theatlantic--2020-04-28--Medication Shortages Are the Next Crisis

In addition to drugs for patients on mechanical ventilators , including sedatives such as etomidate , paralytics , and pain meds , we also need to fast-track the production of antibiotics such as azithromycin , cefepime , and others that we use to treat pneumonia .
We need a steady supply of hydroxychloroquine , although not for patients with COVID-19—no compelling evidence shows that it actually benefits those with the virus .
Yet because many are using it for the coronavirus , we are now low on the drug for patients with conditions it ’ s known to help , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Here are steps the federal government can take now to make sure that hospitals are well stocked during the pandemic and after it passes , when doctors turn to operations delayed by the COVID-19 surge .
First , it needs to improve data collection to track how manufacturing capacity is stacking up against medical demand .
Then , it needs to compel pharmaceutical companies and their suppliers to accelerate the production of needed drugs .
The data infrastructure is already in place .
For some 20 years , the FDA has run a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in response to a deficit of cancer treatments , anesthesia , and other critical-care medications , President Barack Obama issued an executive order urging drug manufacturers to report supply issues early so that any bottlenecks in production could be addressed in a timely way .
The FDA should build on this program by requiring drug manufacturers to disclose the companies that make their ingredients .
Right now , this disclosure is voluntary .
The FDA would then need to take tracking a step further and demand that suppliers of ingredients also release production @ @ @ @ @ @ @ authority may require a change in executive rules at the FDA or a presidential executive order , it is worthwhile .
By knowing where companies get their essential compounds , the FDA can keep tabs on the supply of ingredients , identify any production hiccups early , and guarantee that the ingredients are reserved for medical use .
Some reagents needed to make vital medications , for example , are also used in cosmetics and other nonessential products .
State and federal officials can already anticipate equipment and staffing shortfalls at hospitals by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and Prevention ’ s records on caseloads and capacity .
But expanding the system to allow hospitals to report the undersupply of medications as well will help public-health officials know when and if it is prudent for the government to step in to direct deliveries , prioritizing areas of maximal need and anticipating other shortages before they become critical .
More robust tracking will help the White House wield the Defense Production Act to its fullest extent and in the most effective way .
Although in normal times the government is not involved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are not normal times .
The president should therefore use the DPA ’ s allocation authority to direct private companies to sell and ship drug ingredients only to priority users .
Companies including Amazon are already voluntarily prioritizing the sale of supplies such as hand sanitizer to hospitals .
But if medical-ingredient companies sell to producers of nonessential products such as skin care instead of to drug manufacturers , the government should coerce them to act .
If domestic companies increase production of these active chemical substances , the U.S. will also be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which are of course outside the authority of the DPA and therefore can ’ t be forced to respond to the needs of American hospitals .
And finally , the White House should use DPA authority to direct manufacturers to sell medications to hospitals or regions most in need according to expanded CDC reports .

Widespread critical-medication shortages are the next big crisis of the coronavirus pandemic. Some hospitals, including in New York, are running low on paralytic agents that are needed to safely intubate patients. Steve Corwin, the president and CEO of New York–Presbyterian, recently noted on MSNBC that his hospital is even running short on solutions needed for dialysis. I am fortunate to work in the emergency department of one of the best-resourced hospitals in the country, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Massachusetts. But already, when I order intravenous fentanyl, which doctors use to minimize pain and keep patients breathing safely and comfortably while on mechanical ventilators, an alert pops up reminding me that there’s a national shortage. Am I sure I want to use this medication? Of course I’m sure. The frequency of alerts and the number of drugs in undersupply are shocking developments in a rich country.
Throughout the pandemic, the United States has been playing catch-up. We’re still not testing enough, even though public-health officials saw that problem coming from miles away. Hospitals continue to run low on personal protective equipment. It is too soon to know whether 11th-hour attempts to increase those supplies will succeed. Too many lives hang in the balance to play wait-and-see with our medications too.
In addition to drugs for patients on mechanical ventilators, including sedatives such as etomidate, paralytics, and pain meds, we also need to fast-track the production of antibiotics such as azithromycin, cefepime, and others that we use to treat pneumonia. We need a steady supply of hydroxychloroquine, although not for patients with COVID-19—no compelling evidence shows that it actually benefits those with the virus. Yet because many are using it for the coronavirus, we are now low on the drug for patients with conditions it’s known to help, such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.
Fred Milgrim: A New York doctor’s warning
Here are steps the federal government can take now to make sure that hospitals are well stocked during the pandemic and after it passes, when doctors turn to operations delayed by the COVID-19 surge. First, it needs to improve data collection to track how manufacturing capacity is stacking up against medical demand. Then, it needs to compel pharmaceutical companies and their suppliers to accelerate the production of needed drugs.
The data infrastructure is already in place. For some 20 years, the FDA has run a drug-shortage tracking program. In 2011, in response to a deficit of cancer treatments, anesthesia, and other critical-care medications, President Barack Obama issued an executive order urging drug manufacturers to report supply issues early so that any bottlenecks in production could be addressed in a timely way.
The FDA should build on this program by requiring drug manufacturers to disclose the companies that make their ingredients. Right now, this disclosure is voluntary. The FDA would then need to take tracking a step further and demand that suppliers of ingredients also release production information. Although obtaining this kind of authority may require a change in executive rules at the FDA or a presidential executive order, it is worthwhile. By knowing where companies get their essential compounds, the FDA can keep tabs on the supply of ingredients, identify any production hiccups early, and guarantee that the ingredients are reserved for medical use. Some reagents needed to make vital medications, for example, are also used in cosmetics and other nonessential products.
Read: Our pandemic summer
State and federal officials can already anticipate equipment and staffing shortfalls at hospitals by looking at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s records on caseloads and capacity. But expanding the system to allow hospitals to report the undersupply of medications as well will help public-health officials know when and if it is prudent for the government to step in to direct deliveries, prioritizing areas of maximal need and anticipating other shortages before they become critical.
More robust tracking will help the White House wield the Defense Production Act to its fullest extent and in the most effective way. Although in normal times the government is not involved in the distribution of drugs, these are not normal times. The president should therefore use the DPA’s allocation authority to direct private companies to sell and ship drug ingredients only to priority users. Companies including Amazon are already voluntarily prioritizing the sale of supplies such as hand sanitizer to hospitals. But if medical-ingredient companies sell to producers of nonessential products such as skin care instead of to drug manufacturers, the government should coerce them to act. If domestic companies increase production of these active chemical substances, the U.S. will also be less reliant on manufacturers in China, which are of course outside the authority of the DPA and therefore can’t be forced to respond to the needs of American hospitals. And finally, the White House should use DPA authority to direct manufacturers to sell medications to hospitals or regions most in need according to expanded CDC reports.
If the president is reluctant to continually use the DPA, the government can also compel companies to fill the medication gap in other ways. Recently, for example, the FDA issued guidelines to allow compounding pharmacies, which typically fill prescriptions only for individuals, to temporarily fill them for hospitals. Money can always incentivize companies to speed up production too. The Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services can temporarily offer higher payments for medications, including generics. Better financial margins will spur manufacturers to make these drugs more quickly.
Read: Why some people get sicker than others
Finally, after improving the tracking of drugs and increasing production, the government should make sure that hospitals don’t face scarcity again in the near future. It can do that by replenishing the Strategic National Stockpile now with medicine that doctors use in treating the coronavirus, as the pandemic will likely be here for many more months before a vaccine is available.
Doctors are only as good as our teams, our equipment, and our medicines. If we get the PPE we need, our teams will stay safe. If we receive much-needed equipment—tests, ventilators, IV pumps—in time, fewer of our patients will die needlessly. But if we can’t provide medications that make what we do effective, all our efforts will be for naught.


theatlantic--2020-04-24--The Scariest Pandemic Timeline

The Scariest Pandemic Timeline

Read : America ’ s hospitals have never experienced anything like this A late-in-the-year rebound would be a problem because flu season already puts hospitals close to capacity , experts told me .
Though fewer people hospitalized for the flu would require ventilators than COVID-19 patients likely would , flu patients might need precious intensive-care-unit space .
Already during this outbreak , reports from hospitals read like dispatches from a war zone .
One 49-year-old COVID-19 patient was found “ blue and dead ” in an emergency-room chair while waiting for an inpatient bed .
Doctors ’ groups debated whether @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ventilators .
Having to contend with another round of COVID-19 patients while also taking on severe flu cases might cause hospitals to quickly run out of ventilators , beds , or even doctors .
Some people might even get infected with both the flu and COVID-19 at the same time .
While health experts don ’ t know exactly how that would make COVID-19 worse , “ I can ’ t imagine that would be good , ” Jennifer Nuzzo , a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reenters the picture , Americans likely won ’ t have developed herd immunity to COVID-19 , and a vaccine is likely still more than a year away .
The absolute safest thing to do would be for all Americans to lock themselves inside until there ’ s a coronavirus vaccine .
However , even die-hard public-health cheerleaders say that ’ s simply not feasible .
Millions of people have lost their jobs ; non-COVID-19 medical treatments are being postponed ; children are suffering from a lack of schooling and socialization .
Instead , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ path forward will be an aggressive testing and contact-tracing regimen .
It might not be possible to get asymptomatic people tested regularly .
However , the rapid testing of anyone who has possible COVID-19 symptoms , along with a way to track and isolate anyone they ’ ve been in contact with , could keep coronavirus infections from spreading as the flu simultaneously rips through the population .
While America ’ s testing capabilities have been increasing , we are currently not testing or contact-tracing at anywhere near the necessary level , experts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became and American catastrophe There are other ways to prepare for a big fall surge in flu and COVID-19 infections .
Government and hospital officials could use the intervening time to staff up hospitals and increase their capacity .
Large sporting events and concerts may need to be postponed until there ’ s more immunity in the population , Nuzzo and others say .
Jha says universities should cancel sports and extracurriculars , give every student a single dorm , and stagger dining times .
Vulnerable people—like the elderly or those with chronic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others .
Everyone could wear masks even after they ’ re no longer required to , and work from home if they ’ re able to .

