newyorker--2020-05-07--The Underground Efforts to Get Masks to Doctors

Printed on the front of certain legitimate N95 masks is a logo of sorts : a figure surrounded by a cloud of air particles , represented by tiny , pointillistic dots .
The dots float around the figure ’ s head , and then travel through its mouth and into its lungs , where they hang in a state of suspended animation .
It ’ s an image that Amy Aminlari , a forty-two-year-old emergency-room doctor at a San Diego hospital , has scrutinized many times , sometimes in the middle of the night , after her shift ends and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the morning .
At Aminlari ’ s hospital , as the coronavirus pandemic took hold , patients with no symptoms of COVID-19—rushed through the door for appendicitis or a heart attack—were testing positive for the virus , before those attending to them could find the right gear .
Prior to the crisis , Aminlari would pick up N95 masks—the gold standard , which filter out the small droplets that carry the virus—from a supply closet on her unit ’ s floor , and throw them away after one use .
Now there were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reuse masks , or go without one entirely .
Her colleagues were attempting to buy medical-grade masks off eBay for fifteen dollars a pop without knowing if they were real .
Aminlari and a friend started looking for suppliers too , comparing the masks on offer to guidelines issued by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health .
Through friends of friends of friends , they gathered and investigated around twenty proposed mask suppliers .
They spent hours examining the markings on the front of the masks , and the fine print @ @ @ @ @ @ @ packed .
“ We came up with this huge , expensive , rigorous vetting process , ” Aminlari told me .
“ At the end of the day , everything was counterfeit.
” It was around this time that Aminlari got sick .
She felt winded walking up a flight of stairs ; her blood-oxygen levels fell to eighty-eight per cent .
Her husband , who is also an E.R .
doctor , gave her an ultrasound at home on a device connected to his phone : her lungs were full of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the virus .
She continued to look for masks , this time asking for small donations from her community in California—surfboard shapers , construction workers , homeowners with earthquake emergency kits .
“ We got maybe a hundred or two hundred N95 masks in a week and a half , ” she told me .
She began trying to get some of the masks to other nearby hospitals , where she had heard E.R .
doctors were each being given one N95 mask and told to use it for a month or two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ I don ’ t think it ’ s right for people to be trying to help others and not have the protection they need.
” In doctor ’ s offices , hospitals , and nursing homes all over , health-care practitioners have struggled to get the personal protective equipment , or P.P.E.
, that they need to safely do their jobs .
The outbreak of COVID-19 has triggered a global race for gowns , face shields , and , in particular , N95 masks .
In the U.S. , Jared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inexperienced volunteers , many of them twenty-somethings recruited from the tech industry , to source equipment for the government , which only created more confusion .
( In one instance , a sixty-nine-million-dollar contract to produce more than a thousand ventilators , awarded to an unvetted Silicon Valley engineer , produced no ventilators ) .
Without a coördinated federal response , states have been forced to bid against one another for supplies .
Last month , Maryland ’ s governor , Larry Hogan , sealed a deal for five thousand testing kits from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his wife , who is Korean-American .
Illinois ’ s governor , J .
B. Pritzker , has reportedly arranged secret flights bearing masks from China , for fear of them being seized by the federal government .
“ The supply chain has been likened to the wild West , ” Prizker ’ s press secretary told the Chicago Sun-Times recently , “ and once you have purchased supplies , ensuring they get to the state is another herculean feat.
” Individual hospitals have not fared any better .
Recently , in The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ W. Artenstein , the chief physician executive of Baystate Health , a hospital system in Massachusetts , wrote of a team working “ around the clock ” to secure P.P.E .
“ Deals , some bizarre and convoluted , and many involving large sums of money , have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled , sometimes by the federal government , ” he wrote .
Artenstein described being present for a shadowy pickup of a shipment of masks from China ( which were transported in food-service trucks , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ interrupted by agents from the F.B.I .
; later , a congressperson had to make a call to prevent their seizure .
“ I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back , ” Artenstein wrote , “ feelings that did not abate until midnight , when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.
” With supply chains gone haywire and limited help forthcoming from the government , ordinary citizens have started volunteer networks around the country , forming what one enlistee referred to as “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ PPE , one of the largest groups , estimates that it facilitated the delivery of some one and a half million masks in April alone .
Smaller groups—amorphous , and nimble on their feet—have been built from webs of real-life connections made manifest in Slack channels , WhatsApp groups , and endless 2 A.M. Zoom calls .
Often , there ’ s no formal hierarchy , just a rotating crew of bleary-eyed volunteers : teachers , coders , lawyers , artists , historians , and the recently unemployed .
“ There are dozens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Megan Ranney , an E.R .
doctor and a founder of Get Us PPE , told me recently .
“ We need every one we can get.
” As Aminlari recovered from the virus over the course of a month , a friend of hers put her in touch with one such volunteer effort , known as Last Mile PPE .
Founded in New York , Last Mile groups have sprung up around the country , including in Los Angeles , where Aminlari first made contact .
She began coördinating her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soon founded her own , in San Diego .
She sees it as a temporary but necessary solution to the problem of P.P.E .
shortages .
She doesn ’ t like to speculate on why the gear isn ’ t getting to doctors on the front lines .
“ I just know what the end result is , ” she said .
“ We don ’ t have it.
” Last Mile , like many things born in the time of the coronavirus , grew out of a mixture of alarm and neighborly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ York City , Tricia Wang , a thirty-nine-year-old sociologist and tech ethnographer living in Bedford-Stuyvesant , Brooklyn , had already been following its progress for months .
Years earlier , Wang had lived in Wuhan , where she studied the use of technology among vulnerable populations .
In January , when Wuhan began shutting down , she worked with two former colleagues there to study how residents were coping , conducting interviews over the messaging app WeChat .
Wang ’ s biggest takeaway was the importance , during the quarantine in Wuhan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hyper-local groups that exist all over the city .
Once the virus hit , these groups , run by volunteers , were transformed into networks that could help isolated residents secure food , medicine , and other supplies .
They also provided emotional support , with members trading memes , recipes , and virtual workouts .
In New York , Wang set up her own xiao qu in Bed-Stuy .
In Wuhan , she told me , “ it wasn ’ t just top-down measures that reduced infection or made the quarantine a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of grassroots community members coming together .
”

