Category: policy

Today the US surpassed 2 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 113,000 deaths. That’s like having all the people in New Mexico get infected and almost all of the people in Farmington die.

The W.H.O. walked back an earlier assertion that asymptomatic transmission is “very rare.” Turns out that people who have COVID-19 but are asymptomatic can spread the virus after all. So all those people who felt just fine and didn’t bother with masks or physical distancing might have been making other people sick all this time. Great. And the medical establishment wonders why people don’t listen to them and fall prey to conspiracy theories.

Has the Shutdown Been Worth It? It’s not a yes-or-no question. At what point did we stop being able to engage in complex thinking? It seems that every conversation about the pandemic (and health, and politics ,and economics, and, and, and) gets boiled down to an either-or choice. You either agree that COVID-19 is a serious health threat, or you don’t. You either see the need for the government to limit people’s movements to slow the spread of COVID-19, or you don’t. You either agree that paying the economic price of shutting down the economy is necessary, or you don’t. But when people are asked to think about all these things at the same time and how they’re interrelated, that when people’s brains seem to go tilt and we get stuck.