If you held out a glimmer of hope about life returning to normal this year, that hope may have been thoroughly extinguished this week by the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield told The Washington Post on Tuesday. “We’re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time.”
President Trump later tried to claim that Redfield had been misquoted, but Redfield clarified that he was quoted accurately. He’s also far from the only person who believes that the United States is in for a bleak winter. Numerous public-health experts are concerned that COVID-19 might make a comeback this fall (assuming that total case numbers even drop to begin with). In combination with the normal, October-through-March flu season, the disease could strain hospital capacity even more than it did this spring, when flu season was petering out. “It’s going to be a very difficult fall and winter this year coming up,” says Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute.
Scientists don’t yet know if the coronavirus will fade away during the summer before making a resurgence in colder temperatures. Some other respiratory illnesses do this: During the 2009 swine-flu outbreak, cases surged in the spring, subsided over the summer, then returned with a vengeance in the autumn. But the new coronavirus strain’s behavior is still too mysterious to predict for certain. Experts expect the virus to circulate among humans for some time, but its particular ebbs and flows aren’t yet known.
Read: America’s hospitals have never experienced anything like this
A late-in-the-year rebound would be a problem because flu season already puts hospitals close to capacity, experts told me. Though fewer people hospitalized for the flu would require ventilators than COVID-19 patients likely would, flu patients might need precious intensive-care-unit space. Already during this outbreak, reports from hospitals read like dispatches from a war zone. One 49-year-old COVID-19 patient was found “blue and dead” in an emergency-room chair while waiting for an inpatient bed. Doctors’ groups debated whether younger patients should have preferential access to ventilators. Having to contend with another round of COVID-19 patients while also taking on severe flu cases might cause hospitals to quickly run out of ventilators, beds, or even doctors.
Some people might even get infected with both the flu and COVID-19 at the same time. While health experts don’t know exactly how that would make COVID-19 worse, “I can’t imagine that would be good,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said.
Even as the seasonal flu reenters the picture, Americans likely won’t have developed herd immunity to COVID-19, and a vaccine is likely still more than a year away. The absolute safest thing to do would be for all Americans to lock themselves inside until there’s a coronavirus vaccine. However, even die-hard public-health cheerleaders say that’s simply not feasible. Millions of people have lost their jobs; non-COVID-19 medical treatments are being postponed; children are suffering from a lack of schooling and socialization.
Instead, health experts broadly concur that the best path forward will be an aggressive testing and contact-tracing regimen. It might not be possible to get asymptomatic people tested regularly. However, the rapid testing of anyone who has possible COVID-19 symptoms, along with a way to track and isolate anyone they’ve been in contact with, could keep coronavirus infections from spreading as the flu simultaneously rips through the population. While America’s testing capabilities have been increasing, we are currently not testing or contact-tracing at anywhere near the necessary level, experts say.
Read: How the coronavirus became and American catastrophe
There are other ways to prepare for a big fall surge in flu and COVID-19 infections. Government and hospital officials could use the intervening time to staff up hospitals and increase their capacity. Large sporting events and concerts may need to be postponed until there’s more immunity in the population, Nuzzo and others say. Jha says universities should cancel sports and extracurriculars, give every student a single dorm, and stagger dining times. Vulnerable people—like the elderly or those with chronic illnesses—may have to stay home longer than others. Everyone could wear masks even after they’re no longer required to, and work from home if they’re able to.
In addition to mitigating coronavirus transmission, these types of mild social-distancing measures might help reduce the spread of the flu. “Some of these things will hopefully work their way into our more normal, day-to-day lives, and we’ll be able to do ‘social distancing light’ in a way that will help us reduce the transmission,” Stephen Kissler, an infectious-disease modeler at Harvard, told me.
Jha is hopeful that between now and this fall, biotech companies will have developed drugs that can lessen COVID-19 symptoms. Though these might not be “cures” per se, they might reduce the amount of time COVID-19 patients are in the hospital and thus ease the strain on the health-care system. If these measures don’t happen, Americans might see additional lockdowns. “If we don’t get our act together, the chances that there will be another lockdown in the fall, and that it will be a long one, are very, very high,” Jha said.
To be sure, even if no one takes unnecessary risks, and therapeutics are available, and the hospitals are well stocked, and hand-washing becomes a religion, there still might need to be a fall lockdown. This is, unfortunately, the new uncertainty with which we all now live.
If you are desperate to cling to some modicum of control, the number-one way everyday Americans can help to prevent this flu-COVID-19 Armageddon is by getting the flu shot. Employers could even make returning to work in the fall contingent on being vaccinated against the flu, Nuzzo said. The flu shot is one of the few things that are within our power, and it doesn’t rely on the vicissitudes of pathogens. There aren’t many opportunities to feel empowered these days. We might want to seize the ones we get.


Elaine Godfrey

Elaine Godfrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic , where she covers politics .
• The Protests Are Already Changing Elections The past few weeks of activism have directly fueled the wins of a handful of black progressive candidates .
• The Enormous Scale of This Movement The nationwide demonstrations could carry on for days or weeks—maybe even through November .
• What Really Brought Down Steve King The primary campaign against the Iowa Republican wasn ’ t about his racism .
• In that moment , Ohio Representative Joyce Beatty said , she was just another black American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Two Choices Bernie Backers Have Left Progressives on the Biden-Sanders “ unity task forces ” see some opportunity to move the presumptive nominee left .
But they know they won ’ t get all that they ’ ve been fighting for .
• Thousands of Americans Have Become Socialists Since March The Democratic Socialists of America have an estimated 10,000 new members—growth that organizers attribute , in part , to the coronavirus pandemic .
• Their States Are in Crisis .
They ’ re Declaring Victory Anyway .
For the Republican governors reopening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be around the corner.
” • Thousands of Americans in long-term-care facilities have died from COVID-19 .
My grandmother just became one of them .
• America ’ s Elections Won ’ t Be the Same After 2020 The chaos of this year could radically—and permanently—change how Americans vote .
• How It Feels to Lose Bernie Sanders For some of his supporters , Medicare for All was the light at the end of a long , dark tunnel .
• They fear they could be denied lifesaving treatment if they end up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trapped at Home With People You Met on Craigslist No one answers an ad for roommates expecting to end up quarantined with them .
• We may never know how many people the coronavirus kills : “ It sounds like it could be totally obvious—just count body bags .
It ’ s not obvious at all.
” • What Do Progressives Do Now ?
Progressives are eager to use the coronavirus crisis to convince Joe Biden—and millions of other Americans—of the necessity of major reforms .
• The congresswoman from California is giving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Democratic leadership from afar .
• Voting is the opposite of social distancing .
But Americans in Arizona , Florida , and Illinois are still heading to the polls .

Elaine Godfrey is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Evelyn Hockstein / Reuters The GOP Primary Is a Field of Broken Dreams Donald Trump stole the show at the Iowa State Fair. The other Republican candidates looked like also-rans.
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Elaine Godfrey A Quieter, Gentler Music Festival I had always assumed that music festivals weren’t for me. Then I went to Newport.
Daniel Steinle / Reuters / Redux Is Ben Wikler the Most Important Democrat in America? The Wisconsin chair has turned around his party’s fortunes. But his winning formula faces a stern test in 2024.
Angel Studios I Saw the Movie ‘They’ Don’t Want You to See Sound of Freedom and the limits of culture-war marketing
Weferling / ullstein bild / Getty Are We There Yet? What traveling with my parents as an adult taught me
Mandel Ngan / AFP via Getty The Court Is Conservative—But Not MAGA Does Moore v. Harper shift the dominant narrative about the Roberts Court?
Mark Peterson / Redux It’s Abortion, Stupid Buoyed by the midterms, Democrats believe reproductive rights remain one of the most powerful campaign weapons in their arsenal.
Kathryn Gamble / The New York Times / … The Most Dangerous Democrat in Iowa As state auditor—and his party’s only elected politician in statewide office—Rob Sand is in the Republicans’ sights. But his eyes are on higher things.
Alex Brandon / AP A Bouncy, Fresh Brand of Trumpism Vivek Ramaswamy has burst into the Republican primary race with ultra-Trumpy politics and super-tall hair.
Photograph by Joanna Kulesza for The Atlantic The Abortion Absolutist Warren Hern has been performing late abortions for half a century. After Roe, he is as busy with patients as ever.
Reynolds / AFP / Getty Nikki Haley’s Dilemma Is Also the Republicans’ Problem If the former ambassador is having trouble figuring out a position that pleases both anti-abortion partisans and ordinary voters, so are her GOP rivals.
Shuran Huang / New York Times / Redux The New Pro-life Movement Has a Plan to End Abortion And it doesn’t care if American voters don’t agree with it.
Courtesy of Elaine Godfrey What Do I Do With This Baby Squirrel? Wildlife experts answer pressing springtime questions.
Brandon Bell / Getty Trump Begins the ‘Retribution’ Tour At the first rally of his 2024 campaign, the former president vowed vengeance. His fans loved it.
Alex Wong / Getty The Kari Lake Effect The former local news anchor is throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, but it’s a safe bet that something will.
Teresa Kopec / Getty A Bird’s-Eye View The National Zoo’s new walk-through aviary invites closer encounters with the feathered creatures you might see in your own backyard.
Atlantic; Getty Never Mind Marjorie Taylor Greene’s ‘National Divorce’ According to the author Richard Kreitner, the United States has always been in a troubled marriage.
Brendan Hoffman / Getty What Winning Did to the Anti-abortion Movement As protesters prepare for this year’s March for Life, a current of uncertainty ripples beneath the surface.
Getty; The Atlantic Sudden Russian Death Syndrome It’s not a great time to be an oligarch who’s unenthusiastic about Putin’s war in Ukraine.