Printed on the front of certain legitimate N95 masks is a logo of sorts: a figure surrounded by a cloud of air particles, represented by tiny, pointillistic dots. The dots float around the figure’s head, and then travel through its mouth and into its lungs, where they hang in a state of suspended animation. It’s an image that Amy Aminlari, a forty-two-year-old emergency-room doctor at a San Diego hospital, has scrutinized many times, sometimes in the middle of the night, after her shift ends and before her three daughters wake up in the morning.
At Aminlari’s hospital, as the coronavirus pandemic took hold, patients with no symptoms of COVID-19—rushed through the door for appendicitis or a heart attack—were testing positive for the virus, before those attending to them could find the right gear. Prior to the crisis, Aminlari would pick up N95 masks—the gold standard, which filter out the small droplets that carry the virus—from a supply closet on her unit’s floor, and throw them away after one use. Now there were shortages, and she was having to reuse masks, or go without one entirely. Her colleagues were attempting to buy medical-grade masks off eBay for fifteen dollars a pop without knowing if they were real. Aminlari and a friend started looking for suppliers too, comparing the masks on offer to guidelines issued by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Through friends of friends of friends, they gathered and investigated around twenty proposed mask suppliers. They spent hours examining the markings on the front of the masks, and the fine print on the boxes in which they were packed. “We came up with this huge, expensive, rigorous vetting process,” Aminlari told me. “At the end of the day, everything was counterfeit.”
It was around this time that Aminlari got sick. She felt winded walking up a flight of stairs; her blood-oxygen levels fell to eighty-eight per cent. Her husband, who is also an E.R. doctor, gave her an ultrasound at home on a device connected to his phone: her lungs were full of the veiny pattern that indicates the presence of the virus. She continued to look for masks, this time asking for small donations from her community in California—surfboard shapers, construction workers, homeowners with earthquake emergency kits. “We got maybe a hundred or two hundred N95 masks in a week and a half,” she told me. She began trying to get some of the masks to other nearby hospitals, where she had heard E.R. doctors were each being given one N95 mask and told to use it for a month or two. “Just one,” she said. “I don’t think it’s right for people to be trying to help others and not have the protection they need.”
In doctor’s offices, hospitals, and nursing homes all over, health-care practitioners have struggled to get the personal protective equipment, or P.P.E., that they need to safely do their jobs. The outbreak of COVID-19 has triggered a global race for gowns, face shields, and, in particular, N95 masks. In the U.S., Jared Kushner put together a task force of inexperienced volunteers, many of them twenty-somethings recruited from the tech industry, to source equipment for the government, which only created more confusion. (In one instance, a sixty-nine-million-dollar contract to produce more than a thousand ventilators, awarded to an unvetted Silicon Valley engineer, produced no ventilators). Without a coördinated federal response, states have been forced to bid against one another for supplies. Last month, Maryland’s governor, Larry Hogan, sealed a deal for five thousand testing kits from South Korea, with the help of his wife, who is Korean-American. Illinois’s governor, J. B. Pritzker, has reportedly arranged secret flights bearing masks from China, for fear of them being seized by the federal government. “The supply chain has been likened to the wild West,” Prizker’s press secretary told the Chicago Sun-Times recently, “and once you have purchased supplies, ensuring they get to the state is another herculean feat.”
Individual hospitals have not fared any better. Recently, in The New England Journal of Medicine, Andrew W. Artenstein, the chief physician executive of Baystate Health, a hospital system in Massachusetts, wrote of a team working “around the clock” to secure P.P.E. “Deals, some bizarre and convoluted, and many involving large sums of money, have dissolved at the last minute when we were outbid or outmuscled, sometimes by the federal government,” he wrote. Artenstein described being present for a shadowy pickup of a shipment of masks from China (which were transported in food-service trucks, to avoid detection), which was interrupted by agents from the F.B.I.; later, a congressperson had to make a call to prevent their seizure. “I remained nervous and worried on the long drive back,” Artenstein wrote, “feelings that did not abate until midnight, when I received the call that the PPE shipment was secured at our warehouse.”
With supply chains gone haywire and limited help forthcoming from the government, ordinary citizens have started volunteer networks around the country, forming what one enlistee referred to as “a last-minute bucket brigade.” Get Us PPE, one of the largest groups, estimates that it facilitated the delivery of some one and a half million masks in April alone. Smaller groups—amorphous, and nimble on their feet—have been built from webs of real-life connections made manifest in Slack channels, WhatsApp groups, and endless 2 A.M. Zoom calls. Often, there’s no formal hierarchy, just a rotating crew of bleary-eyed volunteers: teachers, coders, lawyers, artists, historians, and the recently unemployed. “There are dozens of these groups working across the country,” Megan Ranney, an E.R. doctor and a founder of Get Us PPE, told me recently. “We need every one we can get.”
As Aminlari recovered from the virus over the course of a month, a friend put her in touch with one such volunteer effort, known as Last Mile PPE. Founded in New York, Last Mile groups have sprung up around the country, including in Los Angeles, where Aminlari first made contact. She began coördinating her mask-sourcing efforts with the L.A. branch and soon founded her own, in San Diego. She sees it as a temporary but necessary solution to the problem of P.P.E. shortages. She doesn’t like to speculate on why the gear isn’t getting to doctors on the front lines. “I just know what the end result is,” she said. “We don’t have it.”
Last Mile, like many things born in the time of the coronavirus, grew out of a mixture of alarm and neighborly affection. When the virus hit New York City, Tricia Wang, a thirty-nine-year-old sociologist and tech ethnographer living in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, had already been following its progress for months. Years earlier, Wang had lived in Wuhan, where she studied the use of technology among vulnerable populations. In January, when Wuhan began shutting down, she worked with two former colleagues there to study how residents were coping, conducting interviews over the messaging app WeChat.
Wang’s biggest takeaway was the importance, during the quarantine in Wuhan, of the xiao qu, or the hyper-local groups that exist all over the city. Once the virus hit, these groups, run by volunteers, were transformed into networks that could help isolated residents secure food, medicine, and other supplies. They also provided emotional support, with members trading memes, recipes, and virtual workouts. In New York, Wang set up her own xiao qu in Bed-Stuy. In Wuhan, she told me, “it wasn’t just top-down measures that reduced infection or made the quarantine a success, it was also bottom-up measures of grassroots community members coming together.”
Unrelated to her local work, Wang was invited to join a WhatsApp group started by Harper Reed, whom she had known through the tech world for years. Reed was the chief technology officer in Barack Obama’s 2012 reëlection campaign, and wanted to bring people of different backgrounds together for discussions on the virus—a kind of virtual think tank. “I knew that my power was the network and getting people together,” he told me. Reed’s group grew quickly as members added friends and even posted an open invite link to Facebook, ballooning at one point to some hundred and eighty people. It soon splintered into smaller, more focussed groups, one of which was concerned with sourcing P.P.E. Wang eventually created a sub-subgroup that would have a more local focus and called it #NYCPPE.
In its first iteration, #NYCPPE included about thirty people. Its first deliveries were small. One of its early members was a woman named Xin Liu, a twenty-nine-year-old Chinese artist, who lived a few blocks from Wang. In early March, Liu’s father, a doctor in China, grew so concerned about her that he sent her a box of a hundred N95 masks. (“There’s a joke in China,” Liu told me, “that if this is a football game, China plays the first half, the U.S. plays the second half, and Chinese people who are living abroad play the whole game.”) Many of Liu’s Chinese friends living in New York also had some masks tucked away at home. “We saw the situation in the hospitals and were thinking, Can we just donate some of our own?” Liu recalled. When she joined #NYCPPE, Liu and some of her friends began coördinating deliveries through the group. They sent masks to health-care workers in small batches—five, ten—often affixed with handwritten notes thanking them for their work.


newyorker--2020-05-07--The Pandemic Is the Time to Resurrect the Public University

Since the coronavirus pandemic reached the East Coast , at least twenty-three students , faculty , and staff of the City University of New York have died .
According to data compiled by CUNY professor Michael Yarbrough and undergraduates in his research colloquium , sixteen of these deaths were caused by COVID-19 .
They include William Helmreich , a distinguished sociologist who walked virtually every one of New York City ’ s hundred and twenty-one thousand blocks ; Anita Crumpton , a graduate of City College , who was an office assistant at CUNY ’ s Graduate Center for two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Dellis , a couple who met at a bowling alley almost forty years ago and worked at Kingsborough Community College .
The cause of the remaining deaths has not been announced .
CUNY is the largest urban public-university system in the United States .
Its twenty-five campuses span the five boroughs .
One of the campuses , where five of the faculty and staff who died of the coronavirus worked , is Brooklyn College .
I teach there .
It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Yet , aside from an op-ed by Yarbrough in the Daily News , there has been little coverage of this story .
Once known proudly as “ the poor man ’ s Harvard , ” CUNY has become a cemetery of uncertain dimensions , its deaths as unremarked as the graves in a potter ’ s field .
The coronavirus has revealed to many the geography of class in America , showing that where we live and work shapes whether we live or die .
Might it offer a similar lesson about where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ piece in the Times , by the Brown University president , Christina Paxson .
Paxson , who ’ s also the deputy chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston , argues that college campuses should reopen in the fall .
Her piece has generated wide and sympathetic discussion , including an interview on NPR ’ s “ Morning Edition.
” Like many such articles , Paxson ’ s is a statement of universal academic citizenship .
Her concern is the “ lower-income students who may not have reliable internet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ study ” and the students who depend on college for “ upward mobility.
” It ’ s an important point .
But the Times ’ own reporting shows that more students at Brown come “ from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent ” —a feature Brown shares with four other Ivy League universities .
Just over four per cent of Brown ’ s students come from the bottom twenty per cent .
Meanwhile , CUNY ’ s campuses are among the most powerful engines @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drawing hundreds of thousands of students from the poor and the working class .
The hidden force of those numbers is felt across Paxson ’ s prose .
Paxson insists that campuses can reopen this fall if there is “ rapid ” and “ regular ” testing of all students throughout the year .
At CUNY , even in the best of times , we often don ’ t have soap in our bathrooms .
We also still have push faucets .
To wash one hand , I must use the other to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s two handles , hard and continuously .
This produces water of a single temperature—cold—leaving me , always , with one hand that ’ s touched a surface and must remain unwashed .
It ’ s hard to imagine coronavirus tests when washing both hands is nearly impossible .
Paxson also envisions universities “ collaborating with their state health departments and rolling out tracing technology on their campuses.
” Yet there ’ s nowhere at CUNY that I could go simply to find out the most basic statistics on coronavirus infections and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , written by a lecturer at Yale , recommends that universities track and trace students through their campus “ touchless keycard entry ” systems .
Brooklyn College can ’ t afford keycards .
Instead , I must deploy six keys—three for my office , two for the department office , and one that does double duty for our smart classroom and the bathroom—to make my way across campus .
Finally , Paxson worries about the virus spreading through college dorms .
She counsels that “ we can ’ t simply send students home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this happens.
” She recommends that sick students be quarantined in hotel rooms— “ costly , ” she acknowledges , “ but necessary.
” That certainly reflects the Brown experience , in which undergraduates live on campus for at least three of their four years , and money is plentiful .
But that experience is atypical .
According to data compiled by the Seton Hall professor Robert Kelchen , just under sixteen per cent of undergraduates in the United States live on campus , and around forty per cent of community-college students live @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve had with students , I ’ d say that the latter number is higher at CUNY .
A student who gets sick at Brooklyn College will , in all likelihood , end her day where it began : at home with her family .
For decades , a handful of boutique colleges and powerhouse universities have served as emblems of our system of higher education .
If they are not the focus of discussion , they are the subtext , shaping our assumptions about the typical campus experience .
This has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question of reopening has produced dozens of proposals , but most of them are tenable only for schools like Brown ; they don ’ t obtain in the context of Brooklyn College .
The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a more equal society .
It ’ s time for a similar conversation about the academy .
In academia , as in the rest of society , a combination of public and private actors directs wealth to those who need it least .
While CUNY struggles to survive decades of budget @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the possibility of even more—donors lavish elite colleges and universities with gifts of millions , even billions , of dollars .
Sometimes these donations fund opportunities for low-income students , but mostly they serve as tax-deductible transfers to rich , private institutions , depriving the public of much-needed revenue .
What taxes federal and state governments do collect may be returned to those institutions in the form of hefty grants and contracts , which help fund operating budgets that Brooklyn College can only dream of .
This is the song of culture in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wealth and profit ; the melody is diversity and opportunity .
Yet , for all the talk of the poor and students of color at the Ivy League , the real institutions of mobility in the United States are underfunded public universities .
Paxson may believe that “ a university campus is a microcosm of any major city in the U.S. , ” as she told NPR , but CUNY is no microcosm .
With nearly two hundred and seventy-five thousand students and forty-five thousand staff—a population larger than that of many American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the word “ university ” tells us higher education should be : the entire , the whole .
More than seventy-five per cent of our undergraduate students are nonwhite .
Sixty-one per cent receive Pell Grants , and the same percentage have parents who did not graduate from college .
At City College and Baruch College , seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students , respectively , start out in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles .
For hundreds of thousands of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a cash-starved public university is their gateway to the middle or upper-middle class .

