Why We’re Losing the Battle With Covid-19The escalating crisis in Texas shows how the chronic underfunding of public health has put America on track for the worst coronavirus response in the developed world. .......... the key to stopping a pandemic was preventing as many people as possible from landing in hospitals in the first place. ............ Decades of research shows that a robust national public-health system could save billions of dollars annually by reducing the burden of preventable illnesses and keeping the population healthier over all. But like most public-health departments across the country, Harris County’s was grossly underfunded. Shah likes to think of his fellow public-health practitioners as the offensive line of a football team whose fans know only the quarterback: clinical medicine. .............. the pandemic of the century ........ Politics had won out far too often over sound science. As a result, the state’s reopening had been hasty and poorly coordinated. And now, a month and a half in, case counts were rising and intensive-care units were bracing for an onslaught. ......... In other countries, officials locked down entire cities and employed large-scale, high-tech surveillance programs to stop the virus from spreading. In the United States, decades of near-total neglect had left the entire public-health apparatus too weak and uncoordinated to mount even a fraction of that response. ............ Without any clear guidance or coherent national strategy, states were on their own. In March and April, governors found themselves bidding against one another for ventilators and personal protective equipment. In May, several states — not just Texas — rushed to reopen. And by late June, case counts were surging in at least 20 of them. .............. The country was on track to achieve the least successful coronavirus response in the developed world, with the most total cases, the highest death toll and the worst projections for late summer and early fall: tens of thousands more deaths by year’s end ............. And that wasn’t even accounting for a possible “second wave.” Or for flu season or hurricane season, either of which would almost certainly worsen the current crisis. ............... Public-health interventions work best when the forces of politics and culture are aligned behind them — when elected officials provide the necessary resources, and citizens abide by the necessary strictures. Even now, with hospitals filling up, such convergence seemed unlikely. ........... The economy was in tatters now, and the virus was still spreading. ............... In the past century, the largest gains in human health and life expectancy have come from public-health interventions, not medical ones. Clinical medicine — treating individual patients with medication and procedures — has registered enormous gains. Hepatitis C is now curable; so are many childhood cancers. Cutting-edge gene therapies are curing rare genetic disorders, and new technology is making surgeries of every kind safer. But even stacked against those triumphs, public health — the policies and programs that prevent entire communities from getting sick in the first place — is still the clear winner. “It’s saved the most lives by far, for the least amount of money,” Tom Frieden, a former director of the C.D.C., told me recently. “But you’d never guess that based on how little we invest in it.” ................. Social policies that mitigate economic inequality would be at the base of the pyramid, followed immediately by public-health interventions like improved sanitation, automobile-and-workplace-safety laws, clean-water initiatives and tobacco-control programs. Clinical medicine would be closer to the top. ........ Less than 3 percent of the country’s $3.6 trillion total annual health care bill is spent on public health; a vast majority of the rest goes to clinical medicine. ............... Americans don’t like being told what to do. ................ We want to be protected from infectious diseases and dirty water and bad food and crazed gunmen. But not in a way that undermines our freedom. That ambivalence was baked into our public-health institutions from the start. ............ At the turn of the previous century, commissioned doctors had the same reputation for service and self-sacrifice as soldiers. ............. C.D.C. powers are limited. ..... “They treat the states like clients,” says Shelley Hearne, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. “They provide funds and issue recommendations. But they don’t hold any feet to the fire.” ........... the nation’s public-health apparatus. The system, the authors wrote, was arbitrary, reactive and wildly uneven from one part of the country to another. Crises tended to be addressed, or not, based on political will, not scientific knowledge. Investment in public-health programs was thin in many places, and the capacity to gather and analyze essential data was poor. Leadership was also weak and unstable, with health departments increasingly staffed by political appointees instead of career civil servants. And schools of public health had become too academic and divorced from the actual needs of public-health agencies. What’s more, the relationship between medicine and public health was plagued by “confrontation and suspicion.”........................ There also seemed to be no clear coordination among federal, state and local health departments nor much agreement on who was in charge of what. “Responsibilities have become so fragmented,” the authors wrote, “that deliberate action is often difficult if not impossible.” .............. And if they could not contain the virus once they reopened, the entire shutdown would have been for nothing. .......... Infectious-disease outbreaks were trickier. Viruses were invisible — and slow. It took weeks to know if any given decision was the right one, and in the meantime constituents clamored for officials to do less, not more. When Hidalgo erected a temporary field hospital in April so that intensive-care units would not be overwhelmed by a surge of coronavirus infections, Republican lawmakers accused her of wasteful overreaction. When she ordered the release of low-risk inmates from the county jail, in an effort to prevent an outbreak there, a district judge ordered the sheriff to ignore her edict. And when she made masks mandatory in all public spaces, Lt. Gov. Daniel Patrick singled her out for rebuke. .......... It also inspired more citizens to take matters into their own hands. In mid-May, a handful of shops began reopening with the help of heavily armed militias who stood guard in an effort to discourage officials from interfering. ........ By Memorial Day weekend, Texas was almost fully reopened. The state had not met its own criteria for keeping the coronavirus in check. No one seemed certain about whether or how to enforce the social-distancing edicts that remained. And, while Harris County’s case counts had plateaued, case counts in other parts of the state were rising. ............ In the mid-1800s, even as American cities grappled with repeated cholera outbreaks, some officials balked at the expense of sanitation departments and municipal water systems, preferring instead to blame the poor for choosing to live in filth. And during the flu pandemic of 1918, public-health edicts were often subsumed by politics. The mayor of Pittsburgh, for example, ended a ban on public gatherings, not because the city was out of danger but because he had an election coming up and his constituents wanted to celebrate the Armistice with a parade. The city went on to suffer a spike in flu cases, even as the virus waned elsewhere. .................... These powers were often employed cruelly; quarantines in particular were aimed at minorities who were considered dirty and disease-carrying by nature. During an 1892 typhus outbreak in New York City, for example, Russian Jews were rounded up — some of them literally pried from the arms of distraught family members ...... and forcibly quarantined on an East River island downwind of the city garbage dump. .................. It was commonly held at the time that Eastern European Jews carried typhus fever. Very few of those who were quarantined turned out to have typhus, but six ultimately died from illnesses related to unsanitary quarantine conditions. .................... In 1900, when plague emerged in San Francisco, Asian residents were prevented by armed police battalions from leaving the city’s Chinatown section, while European-Americans continued to come and go freely. And Black and brown Americans were often excluded from emerging public-health programs altogether, even as their bodies were used in experiments that advanced the science underpinning those very programs. In an effort to learn more about syphilis, for example, the U.S. Public Health Service withheld treatment from scores of syphilitic Black men in and around Tuskegee, Ala., lying to them about the nature of the study they were participating in and causing many to suffer and die from the disease long after a cure was available. .............. in the 1940s, in an effort to determine whether penicillin could prevent sexually transmitted infections, the U.S. Public Health Service experimented on prisoners, prostitutes, soldiers and mental patients in Guatemala, infecting them with sexually transmitted diseases without informing them or seeking their consent. ................. “From there, we see growing libertarian rejection of public-health law and less and less exercise of public-health police powers,” Parmet says. “Now we’re in a once-in-a-century global pandemic, and everyone’s scrambling to figure out what the state can and can’t do to protect the public.” ............... By then, just about all businesses were open at some level, and case counts were rising with alarming speed. Shah felt as though he were trapped in the driver’s seat of a car with a stuck accelerator. “It’s like we’re shouting out the window, trying to tell everyone, ‘Hey, this thing is out of control,’” he told me. “But we can’t do anything to slow it down.” ............. America was a paradox — a beacon of science embedded in a culture increasingly suspicious of scientists ........... something much more fundamental would also have to change. The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare gnawing questions at the core of America’s many divisions: Are we willing to trust science and scientists in a crisis? What, exactly, do we want from our government? And what are we willing to sacrifice for one another? ............ the anti-mask set is hard to ignore, in part because it speaks to a broader current of American life. “People have grown comfortable putting their individual rights ahead of the needs of their community” ............... A common complaint among public-health workers is that this “neglect, panic, repeat” cycle makes it impossible to prevent crises instead of merely responding to them. ........... a new and bitter reality: Because of the economic crisis, which was triggered by the current pandemic, which was worsened by a lack of public-health investment, public-health agencies will probably suffer more budget cuts in the coming years. ........... “It’s a lot of isolated departments across the country, saying, ‘Oh, we’ll just keep doing God’s work over here, and if our budget gets cut again, we’ll just make do somehow.’” ............. “No one is going to vote for you or name a hospital wing after you because you kept them from getting something that they didn’t think they were susceptible to in the first place,” Frieden says. “The people who cure diseases are glorified, not the people who prevent them.” .............. And the same stories that played out in Wuhan and Lombardy and Seattle and New York were beginning anew. And not only in Texas. In more than 35 states, including some that had previously brought their outbreaks under control, daily case counts are rising, positivity rates are rising and new grim records are being set — and then quickly surpassed. People in Texas, Florida, California and New Jersey are bracing for a second wave of outbreaks in the fall, even as the first wave has yet to fully recede.
A Multibillion-Dollar Opportunity: Virus-Proofing the New OfficeTech, catering and design companies are rushing to sell employers on fever scanners, box lunches and office floor-planning apps for social distancing. But it’s too soon to tell if they will work.
‘Only those with plastic visors were infected’: Swiss government warns against face shields plastic shields are inadequate protection and should only be worn in combination with a face mask. ...... “It has been shown that only those employees who had plastic visors were infected. There was not a single infection among employees with a mask.” ....... not only are plastic face shields less effective than face masks, they may provide wearers with a false sense of security.