theatlantic--2020-04-28--No Testing, No Treatment, No Herd Immunity, No Easy Way Out

Read : How the pandemic will end There was real reason to indulge in each of these hopes .
But in the past several days , a series of developments have undermined the factual basis for all of them .
So I am , finally , starting to reconcile myself to a darker reality : The miracle of deliverance is not in sight .
On Thursday , New York Governor Andrew Cuomo released preliminary results from a coronavirus-antibody study to determine the true caseload in his state .
( Antibodies remain in a patient ’ s body even after the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ official statistics , a quarter of a million people , or about one in 100 residents of the state , have contracted the coronavirus , and more than 21,000 have died from it .
This would put the fatality rate for the coronavirus at a staggering 8 percent .
The new study suggests that the real caseload is much higher .
About one in seven New Yorkers who were administered the test were found to have antibodies to the virus .
This is good news .
If that rate holds for the general @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than previously known have already had COVID-19 , then the true fatality rate could be a little less than 1 percent .
Some researchers have cast doubt on that one-in-seven figure .
Existing antibody tests are far from accurate , and may include a lot of false positives .
And because the New York study recruited many participants in public spaces such as supermarkets , those selected might have taken social distancing less seriously than the average resident of the state—which would make them more likely to have been exposed to the disease @ @ @ @ @ @ @ antibody study didn ’ t overestimate the infected population , its findings suggest that there ’ s no easy way out of social distancing .
Experts estimate that for a population to reach herd immunity , up to 80 percent of it would have to be exposed to the coronavirus .
Even if the virus has a fatality rate of a little less than 1 percent , this means that letting it spread through the population of the United States would cause about 2 million deaths .
Read : Cuomo and de Blasio @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the New York study gives us a lot of valuable information , we still don ’ t know how deadly the coronavirus really is .
Some antibody tests , including one in Miami-Dade , suggest a lower fatality rate than the New York study .
Others , including one in the Netherlands , come to a similarly pessimistic conclusion .
But so long as we can ’ t rule out that millions would die in the United States alone , plans to brave the virus by going back to normal remain in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
A vaccine is likely at least a year away , according to most experts , making finding an effective treatment against COVID-19 all the more important .
President Donald Trump , for his part , has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential miracle drug .
But two studies—one by scientists in France , another by doctors working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—have dashed such hopes .
As the VA found , patients who took hydroxychloroquine were actually more likely to die than those who did not .

The past few months have been bleak. Every day has brought word of new casualties from the coronavirus. The world economy entered free fall. And even for those who do not have a sick relative or a mortgage that can’t be paid, the isolation imposed by social distancing has begun to take a heavy psychological toll.
In these circumstances, I—and, I imagine, many others—couldn’t resist latching onto any piece of news that promised quick deliverance from the pandemic. I scoured the papers for positive stories. And I found at least three reasons to hope that the suffering the virus imposed might end sooner than the most pessimistic experts warned.
First, because some people who have COVID-19 don’t seem to show any symptoms, I wondered whether the disease might be far more widespread than the initial data suggested, raising the prospect of the United States’ reaching herd immunity without mass casualties. Second, reports that some existing drugs might prove effective against the disease led me to hope that doctors could soon be in a much better position to heal patients who contract the virus. And third, because some foreign governments have seemed successful in containing the virus through ambitious test-and-trace programs, I thought the United States might find a way to open up its economy without inducing a large resurgence of cases.
Read: How the pandemic will end
There was real reason to indulge in each of these hopes. But in the past several days, a series of developments have undermined the factual basis for all of them. So I am, finally, starting to reconcile myself to a darker reality: The miracle of deliverance is not in sight.
On Thursday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo released preliminary results from a coronavirus-antibody study to determine the true caseload in his state. (Antibodies remain in a patient’s body even after the disease has cleared.)
According to official statistics, a quarter of a million people, or about one in 100 residents of the state, have contracted the coronavirus, and more than 21,000 have died from it. This would put the fatality rate for the coronavirus at a staggering 8 percent.
The new study suggests that the real caseload is much higher. About one in seven New Yorkers who were administered the test were found to have antibodies to the virus. This is good news. If that rate holds for the general population, and a lot more people than previously known have already had COVID-19, then the true fatality rate could be a little less than 1 percent.
Some researchers have cast doubt on that one-in-seven figure. Existing antibody tests are far from accurate, and may include a lot of false positives. And because the New York study recruited many participants in public spaces such as supermarkets, those selected might have taken social distancing less seriously than the average resident of the state—which would make them more likely to have been exposed to the disease.
But even if the New York antibody study didn’t overestimate the infected population, its findings suggest that there’s no easy way out of social distancing. Experts estimate that for a population to reach herd immunity, up to 80 percent of it would have to be exposed to the coronavirus. Even if the virus has a fatality rate of a little less than 1 percent, this means that letting it spread through the population of the United States would cause about 2 million deaths.
Read: Cuomo and de Blasio: A tale of two leaders
Although the New York study gives us a lot of valuable information, we still don’t know how deadly the coronavirus really is. Some antibody tests, including one in Miami-Dade, suggest a lower fatality rate than the New York study. Others, including one in the Netherlands, come to a similarly pessimistic conclusion. But so long as we can’t rule out that millions would die in the United States alone, plans to brave the virus by going back to normal remain in the realm of the stupid or the sociopathic.
A vaccine is likely at least a year away, according to most experts, making finding an effective treatment against COVID-19 all the more important.
President Donald Trump, for his part, has been touting hydroxychloroquine as a potential miracle drug. But two studies—one by scientists in France, another by doctors working for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs—have dashed such hopes. As the VA found, patients who took hydroxychloroquine were actually more likely to die than those who did not.
Maya L. Harris: Some patients really need the drug that Trump keeps pushing
Most scientists have, from the very beginning, been highly skeptical that an antimalarial drug such as hydroxychloroquine could prove effective against COVID-19. But many did have real hopes for a drug that had proved effective in battling other coronaviruses in lab studies: remdesivir.
Now results from the first randomized clinical trial of remdesivir in patients with COVID-19 have become publicly available. Depressingly, the study concludes that remdesivir “was not associated with clinical or virological benefits.”
This is not the final word on either of these treatments. Different trials could bring better news. We have good reason to hope that effective drugs will, eventually, be discovered. And it’s not inconceivable that a vaccine could become available faster than most experts expect. But the chances of finding a transformative treatment against COVID-19 that could be deployed very soon have dwindled considerably.
We won’t get to herd immunity in the near future. A miracle drug is not in sight. The only way to restart the economy, then, is to put a highly effective system in place to test millions of people, trace their movements, and quickly quarantine those who might have been infected.
But even as the past few days have brought bad news about the science of the pandemic, they have brought terrifying news about its politics: It now seems less likely than ever that the United States will do what is necessary to reopen the economy without causing a second wave of deadly infections.
Read: Our pandemic summer
America is still behind on testing for COVID-19. Although Trump promised almost two months ago that anyone who wanted a test could get one, the U.S. has still conducted only about 5.4 million. The country needs to increase its testing rate at least threefold to reopen safely.
America is also behind on test and trace. Some countries, such as South Korea, now have robust systems in place to inform people that they have been exposed to the coronavirus, and need to self-isolate. But implementing such a system requires two things the United States sorely lacks: widespread trust in the government and a coordinated response from the White House.
In the absence of a federal strategy, some states, such as New York and Massachusetts, are trying to develop their own test-and-trace systems. But without help from Washington, they will likely lack both the resources to build a comprehensive system and the ability to persuade a large majority of their residents to sign up for an app that tracks their movements. Even if, against the odds, they should succeed in both these tasks, they face another obvious obstacle: Viruses don’t respect state lines.
If he were truly interested in limiting the damage to America’s economy, and opening up the country, Trump would be laser-focused on remedying these problems. Instead, the president has doubled down on culture wars and quack cures.
Early last week, Trump fanned the flames of the irresponsible protests against stay-at-home orders that are now being staged in cities across the country. A few days later, he vowed to “suspend immigration” to the United States. Then he suggested that scientists look into the possibility of injecting patients with bleach.
For all his blustering demands to get the country back to normal, the president is failing to take the steps that are required to reopen the economy without a horrific death toll. And for all the ingenuity shown by individual governors, the absence of a coordinated federal strategy may prove impossible to overcome.
I haven’t written much about the pandemic recently. The reason is, quite simply, that I didn’t feel there was much to say. Though every day brought a ton of news, a lot of it was contradictory; for long, painful weeks, I felt as though my overall understanding of the situation was barely improving.
Now I finally feel on firmer ground. Some of what we have learned over the past few weeks has been positive. The fatality rate from COVID-19 is likely to be significantly lower than early estimates suggested. Americans have followed social-distancing guidelines to an impressive degree. So far, we have succeeded in flattening the curve, and have not had to turn thousands of people in desperate need of medical treatment away from the emergency room. Even in New York City, the American epicenter of the pandemic, the number of new infections and new fatalities is ebbing.
We are not in the worst of all possible timelines. And yet, our hopes for the pandemic’s quick resolution should clearly be shelved. Taken together, the three major developments of the past few days paint a bleak picture of the months that lie ahead: COVID-19 is too deadly to let it rip through the population. An effective cure is not in sight. And the federal government is incapable of formulating a coherent pandemic response.
After weeks in which it made sense to hope that something would happen to end this nightmare, the prospects for deliverance are more remote than ever.