Since the coronavirus pandemic reached the East Coast, at least twenty-three students, faculty, and staff of the City University of New York have died. According to data compiled by CUNY professor Michael Yarbrough and undergraduates in his research colloquium, sixteen of these deaths were caused by COVID-19. They include William Helmreich, a distinguished sociologist who walked virtually every one of New York City’s hundred and twenty-one thousand blocks; Anita Crumpton, a graduate of City College, who was an office assistant at CUNY’s Graduate Center for two decades; and Joseph Dellis and Yolanda Dellis, a couple who met at a bowling alley almost forty years ago and worked at Kingsborough Community College. The cause of the remaining deaths has not been announced.
CUNY is the largest urban public-university system in the United States. Its twenty-five campuses span the five boroughs. One of the campuses, where five of the faculty and staff who died of the coronavirus worked, is Brooklyn College. I teach there.
It seems likely that no other college or university in the United States has suffered as many deaths as CUNY. Yet, aside from an op-ed by Yarbrough in the Daily News, there has been little coverage of this story. Once known proudly as “the poor man’s Harvard,” CUNY has become a cemetery of uncertain dimensions, its deaths as unremarked as the graves in a potter’s field.
The coronavirus has revealed to many the geography of class in America, showing that where we live and work shapes whether we live or die. Might it offer a similar lesson about where we learn?
Consider a recent opinion piece in the Times, by the Brown University president, Christina Paxson. Paxson, who’s also the deputy chair of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, argues that college campuses should reopen in the fall. Her piece has generated wide and sympathetic discussion, including an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition.”
Like many such articles, Paxson’s is a statement of universal academic citizenship. Her concern is the “lower-income students who may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to study” and the students who depend on college for “upward mobility.” It’s an important point. But the Times’ own reporting shows that more students at Brown come “from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent”—a feature Brown shares with four other Ivy League universities. Just over four per cent of Brown’s students come from the bottom twenty per cent. Meanwhile, CUNY’s campuses are among the most powerful engines of upward mobility in the country, drawing hundreds of thousands of students from the poor and the working class.
The hidden force of those numbers is felt across Paxson’s prose. Paxson insists that campuses can reopen this fall if there is “rapid” and “regular” testing of all students throughout the year. At CUNY, even in the best of times, we often don’t have soap in our bathrooms. We also still have push faucets. To wash one hand, I must use the other to twist and hold one of the sink’s two handles, hard and continuously. This produces water of a single temperature—cold—leaving me, always, with one hand that’s touched a surface and must remain unwashed. It’s hard to imagine coronavirus tests when washing both hands is nearly impossible.
Paxson also envisions universities “collaborating with their state health departments and rolling out tracing technology on their campuses.” Yet there’s nowhere at CUNY that I could go simply to find out the most basic statistics on coronavirus infections and deaths. An article in The Atlantic, written by a lecturer at Yale, recommends that universities track and trace students through their campus “touchless keycard entry” systems. Brooklyn College can’t afford keycards. Instead, I must deploy six keys—three for my office, two for the department office, and one that does double duty for our smart classroom and the bathroom—to make my way across campus.
Finally, Paxson worries about the virus spreading through college dorms. She counsels that “we can’t simply send students home and shift to remote learning every time this happens.” She recommends that sick students be quarantined in hotel rooms—“costly,” she acknowledges, “but necessary.” That certainly reflects the Brown experience, in which undergraduates live on campus for at least three of their four years, and money is plentiful. But that experience is atypical. According to data compiled by the Seton Hall professor Robert Kelchen, just under sixteen per cent of undergraduates in the United States live on campus, and around forty per cent of community-college students live with their parents. From conversations I’ve had with students, I’d say that the latter number is higher at CUNY. A student who gets sick at Brooklyn College will, in all likelihood, end her day where it began: at home with her family.
For decades, a handful of boutique colleges and powerhouse universities have served as emblems of our system of higher education. If they are not the focus of discussion, they are the subtext, shaping our assumptions about the typical campus experience. This has remained true during the pandemic. The question of reopening has produced dozens of proposals, but most of them are tenable only for schools like Brown; they don’t obtain in the context of Brooklyn College. The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a more equal society. It’s time for a similar conversation about the academy.
In academia, as in the rest of society, a combination of public and private actors directs wealth to those who need it least. While CUNY struggles to survive decades of budget cuts—and faces, in the pandemic, the possibility of even more—donors lavish elite colleges and universities with gifts of millions, even billions, of dollars. Sometimes these donations fund opportunities for low-income students, but mostly they serve as tax-deductible transfers to rich, private institutions, depriving the public of much-needed revenue. What taxes federal and state governments do collect may be returned to those institutions in the form of hefty grants and contracts, which help fund operating budgets that Brooklyn College can only dream of. This is the song of culture in our society. The bass line is wealth and profit; the melody is diversity and opportunity.
Yet, for all the talk of the poor and students of color at the Ivy League, the real institutions of mobility in the United States are underfunded public universities. Paxson may believe that “a university campus is a microcosm of any major city in the U.S.,” as she told NPR, but CUNY is no microcosm. With nearly two hundred and seventy-five thousand students and forty-five thousand staff—a population larger than that of many American cities—it is what the Latin root of the word “university” tells us higher education should be: the entire, the whole. More than seventy-five per cent of our undergraduate students are nonwhite. Sixty-one per cent receive Pell Grants, and the same percentage have parents who did not graduate from college. At City College and Baruch College, seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students, respectively, start out in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles. For hundreds of thousands of working-class students, in other words, a cash-starved public university is their gateway to the middle or upper-middle class.
Beyond opportunity, institutions like CUNY offer a vision of education that is less about credentials than about the deep contact—and conflict—between reading and experience that is the essence of culture. On most élite campuses, undergraduates are eighteen to twenty-two years old. At CUNY, more than twenty-five per cent of undergraduates are twenty-five or older. Our campuses are not cloisters; they’re classrooms out of the pages of Plato and Huey Newton, where philosophy is set in motion in and by the street. Like other public colleges and universities, CUNY is a mustard seed of intellectual life, a source of reinvention and renewal. If we are to endure this crisis—and, later, to learn from it—some of our most original thinkers and leaders will come from schools like City College.
One of the reasons Paxson believes we need to open schools is that many of them are heading toward financial disaster. Here the distinction between public and private—or Brown and Brooklyn College—begins to collapse. Paxson describes the possibilities as “catastrophic,” across the board, and she is not exaggerating. Heavily dependent on tuition, and uncertain that online courses will attract or retain students, many institutions anticipate a loss of revenue so large and precipitous that they fear they may have to close.
Yet these choices are not dictates of nature and economics. They are political and historical, arising from years of decision and indecision, which have slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, shifted the burden of higher education from public to private sources. The tax subsidies for big gifts to Harvard and Yale find their counterpart in the proportion of revenues that public colleges and universities now derive from tuition. Though this shift has been going on for decades, 2017 was a watershed: it was the first year that public colleges and universities began to receive more revenue from tuition than from the state.
If this is the funding model that has forced upon us the choice of open or die—or open and die—we might heed the example of a different catastrophe, which prompted American society to make a different choice. During the Depression, the New York municipal-college system opened two flagship campuses: Brooklyn College and Queens College. These schools built the middle class, took in refugees from Nazi Germany, remade higher education, and transformed American arts and letters. In 1942, Brooklyn College gave Hannah Arendt her first teaching job in the United States; an adjunct, she lectured on the Dreyfus affair, which would figure prominently in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the decades that followed, CUNY built more campuses. Until 1976, it was free to all students; the government footed the bill.
What prompted this public investment in higher education was neither sentimentality about the poor nor a noblesse oblige of good works. It was a vision of culture and social wealth, derived from the activism of the working classes and defended by a member of Britain’s House of Lords. “Why should we not set aside,” John Maynard Keynes wondered in 1942, “fifty million pounds a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university.” Against those who disavowed such ambitions on the grounds of expense, Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” And “once done, it is there.”


newyorker--2020-05-08--When Will It Be Safe to End Coronavirus Lockdowns?

This week , a group of researchers at Columbia University ’ s Department of Environmental Health Sciences released a report projecting that COVID-19 cases and deaths will rise significantly if more states continue to lift shelter-in-place orders and reopen businesses .
The researchers , who drew from ten weeks of county-level data on daily confirmed cases and deaths , predict a resurgence in COVID-19 deaths and incidence beginning in late May , two to four weeks after some states begin to loosen restrictions .
“ These findings indicate that most states are not well-positioned to re-open their economies and simultaneously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the report states .
According to one projection scenario described in the study , average deaths will spike to a median of more than twenty-four hundred deaths per day if , as expected , twenty-five states lift or partially lift their closure orders in the coming days .
I recently spoke by phone with Jeffrey Shaman , a professor in the environmental-health sciences department at Columbia , and the lead author of the study .
His team ’ s work on the coronavirus has been used by both the federal and New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which has been edited for length and clarity , we discussed why opening now could be a mistake , what states need to do before lifting restrictions , and why the lack of federal leadership will make it more difficult to identify any long-term solutions .
Tell me about the creation of this model and your biggest takeaway from it .
We were confronted with a situation where the landscape is continually changing .
It is very , very hard to make projections , and I am not saying this as if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to try to optimize the model to something that is always in flux , which makes it very challenging .
We don ’ t have a lot of data , or as much data to keep our models as informed as we would like .
We really don ’ t have as much information as we would like , because cases that are confirmed today are really reflective of infections that were obtained or acquired a couple of weeks ago .
So there is this lag in the system , and we have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gone on from the past to the present in terms of the transmission dynamics of the virus .
But layered on top of that uncertainty is that we really don ’ t know what society is going to do in the future .
And that will have very strong implications for how the virus is able to transmit .
So we were left with a situation where we ’ re not really making forecasts but we ’ re generating projections based on certain assumptions about what will happen politically , what the public @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there will be .
We have to make up scenarios in order to suss that out .
Because of that , it ’ s advantageous to look at multiple models that are built in different ways and that have different scenarios .
In our own model , we decided to reflect the reality that states are loosening restrictions and opening up their economies .
But we also realize that , just because they say you can go back to work in some form , it doesn ’ t really give us an indication @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in contact and transmission opportunities .
And then there might be differences between a loosening of restrictions in Georgia versus Tennessee versus Texas .
And Georgia can say that you can open restaurants , you can open movie theatres and nail salons and barbershops— But people might not come .
Yeah , and not all the businesses are going to open .
And a lot of people are going to have hesitancy .
In the same way there was difficulty with getting people to take up social distancing , you ’ re going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ establishments because a lot of people don ’ t want to be the first person to put their toe in the water , which is understandable .
So what could happen , we said , is certainly there could be a little bump in the transmissibility of the virus , because some people will open businesses and some people will frequent those establishments .
It is entirely possible that , with social-distancing mechanisms in place—the limiting of clientele in stores and restaurants , and people wearing face masks more vigilantly—that reopening will yield @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But it ’ s also possible that there will be gains , and you ’ ll see some sort of increase in the transmissibility locally .
Further , if after a week everybody who ’ s been living in Georgia sees that people aren ’ t talking about a rise in cases , more people might start frequenting the nail salons and the theatres and the restaurants and the businesses , so you might see a progressive relaxation .
So the model accounts for these different scenarios .
For the states that are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nothing [ assume no effect due to reopening ] , or we have a onetime overriding ten-per-cent bump in the local transmissibility in each county within our model , or we have a weekly bump following the relaxation , which says that , if people get more and more confident each week , there ’ s a ten-per-cent boost each week .
We actually estimate the effective reproductive number in each of those counties .
It ’ s not going to be done perfectly well , because there ’ s not enough information @ @ @ @ @ @ @ estimation of what ’ s going on in each county individually .
We can see the latest estimate of what this reproductive number , R , is .
Unfortunately , what we see is that , for a lot of the states in question that are already loosening restrictions and reopening or planning to in the next week , there is not good evidence that they are well below that magic one line .
That one line is the dividing line between growth of the virus and a decrease of it , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ incidents .
And what you ’ d like is states to be starting from a position of strength , where they have that reproductive number well below one .
A few states , like Wyoming and Alaska , appear to be , for the most part , pretty well below it , and those would be places that are in positions of strength to try loosening restrictions , because that would indicate that , if you open and it does allow for a greater transmissibility of the virus , you have some wiggle @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still be keeping a lid on the virus .
But the other ones are not really there .
Many of the states—Georgia , Texas , Tennessee—they ’ re not in places where you would say , “ This is a good position to start reopening the economy if you want to avoid a rebound.
” One critique that you keep hearing , from conservatives especially , is that we shut down initially to flatten the curve .
The curve is now flat .
Does this mean that we can never reopen the economy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ discussing how to reopen the economy is really important .
But that statement that we have flattened the curve is wrong .
In about a third of the states it ’ s flat .
In some of them it ’ s going down , which is even better , and , in about one-third of them , like in Texas , it is rising .
So there is not any consistent picture .

This week, a group of researchers at Columbia University’s Department of Environmental Health Sciences released a report projecting that COVID-19 cases and deaths will rise significantly if more states continue to lift shelter-in-place orders and reopen businesses. The researchers, who drew from ten weeks of county-level data on daily confirmed cases and deaths, predict a resurgence in COVID-19 deaths and incidence beginning in late May, two to four weeks after some states begin to loosen restrictions. “These findings indicate that most states are not well-positioned to re-open their economies and simultaneously control the spread of COVID-19 infections,” the report states. According to one projection scenario described in the study, average deaths will spike to a median of more than twenty-four hundred deaths per day if, as expected, twenty-five states lift or partially lift their closure orders in the coming days.
I recently spoke by phone with Jeffrey Shaman, a professor in the environmental-health sciences department at Columbia, and the lead author of the study. His team’s work on the coronavirus has been used by both the federal and New York State governments. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why opening now could be a mistake, what states need to do before lifting restrictions, and why the lack of federal leadership will make it more difficult to identify any long-term solutions.
Tell me about the creation of this model and your biggest takeaway from it.
We were confronted with a situation where the landscape is continually changing. It is very, very hard to make projections, and I am not saying this as if “woe is me.” We have to try to optimize the model to something that is always in flux, which makes it very challenging. We don’t have a lot of data, or as much data to keep our models as informed as we would like. We really don’t have as much information as we would like, because cases that are confirmed today are really reflective of infections that were obtained or acquired a couple of weeks ago. So there is this lag in the system, and we have a very incomplete view of what has gone on from the past to the present in terms of the transmission dynamics of the virus. But layered on top of that uncertainty is that we really don’t know what society is going to do in the future. And that will have very strong implications for how the virus is able to transmit.
So we were left with a situation where we’re not really making forecasts but we’re generating projections based on certain assumptions about what will happen politically, what the public will do, and how much compliance there will be. We have to make up scenarios in order to suss that out. Because of that, it’s advantageous to look at multiple models that are built in different ways and that have different scenarios. In our own model, we decided to reflect the reality that states are loosening restrictions and opening up their economies. But we also realize that, just because they say you can go back to work in some form, it doesn’t really give us an indication of how much increase there will be in contact and transmission opportunities. And then there might be differences between a loosening of restrictions in Georgia versus Tennessee versus Texas. And Georgia can say that you can open restaurants, you can open movie theatres and nail salons and barbershops—
But people might not come.
Yeah, and not all the businesses are going to open. And a lot of people are going to have hesitancy. In the same way there was difficulty with getting people to take up social distancing, you’re going to also have less frequenting of these establishments because a lot of people don’t want to be the first person to put their toe in the water, which is understandable.
So what could happen, we said, is certainly there could be a little bump in the transmissibility of the virus, because some people will open businesses and some people will frequent those establishments. It is entirely possible that, with social-distancing mechanisms in place—the limiting of clientele in stores and restaurants, and people wearing face masks more vigilantly—that reopening will yield no gain at all in transmissibility. But it’s also possible that there will be gains, and you’ll see some sort of increase in the transmissibility locally. Further, if after a week everybody who’s been living in Georgia sees that people aren’t talking about a rise in cases, more people might start frequenting the nail salons and the theatres and the restaurants and the businesses, so you might see a progressive relaxation.
So the model accounts for these different scenarios. For the states that are lifting these restrictions, we either do nothing [assume no effect due to reopening], or we have a onetime overriding ten-per-cent bump in the local transmissibility in each county within our model, or we have a weekly bump following the relaxation, which says that, if people get more and more confident each week, there’s a ten-per-cent boost each week.
We actually estimate the effective reproductive number in each of those counties. It’s not going to be done perfectly well, because there’s not enough information, but we try to make an estimation of what’s going on in each county individually. We can see the latest estimate of what this reproductive number, R, is. Unfortunately, what we see is that, for a lot of the states in question that are already loosening restrictions and reopening or planning to in the next week, there is not good evidence that they are well below that magic one line. That one line is the dividing line between growth of the virus and a decrease of it, or diminution of it, in terms of incidents. And what you’d like is states to be starting from a position of strength, where they have that reproductive number well below one.
A few states, like Wyoming and Alaska, appear to be, for the most part, pretty well below it, and those would be places that are in positions of strength to try loosening restrictions, because that would indicate that, if you open and it does allow for a greater transmissibility of the virus, you have some wiggle room left. So you’ll still be keeping a lid on the virus. But the other ones are not really there. Many of the states—Georgia, Texas, Tennessee—they’re not in places where you would say, “This is a good position to start reopening the economy if you want to avoid a rebound.”
One critique that you keep hearing, from conservatives especially, is that we shut down initially to flatten the curve. The curve is now flat. Does this mean that we can never reopen the economy?
The argument that we should be discussing how to reopen the economy is really important. But that statement that we have flattened the curve is wrong. In about a third of the states it’s flat. In some of them it’s going down, which is even better, and, in about one-third of them, like in Texas, it is rising. So there is not any consistent picture.
Secondly, we talked about flattening the curve, but nobody said that was the end policy as the trigger for actually reopening the economy. So that’s a faulty statement in and of itself. We need to reopen the economy. We recognize that. It is very important that we get people who are being driven into unemployment out of it. We need people earning money so that they can spend money, so that they can feed themselves and they can pay their rent and do all the things that we need to do to be viable as a society. I think it would be absurd not to recognize the pressing need to do that, but if we do that in a way that just causes the virus to rebound, we will effectively not have made any gains.


newyorker--2020-05-08--Has Trump Reached the Lying-to-Himself-and-Believing-It Stage of the Coronavirus Pandemic?