theatlantic--2020-05-06--How ‘Karen’ Became a Coronavirus Villain

Amid the coronavirus pandemic , “ Karen ” has been adopted as a shorthand to call out a vocal minority of middle-aged white women who are opposed to social distancing , out of either ignorance or ruthless self-interest .
It ’ s the latest evolution of a long-standing meme .
In The New York Times last year , the writer Sarah Miller described Karens as “ the policewomen of all human behavior , ” using the example of a suburban white woman who calls the cops on kids ’ pool parties .
Karens have been mocked for being anti-vaccine and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ manager ?
” They ’ re obsessed with banal consumer trends and their personal appearance , and typically criminally misguided , usually loudly and with extreme confidence .
Their defining essence is “ entitlement , selfishness , a desire to complain , ” according to Heather Suzanne Woods , a meme researcher and professor at Kansas State University .
A Karen “ demands the world exist according to her standards with little regard for others , and she is willing to risk or demean others to achieve her ends.
” Karens have gained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the joke can be bitingly funny , but also because no meme better captures the fraught feelings of the moment .
With inconsistent guidance from political leaders and conflicting social-distancing mandates among states , Americans are navigating how and when to police one another ’ s behavior .
Mocking Karens has given people on platforms such as Twitter , Reddit , and Facebook a shared language to encourage measures that benefit the public .
But it can be problematic , too—and not just because of its crudeness .
Many people now tossing around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as a pointed critique of structural inequalities , even as black Americans are overrepresented in county- and state-level coronavirus infection and death reports .
“ Karen began as a Black meme used to describe white women who tattle on Black kids ’ lemonade stands , ” the community organizer Gwen Snyder tweeted last week .
“ White boys stole it and turned it into code for ‘ bitch.
’ ” Arguments around social distancing have quickly become a tangle of disparities , distrust of science , politics , and America ’ s tradition @ @ @ @ @ @ @ country takes its first steps toward reopening , the Karen meme raises the question : Is there any simple way for Americans to shame one another into keeping everyone safe ?
Observation and criticism of Karens happens daily on several platforms , but most visibly on Reddit .
The platform has several forums dedicated specifically to identifying and pillorying Karens .
In r/karen , one Reddit user recently posted a photo of cut-out cookies shaped as shopping carts full of toilet paper with Put it Back Karen piped on in pink icing .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ illustration of a Karen sparring off against a doctor , shouting that “ stuff I read on Facebook ” trumps science .

In the ongoing, tense conversation over how long America has to remain locked down during the coronavirus pandemic, one of the more absurd moments came two weeks ago: Carolyn Goodman, the mayor of Las Vegas, called for the immediate reopening of her city’s casinos, offering her constituents up as a “control group” to test whether stay-at-home measures are actually effective. The notion baffled public-health experts, who maintain that a rigorous adherence to social distancing is essential to overcoming the outbreak. It drew swift condemnation from other Las Vegas officials, who referred to Goodman as “reckless” and “an embarrassment.” And, as is so often the case in public blunders, it received its harshest criticism online. Goodman was called “an idiot,” “an actual monster,” and, maybe most damning, “a real Karen’s Karen.”
On the internet, a Karen is not always named Karen. The title has been used to decry a woman named Diane who attended a protest of Pennsylvania’s stay-at-home order carrying an American flag and announcing, “What do I say to your science? I don’t believe in your science.” It’s been thrown at a woman in a local Facebook group demanding private medical information about a person in her neighborhood, and a woman in Tennessee carrying a handmade sign that read Sacrifice the weak, re-open TN. Becky Ames, the mayor of Beaumont, Texas, was declared a Karen after she was photographed breaking the state’s stay-at-home order at a nail salon.
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, “Karen” has been adopted as a shorthand to call out a vocal minority of middle-aged white women who are opposed to social distancing, out of either ignorance or ruthless self-interest. It’s the latest evolution of a long-standing meme. In The New York Times last year, the writer Sarah Miller described Karens as “the policewomen of all human behavior,” using the example of a suburban white woman who calls the cops on kids’ pool parties. Karens have been mocked for being anti-vaccine and pro–“Can I speak to your manager?” They’re obsessed with banal consumer trends and their personal appearance, and typically criminally misguided, usually loudly and with extreme confidence.
Their defining essence is “entitlement, selfishness, a desire to complain,” according to Heather Suzanne Woods, a meme researcher and professor at Kansas State University. A Karen “demands the world exist according to her standards with little regard for others, and she is willing to risk or demean others to achieve her ends.”
[ Read: The social-distancing culture war has begun ]
Karens have gained notoriety in this crisis in part because the joke can be bitingly funny, but also because no meme better captures the fraught feelings of the moment. With inconsistent guidance from political leaders and conflicting social-distancing mandates among states, Americans are navigating how and when to police one another’s behavior. Mocking Karens has given people on platforms such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook a shared language to encourage measures that benefit the public. But it can be problematic, too—and not just because of its crudeness. Many people now tossing around the meme seem unaware of its roots as a pointed critique of structural inequalities, even as black Americans are overrepresented in county- and state-level coronavirus infection and death reports. “Karen began as a Black meme used to describe white women who tattle on Black kids’ lemonade stands,” the community organizer Gwen Snyder tweeted last week. “White boys stole it and turned it into code for ‘bitch.’”
Arguments around social distancing have quickly become a tangle of disparities, distrust of science, politics, and America’s tradition of individualism and self-interest. As the country takes its first steps toward reopening, the Karen meme raises the question: Is there any simple way for Americans to shame one another into keeping everyone safe?
Observation and criticism of Karens happens daily on several platforms, but most visibly on Reddit. The platform has several forums dedicated specifically to identifying and pillorying Karens. In r/karen, one Reddit user recently posted a photo of cut-out cookies shaped as shopping carts full of toilet paper with Put it Back Karen piped on in pink icing. In r/EntitledKarens, another user shared an illustration of a Karen sparring off against a doctor, shouting that “stuff I read on Facebook” trumps science.
The largest of these subreddits, r/FuckYouKaren, was created back in December 2017, in honor of a Reddit poster who had achieved brief internet notoriety by complaining virulently about his vindictive ex-wife, Karen. The subreddit has more than 500,000 subscribers, and its founder, a 17-year-old from Irvine, California, who goes by the username karmacop97, told me that the pandemic has only boosted activity. “It’s been a little bit wild seeing how the Karen archetype is increasing in the wild now,” he said, after requesting anonymity because he doesn’t want the forum to be associated with his future professional life. “COVID-19 is just bringing them more into the spotlight.” At the beginning of the pandemic, the most popular Karens were toilet-paper hoarders and suburban shoppers berating grocery-store workers. Now the subreddit is focused on a new species of Karen: the type of protester who insists that social distancing should end because she needs a haircut.
The posts in these subreddits can be insightful when they acutely criticize entitlement. They get—rudely—at the most destructive logical fallacy of the pandemic, which is any wishful thinking that we won’t personally become a vector for disease, even if we’re breaking rules and taking risks for our own comfort. In some cases, these memes are encouraging awareness of bad health practices and singling out behaviors that health experts agree will legitimately kill people.
But Reddit conversations about Karens, perhaps unsurprisingly, can also cross a line—as with posts mocking a real woman named Karen who expressed doubt about the threat of the coronavirus and later died from it. On Reddit—well known as a home for some of the internet’s more toxic attitudes—motivations behind the meme have been questioned as misogynistic: Is a Karen just a woman who does anything at all that annoys people? If so, what is the male equivalent?
[ Read: The misogynistic joke that became a goth-meme fairy tale ]
The pre-Reddit history of Karens complicates things further. Among black women, the shorthand of a “Karen”—a white woman to be wary of because she won’t hesitate to wield privilege at the expense of others—has existed for years. “The cultural reference has always been there; it just hasn’t always been so specific to one person’s name,” says Meredith Clark, a media researcher at the University of Virginia. “Karen has gone by different names. Back in the ’90s, when ‘Baby Got Back’ came out, it was Becky. There will be another name.”
During the pandemic, Karen jokes have also helped highlight the urgent racial disparities in infections and deaths that exist partly because, in many places, people of color make up the majority of the essential workforce, but also because of long-standing and dramatic health inequalities in the U.S.
André Brock, an associate professor at Georgia Tech who has studied Black Twitter, says Karen memes are freshly resonant now because they allow people of color the chance to indulge in dark comedy about the way the pandemic is disproportionately affecting them. In reference to another varietal of Karen, the type of suburban liberal who uses the Nextdoor app and a Ring security camera to surveil her neighbors and monitor their behavior, he called it “deeply ironic” that white women isolating in single-family homes—whose lifestyle puts them at low risk of exposure to the virus—have been getting militant about teenagers wearing face masks or judgmental about city dwellers’ inability to execute perfect social distancing.
The audience and impact of a meme is impossible to control, especially for one spreading as rapidly as Karen. If social-distancing memes about Karen amount only to calling her ignorant and monstrous, the critique could be lost. They could cause the people being insulted to dig their heels in—and maybe to insist even more fervently that stay-at-home orders are fascist, or that reseeding their lawn is their constitutional right. And if the memes become limited to superficial elements of middle-aged women’s appearances, rather than on addressing deeper issues, they can easily be shot down as sexist.
Research suggests that only certain types of shame are useful: the kind that focuses on specific behaviors, for example. However, the kind that paints someone as an irredeemable archetype of, say, selfishness and bad taste is usually not productive (even if it can be funny). As Americans spend the next several months participating in an unruly group project that requires enormous levels of coordinated behavior, knowing the difference will become ever more important.
[ Read: Friends are breaking up over social distancing ]
Karen memes that are specific to the coronavirus context are at least more coherent than many of their predecessors. “The circumstances of COVID have sharpened the critique,” says Leslie Hahner, a co-author of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right. Hahner cited an image that showed a white woman with blonde hair pointing a handgun at the camera, with the caption “Open the TJ Maxx.” That particular Karen is insisting she deserves exception even in the midst of a pandemic, and is more compelling than some wholly imaginary abstraction of privilege.
But the “Karen conversation” stays convoluted largely because of the platforms it’s taking place on. On Twitter last month, there was a brief but frenzied debate about whether the word Karen could be considered a slur against white women. “Yes. The K-word is stronger than the N-word, at least currently,” read the tweet that received the most attention. “Misogyny has been around longer than slavery.”
The topic was trending on Twitter for several hours—but if you clicked on it, most of the tweets were about how pointless even indulging such a ridiculous debate was. And, in fact, at least part of the backlash was manufactured. The most popular tweet came from an account with the handle @EmillySwaven, which was created this month, links to an Instagram account for a Canadian marketing agency, and tweets only inflammatory opinions about already divisive social and political issues. When I messaged the marketing agency, the owner said that the character was fake and had been created as a joke, as well as a way to get more followers on Instagram. (He also said he was surprised that people fall for that kind of trick as often as they do: “Like, we purposely leave obvious clues behind, such as making a brand new Twitter account, [and posting] tweets that contradict each other.”)
One risk of the current Karen meme could be that it overplays how many Americans actually oppose social-distancing measures. Online discourse can easily misrepresent reality. America is not divided along strict lines of Karen and not-Karen; the Karens shouting on the news about “reopening America” are pulled from tiny protests that don’t reflect with most Americans’ opinions. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that 66 percent of Americans are more concerned about social-distancing restrictions being lifted too quickly than they are about having restrictions in place for too long. (Among Republicans, women were far more likely than men to express that opinion. There was no gender gap among Democrats.)
That’s the challenge that comes along with any meme spreading outside of its original context: It can take on new meanings. Some of them will be creative and additive. Some of them will be stupid potshots. For as long as social distancing remains necessary, many Americans will be spending the bulk of our time on platforms that afford us ample opportunity to comment on others’ behavior. We’ll be seeing almost nothing of one another in the real world, even as crowd-sourced sketches of archetypes circulate more and more widely. Karen is the easiest sort of meme to spread, because she’s not reliant on a specific template. She’s particularly compelling when tensions are high, and she’d like your attention now, please.