On Tuesday afternoon , Gretchen Whitmer , the Governor of Michigan , came on the line with a breaking-news bulletin .
Just before our interview , Whitmer had heard that President Trump was talking about dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national response to the pandemic .
Whitmer seemed stunned by this information—U.S .
infections from COVID-19 were well over a million , the daily national death toll was often more than two thousand , and , in Whitmer ’ s hard-hit state , the crisis had already claimed more than four thousand of her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s just shocking , ” she said , as we both tried to absorb the news .
“ Something new happens every day.
” By the next morning , Trump had , once again , changed his mind .
He told reporters that he had no idea how “ popular ” the coronavirus task force was , and that it would remain in operation while shifting its emphasis toward reopening the economy and away from a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam , Afghanistan , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times in American politics .
What ’ s a governor , or anyone trying to make sense of Trump ’ s on-again , off-again war on the virus , supposed to say ?
Whitmer , a first-term Democrat in a swing state that helped Trump win the Presidency in 2016 , has become such a lightning rod for Trump and his supporters that the President has given Whitmer her own derogatory Twitter nickname .
After long-gun-toting protesters opposing her stay-at-home order entered the Michigan capitol last week—some of them wearing Trump campaign regalia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nooses , and swastikas—the President praised them as “ very good people.
” As Democrats nationally celebrate Whitmer ’ s unyielding response , and as Joe Biden considers her as his running mate , both the Republican-controlled state legislature and a Republican member of Congress have now sued her for using her emergency powers to keep the state closed during the crisis .
Meanwhile , in heavily Democratic , heavily African-American Detroit , health-care workers are struggling to contain one of the worst outbreaks in the country .
Public polls show that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to combat the pandemic ( as is true nationwide ) , and also Whitmer ’ s handling of the situation .
In a state that Trump needs to win this fall , his approval ratings have dropped , while Whitmer ’ s have risen .
Whitmer told me that Trump ’ s hyper-partisan approach did not make sense in terms of either public health or crass politics .
“ The enemy is a virus , and it doesn ’ t care what party you ’ re in , it doesn ’ t care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” she said .
Trump , however , has not only persisted in his critiques of “ that woman from Michigan ” but nationalized his combative approach , with one policy for “ Democrat states , ” as he recently called them , that are the worst-affected by the virus , and another for Republican ones .
A fleeting image , captured on C-SPAN inside the U.S. Capitol this week , highlighted the divisive absurdity of the moment : Mitt Romney , wearing a mask , walked out of the Senate Republican Conference @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a graph on it .
“ Blue states aren ’ t the only ones who are screwed , ” read the headline on the placard .
Romney , though , is a minority of one .
The lone Republican in either the House or Senate to support convicting Trump in his recent impeachment trial , Romney , who was the Republican Presidential nominee in 2012 , is now an outlier in a Party with a devotion to Trump so strong that it has not faltered even in the face of the President @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Romney ’ s pitch , in fact , appeared to be so unpersuasive that , by Wednesday evening , Politico reported that “ Senate Republicans are settling on their pandemic message as they fight to save their majority : President Donald Trump did a tremendous job.
” This , not at all coincidentally , is the theme of a new ad being run nationwide by the Trump campaign , in which the President is portrayed as a heroic leader who defied Democrats and media pundits , shut off the country from the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s cratering economy to recovery .
In case the message is too subtle , the ad spells it out in big all-capital letters on the screen : “ THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY.
” When I went to college , we used to joke during exam period that you were really in trouble when you started to lie to yourself and believe it .
The President and at least some of his most fervent supporters appear now to be in the lying-to-yourself-and-believing-it stage of the pandemic .
Truth has become so inconvenient that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some alternate , less inconvenient reality .
This is , of course , not the first time in the Trump Presidency , or even the first time during this pandemic , that there has been such a gap , but it appears to be a moment when there is a widening and very likely unsustainable gulf between Trumpian truth and what is actually happening .
That ’ s because the numbers are the numbers and , for Trump and for America , they look terrible .
On Wednesday , there were some twenty-six @ @ @ @ @ @ @ COVID-19 , and , on Thursday , there were even more : around twenty-seven hundred .
Leaked predictions from government scientists show an increase , by June 1st , to three thousand deaths , on average , every twenty-four hours .
As Whitmer noted to me , that amounts to essentially a 9/11 ’ s worth of victims per day .
Even after some seventy-five thousand deaths and a couple months of social-distancing public-health measures , the charts demonstrate clearly that the national curve has not flattened , with sharp declines registered only @ @ @ @ @ @ @ already gone through the country ’ s worst ordeal—and a handful of other states .
More than half the states have at least partially lifted strict stay-at-home orders , although none of the states that announced reopenings—not one—met the criteria established by the Trump Administration for doing so .
At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week , a detailed , seventeen-page guide for how to return safely to workplaces and schools was quashed by the White House , and its authors were told it would “ never see the light @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reported on Thursday .
Testing capability is nowhere near the millions of additional tests needed to resume regular daily life , according to experts , nor is there widespread capacity to conduct contact tracing , another prerequisite .
Yet many states are reopening anyway , and Trump is not , at least for now , even bothering to hide the fact that more Americans may die as a result of these decisions .
On Tuesday , he flew to a mask factory in Arizona for a photo op , where he appeared not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ N ’ Roses version of the song “ Live and Let Die ” blasted over the factory ’ s loudspeakers .
In an interview taped at the factory , Trump said , “ I ’ m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent , and to a large extent , as warriors .
They ’ re warriors .
We can ’ t keep our country closed .
We have to open our country .
Will some people be badly affected ?
Yes.
” On Wednesday , he elaborated as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ affected.
” Asked if more Americans might die as a result of reopening too soon , he said , “ Hopefully that won ’ t be the case.
” But , he added , “ It could very well be the case.
” He also argued against more testing .
“ In a way , by doing all this testing , we make ourselves look bad , ” he said .
On Thursday , it was reported that , even as Trump was saying this , one of his personal valets , who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the virus .
In response , Trump said he would now be tested every day .
Reality , it turns out , is not just a matter of political optics .

On Tuesday afternoon, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, came on the line with a breaking-news bulletin. Just before our interview, Whitmer had heard that President Trump was talking about dismantling the coronavirus task force he had assembled to oversee the national response to the pandemic. Whitmer seemed stunned by this information—U.S. infections from COVID-19 were well over a million, the daily national death toll was often more than two thousand, and, in Whitmer’s hard-hit state, the crisis had already claimed more than four thousand of her constituents’ lives. “It’s just shocking,” she said, as we both tried to absorb the news. “Something new happens every day.”
By the next morning, Trump had, once again, changed his mind. He told reporters that he had no idea how “popular” the coronavirus task force was, and that it would remain in operation while shifting its emphasis toward reopening the economy and away from a public-health catastrophe that has already caused more U.S. deaths than the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq combined. These are crazy times in American politics. What’s a governor, or anyone trying to make sense of Trump’s on-again, off-again war on the virus, supposed to say?
Whitmer, a first-term Democrat in a swing state that helped Trump win the Presidency in 2016, has become such a lightning rod for Trump and his supporters that the President has given Whitmer her own derogatory Twitter nickname. After long-gun-toting protesters opposing her stay-at-home order entered the Michigan capitol last week—some of them wearing Trump campaign regalia, and some carrying Confederate flags, nooses, and swastikas—the President praised them as “very good people.” As Democrats nationally celebrate Whitmer’s unyielding response, and as Joe Biden considers her as his running mate, both the Republican-controlled state legislature and a Republican member of Congress have now sued her for using her emergency powers to keep the state closed during the crisis. Meanwhile, in heavily Democratic, heavily African-American Detroit, health-care workers are struggling to contain one of the worst outbreaks in the country.
Public polls show that the vast majority of Michiganders support social-distancing measures to combat the pandemic (as is true nationwide), and also Whitmer’s handling of the situation. In a state that Trump needs to win this fall, his approval ratings have dropped, while Whitmer’s have risen. Whitmer told me that Trump’s hyper-partisan approach did not make sense in terms of either public health or crass politics. “The enemy is a virus, and it doesn’t care what party you’re in, it doesn’t care what state you’re in,” she said. (You can hear our full interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour.) Trump, however, has not only persisted in his critiques of “that woman from Michigan” but nationalized his combative approach, with one policy for “Democrat states,” as he recently called them, that are the worst-affected by the virus, and another for Republican ones.
A fleeting image, captured on C-SPAN inside the U.S. Capitol this week, highlighted the divisive absurdity of the moment: Mitt Romney, wearing a mask, walked out of the Senate Republican Conference weekly lunch meeting toting a large placard with a graph on it. “Blue states aren’t the only ones who are screwed,” the headline on the placard read. Romney, though, is a minority of one. The lone Republican in either the House or Senate to support convicting Trump in his recent impeachment trial, Romney, who was the Republican Presidential nominee in 2012, is now an outlier in a Party with a devotion to Trump so strong that it has not faltered even in the face of the President’s reality-defying response to the pandemic.
Romney’s pitch, in fact, appeared to be so unpersuasive that, by Wednesday evening, Politico reported that “Senate Republicans are settling on their pandemic message as they fight to save their majority: President Donald Trump did a tremendous job.” This, not at all coincidentally, is the theme of a new ad being run nationwide by the Trump campaign, in which the President is portrayed as a heroic leader who defied Democrats and media pundits, shut off the country from the “Chinese virus,” and will lead America’s cratering economy to recovery. In case the message is too subtle, the ad spells it out in big all-capital letters on the screen: “THE GREATEST COMEBACK STORY.”
When I went to college, we used to joke during exam period that you were really in trouble when you started to lie to yourself and believe it. The President and at least some of his most fervent supporters appear now to be in the lying-to-yourself-and-believing-it stage of the pandemic. Truth has become so inconvenient that it’s better left aside for some alternate, less inconvenient reality. This is, of course, not the first time in the Trump Presidency, or even the first time during this pandemic, that there has been such a gap, but it appears to be a moment when there is a widening and very likely unsustainable gulf between Trumpian truth and what is actually happening.
That’s because the numbers are the numbers and, for Trump and for America, they look terrible. On Wednesday, there were some twenty-six hundred deaths in the United States from COVID-19, and, on Thursday, there were even more: around twenty-seven hundred. Leaked predictions from government scientists show an increase, by June 1st, to three thousand deaths, on average, every twenty-four hours. As Whitmer noted to me, that amounts to essentially a 9/11’s worth of victims per day. Even after some seventy-five thousand deaths and a couple months of social-distancing public-health measures, the charts demonstrate clearly that the national curve has not flattened, with sharp declines registered only in New York and New Jersey—which have already gone through the country’s worst ordeal—and a handful of other states. More than half the states have at least partially lifted strict stay-at-home orders, although none of the states that announced reopenings—not one—met the criteria established by the Trump Administration for doing so. At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this week, a detailed, seventeen-page guide for how to return safely to workplaces and schools was quashed by the White House, and its authors were told it would “never see the light of day,” the Associated Press reported on Thursday. Testing capability is nowhere near the millions of additional tests needed to resume regular daily life, according to experts, nor is there widespread capacity to conduct contact tracing, another prerequisite.
Yet many states are reopening anyway, and Trump is not, at least for now, even bothering to hide the fact that more Americans may die as a result of these decisions. On Tuesday, he flew to a mask factory in Arizona for a photo op, where he appeared not wearing a mask, as the Guns N’ Roses version of the song “Live and Let Die” blasted over the factory’s loudspeakers. In an interview taped at the factory, Trump said, “I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent, and to a large extent, as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country. Will some people be badly affected? Yes.” On Wednesday, he elaborated as to what he meant by “badly affected.” Asked if more Americans might die as a result of reopening too soon, he said, “Hopefully that won’t be the case.” But, he added, “It could very well be the case.” He also argued against more testing. “In a way, by doing all this testing, we make ourselves look bad,” he said. On Thursday, it was reported that, even as Trump was saying this, one of his personal valets, who delivers his meals, had tested positive for the virus. In response, Trump said he would now be tested every day. Reality, it turns out, is not just a matter of political optics.
In the past, when Trump has got too far away from what is actually happening and into his personal hall of mirrors, the press of events has forced him to abandon his position. He is adept enough at self-survival to make wild course corrections where necessary. This is a man, after all, who said in late February that coronavirus cases would soon be down to zero and, just two weeks later, declared a national emergency and vowed to wage war on the deadly “invisible enemy.” I’ve seen many possible explanations for Trump’s bizarre, reality-defying behavior in recent days. He’s bored. He’s clueless. He’s panicking about his reëlection. He doesn’t care about anything other than the stock market. He’d rather talk about his border wall or vanquishing the “deep state.” All of them might be correct. It’s also possible that Trump really is the greatest of all time at something: believing his own hype. On Sunday, he stared right into a Fox News camera and declared that he had been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln—while speaking at the national memorial to the slain President. Either Trump is the most brazen politician in the long line of brazen American politicians or he somehow had been brainwashed by his own B.S.


newyorker--2020-05-07--Lessons on Being a Critic, from the Classic Children’s Book “Anatole”

A fellow-critic , Tayler Montague , posted a hypothetical query on Twitter earlier this week : “ ‘ where did you have your first aesthetic awakening ?
’ ” Instantly , the question sent me into a rabbit hole of memory , like a fast-motion special-effects scene in a movie that whooshes a character through a montage of memories and into the distant past .
I blasted back , bypassing my high-school exultation hearing the title track of Eric Dolphy ’ s album “ Out There , ” my middle-school literary illumination reading Willa Cather ’ s story “ Paul @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years of baseball cards ( Curt Blefary ’ s balletic batting stance ) and car models ( the pointed tail of the Corvette Stingray ) until stopping , even further back , at what I recall as the very dawn of my aesthetic consciousness , in my early childhood .
I still have the object in question on a bookshelf , dog-eared and torn , yellowing and held together with strapping tape : the American College Dictionary that I got as a present at the age of four , as a preschool reader @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much too advanced for me ; I could sound out many of the words but hadn ’ t any idea what they meant .
Still , I found delight in the stark yet complex rhythms with which its definitions were phrased ; the meanings were , if not beside the point , less important than the verbal music in which they were presented .
It ’ s tempting to rewrite early childhood in the light of later perceptions , to gather the fragments of early experience and impose narrative coherence , yet revisiting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years and comparing its taut phrasing to that of others has reaffirmed the authenticity , even the immediacy , of those memories .
I wouldn ’ t have known to call it style , but a framework was surely put in place for me then , reading the dictionary—a sense that the meaning of language was inseparable from the sensations of pleasure that its tone inspired .
Other old books stand out in my mind from right around the same time—especially the navigation manual that my father , who ’ d served in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ World War , had brought home in 1945 and kept ever since .
When I read it , uncomprehendingly , the navigational part hardly took and the military ideas went right over my head .
But the parts about administering first aid and treating wounds stuck : fantasies of abstract carnage and dedicated treatment .
( Did my parents want a doctor in the family ? )
And that interest in gore gave rise to a fascination with monsters , which I got not from movies but from cheesy monster-movie magazines that were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there came my first movie passions : nineteen-fifties science-fiction , such as “ Earth vs. the Spider ” and “ The Amazing Colossal Man ” and “ Creature from the Black Lagoon , ” and classic monster movies , such as “ Frankenstein , ” “ Dracula , ” “ The Mummy , ” and “ The Wolf Man , ” that were broadcast on TV .
I didn ’ t spend much time on children ’ s books ( I didn ’ t read many grownup books , either ; I watched @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I did read , preferred newspapers and magazines ) , but one children ’ s book that my mother read to me , and that continued to pique my interest long past the time when its simple text would still have been stimulating , was “ Anatole , ” written by Eve Titus and illustrated by Paul Galdone , which was published in 1956 .
( It ’ s still in print . )
It ’ s the story of a French mouse named Anatole , who , with other French mice , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , into Paris in order to slip through the cracks of homes and steal food to bring home to their mouse families .
The book ’ s narrative is set in motion when Anatole suffers a blow to his honor : while raiding a private home , he hears its owners curse mice , calling them “ terrible , ” “ dirty , ” and “ a disgrace to France.
” “ To be a mouse is to be a villain !
” they declare .
When he gets back to his own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his wife , Doucette .
( The book reproduces the gender stereotypes of the time—it ’ s only male mice who do the pilfering ; Doucette is home with their six children—Paul and Paulette , Claude and Claudette , Georges and Georgette . )
She wonders , in response , “ If only we could give people something in return.
” And this sparks his idea : instead of raiding homes , he sneaks into a huge cheese factory and , when he samples the wares , pins little cards to each , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Extra- ’ specially good ” to “ No good , ” and scribbles his more nuanced judgments , such as “ Another pinch of salt ” and “ Add a little vinegar , ” all signed , “ Anatole.
” The owner of the factory , M ’ sieu Duval , questions his employees to find out who has been leaving them , but to no avail .
I wouldn ’ t have known , at the age of five , what it meant to be a critic , but “ Anatole ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ foundational text for the formation of a critic ’ s sensibility .
( I don ’ t know whether the writers of “ Ratatouille ” were familiar with “ Anatole ” before writing the movie ’ s story , though it invites the comparison—to the book ’ s favor , I think . )
I learned , through Anatole ’ s cheese reviews , that , by expressing one ’ s pleasures and displeasures , one could make a positive contribution to the world , and that the expression of one ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ done the right way , could itself be a creative act .
Spoiler alert : when M ’ sieu Duval follows the suggestions of the stranger ( whose identity he is never able to discover ) , he becomes the most celebrated and successful cheese manufacturer in all of France—and Anatole , unrevealed , regains his dignity .
Titus dramatizes Anatole ’ s critical sensibility as one that coheres with that of the public at large—Anatole picked up , ahead of time , on the pleasures that consumers didn ’ t even yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Duval offered them , they delightedly lapped up .
As a child , I couldn ’ t have grasped the book ’ s elision of critics ’ own potential indignities—it never hints that there could have been a gap between Anatole ’ s taste and the palate of the public at large .
( What if Anatole ’ s note “ NO GOOD , Throw it away !
” had been affixed to Duval ’ s most popular cheese ? )
On the other hand , the book also instilled , secretly , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ little reminiscence by the tail : critics are best heard and not seen .