Christian Paz

Christian Paz is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic .
• The public-health expert has developed the kind of internet presence that many public figures , especially politicians , only dream of building .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : There Goes the Economy Almost 10 million Americans have already filed for unemployment benefits .
It didn ’ t have to be this way , Derek Thompson argues .
Plus : COVID-19 ’ s unique threat to the South .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : The Other Way American Cities Will Suffer What happens is local governments go bankrupt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the new coronavirus behaves in air ( the answer is very complicated ) .
• There once was a time at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when social distancing was n't a polarized along party lines .
That ’ s changing • The Atlantic Politics Daily : It ’ s Up to the States Now How the leaders of the two most populous cities in America are handling the pandemic .
Plus : Save the 2020 election and vote by mail , this law professor argues .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 2020 presidential race .
Plus : What the healthy owe to society , especially the more vulnerable , in the time of the coronavirus .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : How This Will All Play Out The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world .
Plus : Is an extended national shutdown now the least worst option ?
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Even the Pandemic Is Partisan Some states are imposing serious lockdowns , others are being far more lax , and others @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : Trump wasn ’ t the only one who got it wrong .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Where Are the Billionaires ?
Remember when Michael Bloomberg spent about $ 500 million running for president ?
Plus : What if checkpoints come to the U.S. to help slow the spread of COVID-19 ?
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : This Is What Democracy ( in a Pandemic ) Looks Like Managing the voting booth in the time of a pandemic .
Plus : COVID-19 cases have been reported in all 50 states—here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ prepare for the worst .
• The governor of Ohio recommended this evening that the state postpone Tuesday ’ s primary voting until June .
Plus : The winner of last night ’ s debate ?
The coronavirus .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Congress Is n't Ready for the Coronavirus Why the U.S. is so behind on COVID-19 testing .
Plus : Remote work was thought of being the future for office work .
The coronavirus outbreak has hastened that experiment .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : The Dangerous Misnaming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his way to spin COVID-19 as a menace coming from abroad , referring to its source as a “ foreign virus.
” Plus : The staggering heartlessness toward the elderly .
• The president and his allies can still use his bully pulpit to drown information inconvenient to them .
Plus : Is this the end of the line for Bernie Sanders ?
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Running for President During an Epidemic Out with the handshakes , in with the hand sanitizer—Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have both canceled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ From “ Never Trump ” to “ Why not.
” • The Atlantic Politics Daily : When Everyone Stays Home What mass quarantines could look like in the U.S. ( hint : trying to implement them at scale would be a mess ) .
Plus : The empty public spaces of a world amidst outbreak .

Christian Paz is a former assistant editor at The Atlantic.
Martin Parr / Magnum The Real Hot Vax Summer Is Coming After what felt like a letdown last summer, Americans are revving up for the most normal summer yet.
Drew Angerer / Getty The Anti-abortion Movement’s Gen-Z Victors At the March for Life, activists felt certain that their triumph was finally at hand.
TikTok; The Atlantic When Your Doctor Is on TikTok On a platform rife with falsehoods, a cohort of health-care professionals has stepped in to correct them.
Martin Chavez / Getty The Coup at 30,000 Feet Stuck on a plane flying back to Washington, I feared the version of the country I would land in.
Lanna Apisukh / The New York Times / … Gen Z Is Done With the Pandemic Though the specter of a new variant hangs over the holidays, young people have no plans to lock themselves down again.
Greg Nash / AFP / Getty What a National Guard Commander Saw on January 6 William J. Walker led the D.C. National Guard during the Capitol attack, but for hours that day, he felt helpless.
The Atlantic Another Problem for Latinx Not many Latinos in America use the term. Even fewer elected officials do.
Andreas Rentz / Getty; The Atlantic Why Hillary Clinton Fears the GOP’s Next Moves The former secretary of state worries that the conspiracies of the ’90s have brought us to the brink.
Drew Angerer / Getty; The Atlantic Ben Sasse Wants to Talk About Tocqueville, Not Marjorie Taylor Greene Why a senator from the GOP heartland thinks today’s Trump-obsessed politics won’t stick around
Alexi Rosenfeld / Getty Why Are People Nostalgic for Early-Pandemic Life? Pandemic fatigue is fueling a bizarre sense of longing.
Stanton Sharpe / Sopa / Sipa / AP The Voters Who Could Turn California Red The state GOP’s comeback runs through Latino communities.
Luis Echeverria / Reuters America’s Vaccine Nationalism Isn’t Working The longer it takes for the United States to lead a global response, the more the risks compound.
Gabriella Demczuk There’s No Playbook for What Alex Padilla Is Trying to Do California’s new senator, who filled Kamala Harris’s seat, is hoping to speak for his fellow Latinos. That won’t be easy.
John Sleezer / Kansas City Star / Samuel … Remember Trump’s Accomplices Americans must not forget the 147 members of Congress who advanced the former president’s lies, then ignored his culpability in inciting a coup.
Getty / The Atlantic The Populists Who Got COVID-19 Are a Warning for Democracy They downplayed the severity of the coronavirus and never changed their minds. What now?
Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty Kamala Harris Is the Decider With a 50–50 split in the Senate, Harris is poised to have final say over crucial decisions in the coming years.
Jim Watson / AFP / Getty The World Leader Backing Trump’s State of Denial Presidents and their challengers haven’t always admitted defeat. Just look at Mexico.
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Marco Bello / AFP / Getty What Liberals Don’t Understand About Pro-Trump Latinos They all have one very important thing in common.