“Anatole” is a story about a mouse who finds redemption reviewing cheese. Illustration by Paul Galdone
A fellow-critic, Tayler Montague, posted a hypothetical query on Twitter earlier this week: “ ‘where did you have your first aesthetic awakening?’ ” Instantly, the question sent me into a rabbit hole of memory, like a fast-motion special-effects scene in a movie that whooshes a character through a montage of recollections and into the distant past. I blasted back, bypassing my high-school exultation hearing the title track of Eric Dolphy’s album “Out There,” my middle-school literary illumination reading Willa Cather’s story “Paul’s Case,” and the years of baseball cards (Curt Blefary’s balletic batting stance) and car models (the pointed tail of the Corvette Stingray) until stopping, even further back, at what I recall as the very dawn of my aesthetic consciousness, in my early childhood. I still have the object that prompted the awakening, on a bookshelf, dog-eared and torn, yellowing and held together with strapping tape: the American College Dictionary that I got as a present at the age of four, as a preschool reader. It was, of course, much too advanced for me; I could sound out many of the words but hadn’t any idea what they meant. Still, I found delight in the stark yet complex rhythms with which its definitions were phrased; the meanings were, if not beside the point, less important than the verbal music in which they were presented. It’s tempting to rewrite early childhood in the light of later perceptions, to gather the fragments of early experience and impose narrative coherence, yet revisiting that dictionary’s text throughout the years and comparing its taut phrasing to that of others has reaffirmed the authenticity, even the immediacy, of those memories. I wouldn’t have known to call it style, but a framework was surely put in place for me then, reading the dictionary—a sense that the meaning of language was inseparable from the sensations of pleasure that its tone inspired.
Other old books stand out in my mind from right around the same time—especially the navigation manual that my father, who’d served in the Army Air Forces in the Second World War, had brought home in 1945 and kept ever since. When I read it, uncomprehendingly, the navigational part hardly took and the military ideas went right over my head. But the parts about administering first aid and treating wounds stuck: fantasies of abstract carnage and dedicated treatment. (Did my parents want a doctor in the family?) And that interest in gore gave rise to a fascination with monsters, which I got not from movies but from cheesy monster-movie magazines that were sold at local candy stores. From there came my first movie passions: nineteen-fifties science-fiction, such as “Earth vs. the Spider” and “The Amazing Colossal Man” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” and classic monster movies, such as “Frankenstein,” “Dracula,” “The Mummy,” and “The Wolf Man,” that were broadcast on TV. I didn’t spend much time on children’s books (I didn’t read many grownup books, either; I watched too much television, and, when I did read, preferred newspapers and magazines), but one children’s book that my mother read to me, and that continued to pique my interest long past the time when its simple text would still have been stimulating, was “Anatole,” written by Eve Titus and illustrated by Paul Galdone, which was published in 1956. (It’s still in print.) It’s the story of a French mouse named Anatole, who, with other French mice, bicycle nightly, in berets and ascots, into Paris in order to slip through the cracks of homes and steal food to bring home to their mouse families.
The book’s narrative is set in motion when Anatole suffers a blow to his honor: while raiding a private home, he hears its owners curse mice, calling them “terrible,” “dirty,” and “a disgrace to France.” “To be a mouse is to be a villain!” they declare. When he gets back to his own home, he confides his shame to his wife, Doucette. (The book reproduces the gender stereotypes of the time—it’s only male mice who do the pilfering; Doucette is home with their six children—Paul and Paulette, Claude and Claudette, Georges and Georgette.) She wonders, in response, “If only we could give people something in return.” And this sparks his idea: instead of raiding homes, he sneaks into a huge cheese factory and, when he samples the wares, pins little cards to each, on a rating scale ranging from “Extra-’specially good” to “No good,” and scribbles his more nuanced judgments, such as “Another pinch of salt” and “Add a little vinegar,” all signed, “Anatole.” The owner of the factory, M’sieu Duval, questions his employees to find out who has been leaving them, but to no avail.
I wouldn’t have known, at the age of five, what it meant to be a critic, but “Anatole” was, in its way, a foundational text for the formation of a critic’s sensibility. (I don’t know whether the writers of “Ratatouille” were familiar with “Anatole” before writing the movie’s story, though it invites the comparison—to the book’s favor, I think.) I learned, through Anatole’s cheese reviews, that, by expressing one’s pleasures and displeasures, one could make a positive contribution to the world, and that the expression of one’s very personal sense of taste, if done the right way, could itself be a creative act. Spoiler alert: when M’sieu Duval follows the suggestions of the stranger (whose identity he is never able to discover), he becomes the most celebrated and successful cheese manufacturer in all of France—and Anatole, unrevealed, regains his dignity. Titus portrays Anatole’s critical sensibility as one that coheres with that of the public—Anatole picked up, ahead of time, on the pleasures that consumers didn’t even yet know they desired but that, once Duval offered them, they delightedly lapped up. As a child, I couldn’t have grasped the book’s elision of critics’ own potential indignities—it never hints that there could have been a gap between Anatole’s taste and the palate of the public at large. (What if Anatole’s note “NO GOOD, Throw it away!” had been affixed to Duval’s most popular cheese?) On the other hand, the book also instilled, secretly, another notion, one that swallows this little reminiscence by the tail: critics are best heard and not seen.


newyorker--2020-05-07--Are We Failing the Coronavirus-Antibody Test?

Again and again , the mistakes that the Trump Administration makes in handling the coronavirus crisis seem to break in the worst possible direction .
The latest example concerns antibody tests , which are meant to show whether someone has had COVID-19 , but , in practice , often do not .
There are more than two hundred tests out there now , produced by a wide range of companies and labs , with little control over how they are marketed ; only a dozen have even gone through the process of getting what ’ s known as an Emergency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Food and Drug Administration , which is less rigorous than a normal approval .
The F.D.A .
has told other companies that they can go ahead and peddle their tests based on self-reported measures of accuracy to clinics , doctors ’ offices , businesses , or state and local governments .
Some tests are not just imperfect but shoddy ; “ terrible ” is the word one researcher used in describing certain tests to CNN .
The situation was becoming so egregiously bad , so quickly , that , on Monday , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , said that test-makers would have to apply for an E.U.A .
within ten days of putting a test on sale .
It ’ s not clear how long that emergency-approval process might take , or who might be tracking the many dubious results being handed out to the public in the meantime .
The particular problem with a great many of the tests is one that could do damage on a mass scale : they often have a very high number of false positives .
( False negatives are also an issue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are serological tests that look for indications that someone has already had COVID-19 , in the forms of the antibodies that the immune system would have produced to fight the disease off .
( Diagnostic tests look to see whether someone is actively infected—not recovered . )
So people who take a test and receive a false positive may wrongly believe that their COVID-19 experience is behind them , and that they have some degree of immunity to reinfection .
On Sunday , Roche , the Swiss pharmaceutical company , announced that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be one of the more accurate tests so far : it has a reported a specificity of 99.8 per cent , which means that , out of a thousand people who don ’ t have any antibodies at that point , only two would be inaccurately told that they did .
With some tests now on the market , two hundred people in a thousand , or more , would be told that they are antibody-positive when they are not .
Even a test with a specificity of ninety-five-per-cent , which is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looking for , would yield fifty false positives in a field of a thousand true negatives .
The lower the actual rate in a community is , the greater the possibility that false positives will outnumber true ones .
Crucially , immunity is an uncertain thing , even for those who really have had COVID-19 .
We do not know yet whether , in what ways , or for how long someone who has had the virus will be immune to it going forward .
Different viruses act differently : for some , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it is extremely short-term .
There is also a chance that a prior infection would , after immunity has faded , still serve to make subsequent infections milder ; in that case , the question would be whether a second-round infectee could nonetheless spread the disease .
There is also the possibility that those who are asymptomatic when they first got the disease might not be left with as strong or as enduring a resistance as those who were very ill , and whose bodies engaged in an all-out fight with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ better answers to these questions before it makes sense to start issuing immunity passports or certificates , which might enable their bearers to work or travel freely .
Short-staffed hospitals may gamble on at least short-term immunity , if they choose , as a crisis measure , to bring back health-care workers who have recovered from the illness .
But nobody should pretend that this is an ideal or , based on what we know now , anything like a long-term best practice .
More speculative scenarios , in which a happy class @ @ @ @ @ @ @ airports , remain distant .
That desire—to be done with COVID-19 and feel safe to go out into the world again—is part of what ’ s driving the demand for tests .
( The Washington Post , in a piece on the phenomenon of people who become convinced that the flu-like symptoms they had many months ago were due to COVID-19 , calls the syndrome “ thinkihadititis.
” ) That is understandable .
But the logic of antibody testing is being further contorted by other factors .
One is the failure to make @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a reason why so many people , even those who experienced severe symptoms at a time when COVID-19 might have been rampant in their communities , don ’ t know if they had it .
They are now , too often , being offered a second- or third-rate answer in the form of an unapproved test .
( One possible source of a false positive , as it happens , is a recent bout with a non-SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus , such as those that cause the common cold . )
And members of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ test they get .
Another issue that may affect the oversight of antibody testing is the drive to reopen , which some states seem ready to pursue at any cost : there is a danger that some employers will decide that if their employees get a positive test result—from any test—then they are good to go back to work in a crowded office , nursing home , or meat-packing plant , without strict precautions , or any .
There are , even now , good uses to which the best antibody tests can @ @ @ @ @ @ @ useful at a population level—studying the results from a group , which allows researchers to take the error rate into account and still gain insights—provided that there is some consistency in testing , and that care is taken in the studies ’ design .
( One survey in Santa Clara County , California , conducted by researchers associated with Stanford University , which recruited subjects in a non-random manner—a middle-school mailing list was involved—and used an unapproved test imported from China , has nonetheless been cited as the basis for broad extrapolations about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disease . )
For example , if the workers in two meat-packing plants are both given the same antibody test , and one plant has a positive rate of twenty-five per cent and the other just two per cent , you have learned something meaningful—one plant ’ s rate is higher than the other ’ s , perhaps because of a different workplace configuration or safety practices—even if the exact numbers are off .
( You could learn even more if people in those workers ’ households were tested , too . )
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ different rates that have turned up in surveys for New York City 's five boroughs : the Bronx seems to have been hit much harder , with 27.6 per cent showing antibodies , than Manhattan , with 17.3 per cent—but the survey relied on samples from people who were out and about in grocery stores , so the numbers may be higher than the true figure for the city as a whole .
And well-designed studies might give some clues to help reopening : if a comprehensive serological survey found rates of prior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and families associated with elementary schools that were broadly different from those associated with middle or high schools , that finding might offer some insights into transmissibility of the virus and best practices for curbing its spread .
Or a study might compare small schools with large ones , or students who commute by subway , as many in New York do , with students who walk to school .
There is much to learn , or to mislearn , depending on how we go about it .
• Twenty-four hours at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th .
• Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus .
New York leaders did not .
• Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy ?
• What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine .
• Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time ?
• The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ social distancing , from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food .
• The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci , the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people .
• What to read , watch , cook , and listen to under quarantine .

Again and again, the mistakes that the Trump Administration makes in handling the coronavirus crisis seem to break in the worst possible direction. The latest example concerns antibody tests, which are meant to show whether someone has had COVID-19, but, in practice, often do not. There are more than two hundred tests out there now, produced by a wide range of companies and labs, with little control over how they are marketed; only a dozen have even gone through the process of getting what’s known as an Emergency Use Authorization, or E.U.A., from the Food and Drug Administration, which is less rigorous than a normal approval. The F.D.A. has told other companies that they can go ahead and peddle their tests based on self-reported measures of accuracy to clinics, doctors’ offices, businesses, or state and local governments. Some tests are not just imperfect but shoddy; “terrible” is the word one researcher used in describing certain tests to CNN. The situation was becoming so egregiously bad, so quickly, that, on Monday, Stephen Hahn, the F.D.A. commissioner, said that test-makers would have to apply for an E.U.A. within ten days of putting a test on sale. It’s not clear how long that emergency-approval process might take, or who might be tracking the many dubious results being handed out to the public in the meantime.
The particular problem with a great many of the tests is one that could do damage on a mass scale: they often have a very high number of false positives. (False negatives are also an issue with some.) Again, these are serological tests that look for indications that someone has already had COVID-19, in the forms of the antibodies that the immune system would have produced to fight the disease off. (Diagnostic tests look to see whether someone is actively infected—not recovered.) So people who take a test and receive a false positive may wrongly believe that their COVID-19 experience is behind them, and that they have some degree of immunity to reinfection. On Sunday, Roche, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, announced that it had gained emergency-use approval for what appears to be one of the more accurate tests so far: it has a reported a specificity of 99.8 per cent, which means that, out of a thousand people who don’t have any antibodies at that point, only two would be inaccurately told that they did. With some tests now on the market, two hundred people in a thousand, or more, would be told that they are antibody-positive when they are not. Even a test with a specificity of ninety-five-per-cent, which is what the F.D.A. says it is looking for, would yield fifty false positives in a field of a thousand true negatives. The lower the actual rate in a community is, the greater the possibility that false positives will outnumber true ones.
Crucially, immunity is an uncertain thing, even for those who really have had COVID-19. We do not know yet whether, in what ways, or for how long someone who has had the virus will be immune to it going forward. Different viruses act differently: for some, immunity lasts a lifetime; for others, it is extremely short-term. There is also a chance that a prior infection would, after immunity has faded, still serve to make subsequent infections milder; in that case, the question would be whether a second-round infectee could nonetheless spread the disease. There is also the possibility that those who are asymptomatic when they first got the disease might not be left with as strong or as enduring a resistance as those who were very ill, and whose bodies engaged in an all-out fight with the disease.
There need to be much better answers to these questions before it makes sense to start issuing immunity passports or certificates, which might enable their bearers to work or travel freely. Short-staffed hospitals may gamble on at least short-term immunity, if they choose, as a crisis measure, to bring back health-care workers who have recovered from the illness. But nobody should pretend that this is an ideal or, based on what we know now, anything like a long-term best practice. More speculative scenarios, in which a happy class of the immuno-privileged glide through offices and airports, remain distant.
That desire—to be done with COVID-19 and feel safe to go out into the world again—is part of what’s driving the demand for tests. (The Washington Post, in a piece on the phenomenon of people who become convinced that the flu-like symptoms they had many months ago were due to COVID-19, calls the syndrome “thinkihadititis.”) That is understandable. But the logic of antibody testing is being further contorted by other factors. One is the failure to make diagnostic testing widely available, which is a reason why so many people, even those who experienced severe symptoms at a time when COVID-19 might have been rampant in their communities, don’t know if they had it. They are now, too often, being offered a second- or third-rate answer in the form of an unapproved test. (One possible source of a false positive, as it happens, is a recent bout with a non-SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, such as those that cause the common cold.) And members of the public may have limited control over which test they get.
Another issue that may affect the oversight of antibody testing is the drive to reopen, which some states seem ready to pursue at any cost: there is a danger that some employers will decide that if their employees get a positive test result—from any test—then they are good to go back to work in a crowded office, nursing home, or meat-packing plant, without strict precautions, or any.
There are, even now, good uses to which the best antibody tests can be put. They can be very useful at a population level—studying the results from a group, which allows researchers to take the error rate into account and still gain insights—provided that there is some consistency in testing, and that care is taken in the studies’ design. (One survey in Santa Clara County, California, conducted by researchers associated with Stanford University, which recruited subjects in a non-random manner—a middle-school mailing list was involved—and used an unapproved test imported from China, has nonetheless been cited as the basis for broad extrapolations about the fatality rate and prevalence of the disease.) For example, if the workers in two meat-packing plants are both given the same antibody test, and one plant has a positive rate of twenty-five per cent and the other just two per cent, you have learned something meaningful—one plant’s rate is higher than the other’s, perhaps because of a different workplace configuration or safety practices—even if the exact numbers are off. (You could learn even more if people in those workers’ households were tested, too.) The same could be said of the different rates that have turned up in surveys for New York City's five boroughs: the Bronx seems to have been hit much harder, with 27.6 per cent showing antibodies, than Manhattan, with 17.3 per cent—but the survey relied on samples from people who were out and about in grocery stores, so the numbers may be higher than the true figure for the city as a whole. And well-designed studies might give some clues to help reopening: if a comprehensive serological survey found rates of prior infection among teachers, staff, students, and families associated with elementary schools that were broadly different from those associated with middle or high schools, that finding might offer some insights into transmissibility of the virus and best practices for curbing its spread. Or a study might compare small schools with large ones, or students who commute by subway, as many in New York do, with students who walk to school. There is much to learn, or to mislearn, depending on how we go about it.
A Guide to the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-05-07--Loneliness, Tyranny, and the Coronavirus

Though some economies have begun reopening , many people around the world are battening down for an indefinite period of @ @ @ @ @ can be a destructive force .
The toll of isolation on people 's health has @ @ @ @ @ isolation can also be a potent political tool , one often wielded by autocrats and @ @ @ @ @ Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the pandemic is reshaping politics , for better and for @ @

Photograph by Emilio Morenatti / AP
Though some economies have begun reopening, many people around the world are battening down for an indefinite period of extreme social distancing. Loneliness can be a destructive force. The toll of isolation on people's health has been well documented, but isolation can also be a potent political tool, one often wielded by autocrats and despots. Masha Gessen joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the pandemic is reshaping politics, for better and for worse.