theatlantic--2020-03-27--The Callousness of India’s COVID-19 Response

For the poor , work has dried up entirely , and so those migrant workers who could sought to beat the lockdown by heading home in huge numbers .
Since the restrictions came into force , buses and trains have stopped ferrying passengers across the country , leaving them to walk , often for days , with their families back to their towns and villages .
Again , the authorities ’ callousness has been on display : In one heartbreaking video that went viral , police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh force young boys to perform frog jumps @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Another video shows police waiting outside a mosque in the southern state of Karnataka , beating worshippers with a stick as they leave .
Similar cases of police brutality have been reported around the country , and social media have filled with messages of people running out of food yet afraid to leave their dwellings , fearful of the police .
All of that is to say nothing of the medical disaster that may well await India , one I am familiar with—I have covered health care in India for 17 years , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Hindu , one of the country ’ s biggest newspapers .
As the government focused in recent months on passing the controversial anti-Muslim law , stoking protests and eventually communal violence , crucial time to prepare for this pandemic was lost .
The World Health Organization warned on February 27 of a coming disruption in global supply chains , advising countries to create their own stockpiles of the personal protective equipment that medical workers would need .
The Indian government waited until March 19 , however , to finally issue an order @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and a further five days to ban the export of respiratory apparatuses .
There are more such delays : Only last week did the government finally allow health-care workers treating patients suffering from COVID-19 , the disease caused by the coronavirus , to be tested ; it also only recently began testing those without a travel history , a long-overdue implicit admission that the virus was being transmitted locally ; and it has just issued notices to private hospitals to submit tallies of the number of intensive-care beds and ventilators available and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ facilities nationwide to ensure those suffering COVID-19 are neither stigmatized nor turned away .
Even the measures the authorities have taken have had unintended consequences .
The lockdown , for example , bars factory workers from going to work , leading to a shutdown of the medical-device industry , and prevents truckers from transporting materials and stocks to hospitals .
There is , unfortunately , good reason to believe that all of this will not be enough .
For one , India is still not testing enough people , having conducted the fewest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ confirmed cases of the coronavirus , at just 10.5 per million residents ( South Korea , by contrast , has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents ) .
That private laboratories are allowed to charge $ 60 per test—remember , just $ 7 a month has been offered as income support for some residents—means significant barriers to confirmation and treatment remain in place .
( The government argues that because of the size of the population , widespread testing is not feasible . )
The authorities are also not meticulously contact @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and measures such as self-quarantines and social distancing are impractical in a country where much of the population lives in dense clusters in overcrowded megacities .
Whereas the WHO recommends a ratio of one doctor for every 1,000 patients , India has one government doctor for every 10,000 , according to the 2019 National Health Profile .
A 2016 Reuters report noted that India needed more than 50,000 critical-care specialists , but has just 8,350 .
In short , the country ’ s health-care system is in no position to cope with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ respiratory infection in the manner that China and Italy have been doing—India ’ s continued inability to deal with the epidemic of tuberculosis speaks to that struggle .

By now, the global timeline of the coronavirus’s development has been well established: The first case reportedly appeared in mid-November; in December, the Chinese government was still attributing hospitalizations to a peculiar form of pneumonia; through January and February, the outbreak began spreading around the world; and its epicenter is today firmly in Europe and the United States.
Throughout, another set of events were occurring here in India. Late last year, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist government introduced and passed a controversial new law, ostensibly in support of minorities in neighboring countries, that in fact openly discriminated against Muslims and undermined India’s secular foundations. Then, early this year, protests over that new law snowballed into a pogrom in which dozens of people—mostly Muslims—have been killed.
Yet even as India was gripped by demonstrations and violence, the coronavirus was making inroads into society here. The country reported its first case on January 30, but authorities steadfastly insisted that cases were one-offs and no local transmission was taking place. In recent weeks, though, India has seen exponential growth in the number of cases. Today, we are three days into a three-week nationwide lockdown, a heavy restriction on a nation of 1.3 billion people that Modi and his government have insisted will help defeat the virus.
Read: India shows that developing a coronavirus treatment isn’t enough
In fact, it may well be too late. This lockdown is, in keeping with many of this government’s policies, a headline-grabbing initiative announced with little warning, but one that will do little to address the myriad problems India faces in dealing with the coronavirus. It puts responsibility for containing the outbreak on citizens, instead of instituting a robust official support system. It is needlessly punishing for the most vulnerable in society. It does nothing to solve this country’s problems with public health and safety. And everything that is wrong with India’s response flows from that period late last year through the early parts of this year, in which the government set the tone for what is undoubtedly the world’s harshest lockdown with police brutality, a lack of transparency, and a shortage of compassion.
The restrictions themselves are onerous: Indians should not be leaving their homes, all businesses were ordered to close, and no transport—via plane, train, or bus—would be allowed. The prime minister called for social distancing, urged his compatriots to avoid spreading rumors, and pledged financial support to strengthen the health-care system. Yet the announcement of the lockdown was remarkable not just for its scope, but for its timing. Modi made his speech at 8:00 p.m. on March 24, saying the restrictions would come into force just after midnight and be in place for three weeks. By the time he spoke, shops had closed for the day, catching off guard people who had been repeatedly told not to panic-buy. The next morning, nothing was open in Goa, the state where I live. Elsewhere, such as in Britain, France, and Italy, grocery stores and pharmacies have remained open to provide essential services, but here, they are closed. While most wealthy and middle-class Indians will make it through these three weeks unscathed, able to hunker down, work from home, and access some modicum of entertainment, the country’s poor and its huge number of transient migrant workers (there are no official figures, but the most often cited number is 100 million) will struggle to survive.
The government is offering little in the way of a safety net. Only after the lockdown came into force, and amid growing outrage, did the finance minister finally announce an aid package. Yet its $22 billion value is a pitiful amount compared with what governments elsewhere have provided: Whereas governments in Britain, Spain, and Germany have offered stimulus plans of up to 20 percent of GDP, India’s amounts to less than 1 percent of its GDP. It provides no help for day laborers or other workers in similar unorganized sectors. It contains no measures for migrant workers. The actual amounts of support—five kilograms of rice or wheat, and one kilogram of legumes, per person for the next three months, coupled with cash transfers, in some cases of 500 rupees, or $7, a month—have infuriated voters. Here in Goa, a lawyer has petitioned the high court to direct the state government to provide essential goods to the people, especially those who are living below the poverty line.
For the poor, work has dried up entirely, and so those migrant workers who could sought to beat the lockdown by heading home in huge numbers. Since the restrictions came into force, buses and trains have stopped ferrying passengers across the country, leaving them to walk, often for days, with their families back to their towns and villages.
Again, the authorities’ callousness has been on display: In one heartbreaking video that went viral, police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh force young boys to perform frog jumps as punishment for violating the curfew. Another video shows police waiting outside a mosque in the southern state of Karnataka, beating worshippers with a stick as they leave. Similar cases of police brutality have been reported around the country, and social media have filled with messages of people running out of food yet afraid to leave their dwellings, fearful of the police.
All of that is to say nothing of the medical disaster that may well await India, one I am familiar with—I have covered health care in India for 17 years, and was previously the health editor of The Hindu, one of the country’s biggest newspapers. As the government focused in recent months on passing the controversial anti-Muslim law, stoking protests and eventually communal violence, crucial time to prepare for this pandemic was lost. The World Health Organization warned on February 27 of a coming disruption in global supply chains, advising countries to create their own stockpiles of the personal protective equipment that medical workers would need. The Indian government waited until March 19, however, to finally issue an order prohibiting the export of domestically made PPE, and a further five days to ban the export of respiratory apparatuses. There are more such delays: Only last week did the government finally allow health-care workers treating patients suffering from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, to be tested; it also only recently began testing those without a travel history, a long-overdue implicit admission that the virus was being transmitted locally; and it has just issued notices to private hospitals to submit tallies of the number of intensive-care beds and ventilators available and to cancel nonessential surgeries, and directed facilities nationwide to ensure those suffering COVID-19 are neither stigmatized nor turned away. Even the measures the authorities have taken have had unintended consequences. The lockdown, for example, bars factory workers from going to work, leading to a shutdown of the medical-device industry, and prevents truckers from transporting materials and stocks to hospitals.
There is, unfortunately, good reason to believe that all of this will not be enough. For one, India is still not testing enough people, having conducted the fewest number of tests of any country with confirmed cases of the coronavirus, at just 10.5 per million residents (South Korea, by contrast, has conducted more than 6,000 tests per million residents). That private laboratories are allowed to charge $60 per test—remember, just $7 a month has been offered as income support for some residents—means significant barriers to confirmation and treatment remain in place. (The government argues that because of the size of the population, widespread testing is not feasible.) The authorities are also not meticulously contact tracing, people are fleeing isolation centers, and measures such as self-quarantines and social distancing are impractical in a country where much of the population lives in dense clusters in overcrowded megacities. Whereas the WHO recommends a ratio of one doctor for every 1,000 patients, India has one government doctor for every 10,000, according to the 2019 National Health Profile. A 2016 Reuters report noted that India needed more than 50,000 critical-care specialists, but has just 8,350. In short, the country’s health-care system is in no position to cope with an avalanche of patients with a contagious respiratory infection in the manner that China and Italy have been doing—India’s continued inability to deal with the epidemic of tuberculosis speaks to that struggle.
An added issue is the Modi government’s willingness to tolerate unscientific thinking. The prime minister and his colleagues have held intellectuals and experts in disdain, and promoted traditional medicine in the past, undermining the health ministry’s efforts to combat misinformation by endorsing homeopathic prophylactic treatment.
Read: How the pandemic will end
India now has several hundred confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and has seen at least 17 deaths—both highly conservative figures. Thus far, the spread of infections has matched that of a textbook epidemic, yet the government’s response has been anything but. The lockdown may help “flatten the curve” and buy the authorities some time, but that means little if they do not take advantage by aggressively testing, isolating confirmed cases, and performing contact tracing. Absent these measures, the lockdown will merely create concentrated pockets of outbreaks that will then expand rapidly once the restrictions are eventually lifted.
During his first televised address to the nation on the pandemic—unlike leaders in other democratic countries, he has not given regular press conferences—Modi compared the effort to contain COVID-19 to the Great Wars, and asked citizens to perform their duties, without explaining what his government was doing.
Ramanan Laxminarayan, an epidemiologist and lecturer at Princeton University, used a different analogy. “Imagine that you’re standing on the shore and you’re watching the tsunami come in,” he told the BBC. “If you are going to just stand there, and watch the tsunami, you are finished. If you can run as fast as you can, you have a better chance.”


Alexis C. Madrigal

Alexis C. Madrigal is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Powering the Dream : The History and Promise of Green Technology • A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic The U.S. has seen more cases in the past week than in any week since the pandemic began .
• America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic Businesses are reopening .
Protests are erupting nationwide .
But the virus isn ’ t done with us .
• ‘ How Could the CDC Make That Mistake ?
’ The government ’ s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies .
Pennsylvania , Georgia , Texas , and other states are doing the same .
• State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don ’ t Match Up The CDC has quietly started releasing nationwide numbers .
But they contradict what states themselves are reporting .
• The state is combining results from viral and antibody tests in the same statistic .
This threatens to confound America ’ s understanding of the pandemic .
• Donald Trump won the presidency by using the social @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the way the company wanted .
He ’ s poised to do it again .
• A New Statistic Reveals Why America ’ s COVID-19 Numbers Are Flat Few figures tell you anything useful about how the coronavirus has spread through the U.S.
Here ’ s one that does .
• Backlogs at private laboratories have ballooned , making it difficult to treat suffering patients and contain the pandemic .
• How the Coronavirus Became an American Catastrophe The death and economic damage sweeping the United States could have been avoided—if only we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• How to Understand Your State ’ s Coronavirus Numbers As the outbreak spreads , state websites are still some of the best sources of information on how many people have been tested .
• The Dangerous Delays in U.S. Coronavirus Testing Haven ’ t Stopped Without adequate testing , people with coronavirus symptoms are left to agonize over the right course of action on their own .
• The Official Coronavirus Numbers Are Wrong , and Everyone Knows It Because the U.S. data on coronavirus infections are so deeply flawed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than it illuminates .
• The Gig Economy Has Never Been Tested by a Pandemic Companies such as Uber and Instacart have transformed the urban experience , but would they hold up if the coronavirus spread across America ?
• It will be a long time before we understand what the outbreak did to the global economy .

Alexis Madrigal is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the host of KQED’s Forum.
He is the author of Powering the Dream and the forthcoming The Pacific Circuit. He created the podcast Containers and the television show Real Future. He previously worked at Wired, at Univision, and in various editorial roles at The Atlantic.
Getty; The Atlantic Getting Back to Normal Is Only Possible Until You Test Positive I was ultracareful for 18 months. Then I got COVID.
Getty / The Atlantic The Messiest Phase of the Pandemic Yet Coronavirus data have always been incomplete—but the situation in America is particularly murky now.
Getty / The Atlantic The Threat That COVID-19 Poses Now After a year of waves and surges, the pandemic is entering a “tornado” phase in America.
NIAID / The Atlantic Why the Pandemic Experts Failed We’re still thinking about pandemic data in the wrong ways.
The Atlantic A Simple Rule of Thumb for Knowing When the Pandemic Is Over At some point—maybe even soon—the emergency phase of the pandemic will end. But what, exactly, is that magic threshold?
Katie Martin / The Atlantic America’s Most Reliable Pandemic Data Are Now at Risk The Biden administration has to make a choice: Should it undo a vital system that Trump’s health department created?
Getty / Paul Spella / The Atlantic America Has Not Fixed Its Deadliest Pandemic Errors The COVID Tracking Project’s extensive, daily data collection reveals the simple yet devastating ways the U.S. has failed.
Go Nakamura / Getty One Day, 3,000 Deaths The pandemic set a devastating record today. It will not be the last.
Go Nakamura / Getty The U.S. Has Passed the Hospital Breaking Point A new statistic shows that health-care workers are running out of space to treat COVID-19 patients.
Shutterstock / Paul Spella / The Atlantic How Many Americans Are About to Die? A new analysis shows that the country is on track to pass spring’s grimmest record.
Erin Clark / The Boston Globe / Getty Hospitals Can’t Go On Like This Twenty-two percent of American hospitals don’t have enough workers right now.
Go Nakamura / Getty The Worst Day of the Pandemic Since May COVID-19 hospitalizations are now at an all-time high.
Callaghan O'Hare / The New York Times / … A Dreadful New Peak for the American Pandemic The country recorded more than 100,000 coronavirus cases on Wednesday—the highest single-day total since the pandemic began.
Shutterstock / The Atlantic Why Trump’s Rapid-Testing Plan Worries Scientists Experts were already divided on the right way to deploy new coronavirus tests. Then the White House barged ahead.
Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty Now What? The president’s COVID-19 diagnosis raises a number of questions about when the president was infected and how many other people in the White House might be sick.
Mandel Ngan / Getty Fauci to a Meddling HHS Official: ‘Take a Hike’ The nation’s top public-health expert addresses political interference in the COVID-19 response, but urges Americans to focus on the winter ahead.
Yulia Reznikov / Getty / COVID Tracking Project … The Fog of the Pandemic Is Returning Millions of coronavirus tests may be happening without their results being made public.
Getty / The Atlantic A New Era of Coronavirus Testing Is About to Begin A newly authorized test promises to double America’s monthly testing capacity, thanks in part to a huge purchase by the Trump administration. Can the test deliver?
Adam Maida The Plan That Could Give Us Our Lives Back The U.S. has never had enough coronavirus tests. Now a group of epidemiologists, economists, and dreamers is plotting a new strategy to defeat the virus, even before a vaccine is found.


Edward Tenner

The senator from California seems like the obvious choice to be Joe Biden ’ s running mate .
So why is she keeping mum about her thinking ?
A few weeks ago , an adviser to Kamala Harris called me to talk through some polling data .
“ We understand that Joe Biden ’ s the nominee , but the party is so much different than a septuagenarian white male , ” the adviser said .
“ Kamala Harris is more symbolic of that changing America—America coming together—than some of the other potential candidates ” for vice president .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ because , officially , Harris is pretending that she ’ s not campaigning to be Biden ’ s running mate .
In public , Harris has repeatedly insisted that she ’ s not talking about or thinking about her prospects of being picked .
But judging from my conversations with people around Harris , she and her team use her prospects to book events and television hits that aim to show she ’ s neither overeager nor overambitious .
She and her team are avoiding situations that could create stumbles .
They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ background , and the force of her personality propel her .
They ’ re picking specific moments for her to grab attention on the Senate floor or send a calibrated tweet .
They ’ re tuning out political reporters who are stuck on their couches , looking to drum up content during the pandemic .
They ’ re trying to ease concerns in Biden ’ s orbit that if she ’ s picked and they win , she ’ ll start running for president the morning after the inauguration .
They want her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be the Democratic nominee in 2024 .

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.
This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.
Over the past eight years or so, I’ve been obsessed with two questions. The first is: Why have Americans become so sad? The rising rates of depression have been well publicized, as have the rising deaths of despair from drugs, alcohol, and suicide. But other statistics are similarly troubling. The percentage of people who say they don’t have close friends has increased fourfold since 1990. The share of Americans ages 25 to 54 who weren’t married or living with a romantic partner went up to 38 percent in 2019, from 29 percent in 1990. A record-high 25 percent of 40-year-old Americans have never married. More than half of all Americans say that no one knows them well. The percentage of high-school students who report “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021.


Yascha Mounk

Yascha Mounk is a contributing writer at The Atlantic , an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University , a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund , and a senior adviser at Protect Democracy .
He is the author of The People vs. Democracy • Americans are pretending that the pandemic is over .
It certainly is not .
• Authoritarian Populists Have Six Classic Moves .
Trump ’ s Response to COVID-19 Uses Five of Them .
While the president may not be using the coronavirus to consolidate power , Americans should still be worried about the threat he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ First Time , I ’ m Doubting My Decision to Come to America The coronavirus is making me experience what Germans poetically call heimweh , the hurt of being far from your native land .
• This Is Just the Beginning People who now advocate that we “ choose the economy ” are not being honest about the consequences of that decision .
• There are now simply too many patients for each one of them to receive adequate care .
• Social distancing is the only way to stop the coronavirus .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ is a large constituency for a racially inclusive form of social democracy that is not democratic socialism .
• Americans are desperate to believe the worst about one another .
• What Will the World Look Like in 2030 ?
One thing is certain : The next decade will look very different from what most people expect .
• This Is How Democracy Dies A new report shows that people around the world are collectively losing faith in democratic systems .
• Voters may be less interested in whether a candidate is likable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ them .
• Why Trump ’ s Second Term Will Be Worse Narendra Modi has been emboldened by reelection .
The American president could be too .

Yascha Mounk is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. Goodbye to the Prophets of Doom The conventional wisdom about the global economy is that the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been getting poorer. What if that isn’t true?
ISM Agency / Getty The Corrosive Legacy of Silvio Berlusconi His demagogic style revolved around self-interest, but he inspired other right-wing populists to bend the rule of law and divide their democracy.
Illustration by Ben Kothe / Atlantic. Source: Getty Poland’s Imperiled Democracy The remarkable staying power of populist governments—thanks in part to their willingness to bend the rule of law—is a warning to America.
Paul Hennessy / NurPhoto / AP How to Save Academic Freedom From Ron DeSantis There are grounds for being skeptical of “wokeness,” but the Florida bill to curb progressive ideas in universities is flat-out unconstitutional.
Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters Brazil’s ‘January 6 Moment’ Is a Warning The threat from authoritarian populists endures.
Getty; The Atlantic How Moderates Won the Midterms A lesson for any party that wants to succeed in 2024
Ueslei Marcelino / Reuters What Bolsonaro’s Loss Reveals About the Limits of Populism The sight of a would-be authoritarian losing at the ballot box is welcome, but it’s too soon to declare a total victory over the demagogues.
Getty; The Atlantic Attack of the Zombie Populists Antidemocratic demagogues have an amazing ability to stage comebacks after suffering political death. Here’s why—and how to defeat them.
Alberto Pizzoli / AFP / Getty Italians Didn’t Exactly Vote for Fascism The electoral victory of Giorgia Meloni is nothing to be complacent about, but Italians are cynical about how long any government will last. Let’s hope they’re right.
Nathan Howard / Getty Why Freedom of Speech Is the Next Abortion Fight A legal battle in Mississippi will test whether states can criminalize those who merely provide information.
The Atlantic Democrats Need a Real Primary Contest To beat the Trump GOP, the party must give voters a proper say in who will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2024.
Ben Hickey The Real Chill on Campus Most students are open to real debate. But their colleges are failing them.
The Atlantic; Getty The Doom Spiral of Pernicious Polarization The U.S. is more dangerously divided than any other wealthy democracy. Is there a way back from the brink?
Lionel Preau / Riva Press / Redux Why Marine Le Pen Is So Close to Power The French mainstream has failed to counter the far right’s pessimism about the state of the country. Americans are making the same mistake.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic; CSA-Printstock / Getty How Diverse Democracies Can Protect Their Citizens Only liberal values can ensure true freedom.
Adam Maida / The Atlantic Dictators Aren’t Pretending Anymore The democratic recession is so severe that autocrats now openly stage coups, steal elections, and invade other countries.
The Atlantic Open Everything The time to end pandemic restrictions is now.
The Atlantic Omicron Is the Beginning of the End No matter the severity of the variant, the appetite for shutdowns or other large-scale social interventions simply isn’t there.
Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty You Can’t Win Elections by Telling Voters Their Concerns Are Imaginary Virginia is sending Democrats a warning: They’ve lost control of the narrative about education.


Robinson Meyer

Robinson Meyer is a staff writer at The Atlantic , where he covers climate change and technology .
• A Devastating New Stage of the Pandemic The U.S. has seen more cases in the past week than in any week since the pandemic began .
• America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic Businesses are reopening .
Protests are erupting nationwide .
But the virus isn ’ t done with us .
• The Protests Will Spread the Coronavirus The country should expect a spike in less than two weeks , public-health experts say .
• ‘ How Could the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ government ’ s disease-fighting agency is conflating viral and antibody tests , compromising a few crucial metrics that governors depend on to reopen their economies .
Pennsylvania , Georgia , Texas , and other states are doing the same .
• State and Federal Data on COVID-19 Testing Don ’ t Match Up The CDC has quietly started releasing nationwide numbers .
But they contradict what states themselves are reporting .
• The state is combining results from viral and antibody tests in the same statistic .
This threatens to confound America ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There ’ s One Big Reason the U.S. Economy Can ’ t Reopen The country faces the same problem today that it did two months ago : There are not enough tests to contain the virus .
• A New Statistic Reveals Why America ’ s COVID-19 Numbers Are Flat Few figures tell you anything useful about how the coronavirus has spread through the U.S.
Here ’ s one that does .
• Trump ’ s New Auto Rollback Is an Economic Disaster According to the administration ’ s own math , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ driving , and inflict billions in damage .
• Backlogs at private laboratories have ballooned , making it difficult to treat suffering patients and contain the pandemic .
• How the Coronavirus Became an American Catastrophe The death and economic damage sweeping the United States could have been avoided—if only we had started testing for the virus sooner .
• America Isn ’ t Testing for the Most Alarming Coronavirus Cases In many states , testing rules are so strict that doctors may not notice a community outbreak until it ’ s too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. Coronavirus Testing Haven ’ t Stopped Without adequate testing , people with coronavirus symptoms are left to agonize over the right course of action on their own .
• For Democrats , climate change is now one of the two most important issues in politics , according to a new poll .
• In the past few years , the American Petroleum Institute and its allies have fought against climate-friendly policies in at least 16 different states .
• Jeff Bezos has pledged more money to battling climate change than anyone ever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ go ?

Robinson Meyer is a former staff writer at The Atlantic and the former author of the newsletter The Weekly Planet
He is also a co-founder of the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic. Rob was previously a visiting fellow in journalism at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. He was a recipient of the American Society of Magazine Editors’ NEXT Award for Journalists Under 30 in 2021.
AUL LOEB / AFP/ Getty The World Could Be Entering a New Era of Climate War Runaway climate change once seemed like it could spur violence. Now a different risk has emerged.
Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty America Just Shrugged Off Biden’s Big Climate Law Democrats braced for a midterm backlash to the Inflation Reduction Act. It never came.
Andrew Burton / Getty The Paris Agreement Is Working … For Now The world’s much-maligned climate treaty has produced some stunning results.
Patrick Pleul / DPA / AFP / Getty A Republican Congress Is Coming for Biden’s Climate Wins If the looming GOP majority sabotages climate policy, its own voters will suffer. The party might do it anyway.
Getty; The Atlantic The Climate Art Vandals Are Embarrassing Aesthetics matter in politics. But not like … this.
Franco Origlia / Getty China Accidentally Made Our Gas Much Cheaper Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID lockdowns have been an unexpected gift to Joe Biden.
GMC Frankenstein’s Hummer The company's new electric pickup truck is an unwieldy mix between an ambulance and a race car.
David McNew / Getty The Climate Economy Is About to Explode A new report suggests that the Inflation Reduction Act could be even bigger than Congress thinks.
Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Honestly? The Link Between Climate Change and Hurricanes Is Complicated. Hurricane Ian shows some symptoms of global warming. But saying anything beyond that is folly.
Sharaf Maksumov; Shutterstock; Lauren Justice / Bloomberg / … What Did Axios Do? Don’t read the new book by the outlet’s co-founders. Experience it. Then buy six copies.
Christian Charisius / picture-alliance / dpa / AP The Senate Just Quietly Passed a Major Climate Treaty America is in the middle of a mini–golden Age of climate policy.
Getty Manchin’s New Bill Could Lead to One Big Climate Win Power lines are crucial to expanding renewables. America could finally—finally!—be about to build more of them.
DigitalGlobe / Getty Think Twice About Working for a ‘Climate Villain’ You’re not off the hook for your company’s actions.
Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic A Very California Lesson on Just How Weird Electricity Is The state’s record-smashing heat wave is a window into the future … and it’s okay.
Sean Gallup / Getty It Wasn’t Just Oil Companies Spreading Climate Denial The electricity industry knew about the dangers of climate change 40 years ago. It denied them anyway.
Al Drago / Getty ‘The Biggest Thing to Happen in International Climate Diplomacy in Decades’ The Inflation Reduction Act could change the world in at least five ways.
Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic The EPA Just Quietly Got Stronger The new climate bill isn’t quite “all carrots, no sticks.”


Kaila Philo

Kaila Philo is an editorial fellow at The Atlantic .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Two Key Swing States During a Pandemic President Trump ’ s complicated relationships with the governors of two swing states could ultimately cost him reelection .
Plus : How the legacy of Bernie Sanders might live on .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Many Chinese Americans Saw This Coming Their loved ones in China just endured the pandemic ’ s isolation , overwhelmed hospitals , and deaths .
Plus : An unhealthy military , struggling to fight COVID-19 .
• The Atlantic Politics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Will Suffer What happens is local governments go bankrupt during the pandemic ?
Plus : How the new coronavirus behaves in air ( the answer is very complicated ) .
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : When COVID-19 Comes to Trump Country When the coronavirus pandemic comes to Trump country , politicization can only last so long .
Plus : What ’ s the deal with Oscar Health and COVID-19 testing ?
• The Atlantic Politics Daily : Even the Pandemic Is Partisan Some states are imposing serious lockdowns , others are being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fallen somewhere in between .
Plus : Trump wasn ’ t the only one who got it wrong .

The Atlantic Politics Daily: Two Key Swing States During a Pandemic President Trump’s complicated relationships with the governors of two swing states could ultimately cost him reelection. Plus: How the legacy of Bernie Sanders might live on.
The Atlantic Politics Daily: Many Chinese Americans Saw This Coming Their loved ones in China just endured the pandemic’s isolation, overwhelmed hospitals, and deaths. Plus: An unhealthy military, struggling to fight COVID-19.
The Atlantic Politics Daily: The Other Way American Cities Will Suffer What happens is local governments go bankrupt during the pandemic? Plus: How the new coronavirus behaves in air (the answer is very complicated).
The Atlantic Politics Daily: When COVID-19 Comes to Trump Country When the coronavirus pandemic comes to Trump country, politicization can only last so long. Plus: What’s the deal with Oscar Health and COVID-19 testing?