Covid-19 has exposed India's failure to deliver even the most basic obligations to its peopleFar from flattening the curve, India's graph of transmission is swinging skyward like a Mo Salah free kick. ....... India's ratio currently hovers at around 9,231 tests per million -- or 9 per 1,000, compared to 128 per 1,000 in the United States. ........ about a fifth of all deaths in India are not registered and less than a quarter are medically certified. ...... The lockdown of 1.35 billion people has been the subject of competing hypotheticals. What is known is that it flattened the economy -- in June, the IMF predicted that India's GDP would contract by 4.5% in 2020, while rating agency ICRA estimated a contraction of 9.5% -- and signaled the deepest recession in 60 years. The human cost, amplified by images of millions of migrants forced to return home after losing their jobs, is still unraveling. .......... Vulnerability is aggravated by the comorbidity of poor governance and neglect of seven-odd decades. The Indian state struggles to provide what economist and philosopher Adam Smith defined as the most basic of obligations -- water, health, education, power and security. .......... India is in the company of low-income sub-Saharan countries on the Health Care Access and Quality Index -- trailing neighbors Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Bangladesh . ......... Health care depends on investment in state capacity. For decades, committees and commissions have urged expenditure on health to be raised to between 4% and 6% of GDP -- but it has stayed at less than 1%. .......... "Wash hands," say doctors and health officials. Yet in 2019, only one in five Indian households had piped water in their homes. Every second home depends on water from wells, unprotected water bodies or tanker water -- 70% cent of water is contaminated, with India ranked 120 among 122 countries in the water quality index. Pneumonia and diarrhoea also kill more than 1.3 million children each year. ............. poor air quality kills over a Million every year. ............. Such is the state of government schools that millions of students have graduated in the past decade without rudimentary skills of reading and math. In 2016, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, then deputy prime minister of Singapore, invited by the government of India, told the audience of policy makers, "Schools are the biggest crisis in India today, and have been for a long time. Schools are the biggest gap between India and East Asia." ......... Seventy years after its independence, India finally managed to electrify all its villages in 2019. Still, quality of supply is another matter. Barring Mumbai, no city in India can boast of 24/7 supply and households and businesses across the country must depend on inverters. .............. Indians pay for over 60% of heath care costs from their savings -- some even borrow and land in penury . More parents are also opting for private schools, with nearly 40% of students enrolled in non-public education. Water tankers, air purifiers and inverters are other ubiquitous essentials of living. ......... Successive regimes have taken refuge in the diffusion of authority between federal and state governments and evaded accountability. This has been enabled by the nature of public discourse, which is riveted by emotion and rhetoric rather than reflection on realities.
Covid-19 has many faces even when all of the different influenza types (a or b) and subtypes (h1n1, h3n2, etc) were analysed, there were few differences in the ways they presented clinically. Literature on sars-cov-2 suggests, by contrast, that this virus is a master of disguise. ........... Patients brought into hospital with all the symptoms of a heart attack have later been found to be suffering from cardiac inflammation caused by the virus. It has also demonstrated that it can begin as a kidney infection, or even as meningitis, before sometimes going on to cause its characteristic respiratory problems. ........... the two-phase activity of sars-cov-2, whereby it starts in the upper respiratory tract and then migrates deep into the lungs, is the critical factor that allows it to travel around the body. “Influenza rarely gets deep into the lungs,” he says. “This new virus gets down there all the time.” ............ As for why the disease sometimes makes its initial appearance in the digestive system, as it did in Dr DeBenedet’s patient, this is probably because ace2, the cell-surface protein that sars-cov-2 binds to, is abundant in the gut as well as the lungs. How the virus gets through the highly acidic stomach unharmed is unknown. But clearly it can, and does. ............ ace2 is also found in the kidneys and the heart, which may help explain why symptoms manifest there, as well. By contrast, the entry molecules preferred by influenza viruses are almost exclusive to the upper respiratory tract.
America’s Enduring Caste SystemOur founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries. ......... The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see. ......... We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now. ........... Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country’s X-ray up to the light. ........... A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places. .............. Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. ............. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy for caste. ......... Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only of how we speak but also of how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it. .......... We know that the letters of the alphabet are neutral and meaningless until they are combined to make a word, which itself has no significance until it is inserted into a sentence and interpreted by those who speak or hear it. In the same way that “black” and “white” were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicates them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform.......... we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. “Race is a social concept, not a scientific one” ........... “We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world.” ........... Caste is the bones, race the skin. ...... Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present through line in the country’s operation. ........... While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception — whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critical and tragic, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall. ......... “Young people,” he said, “I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America.” .............. 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, “still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,” quarantined in isolated ghettos, exiled in their own country. ........ he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life ......... What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our ancestors’ era but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system. ........ Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning. ......... What does racism mean in an era when even extremists won’t admit to it? ........ The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept. ........ caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see. ......... Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. ......... Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things. ......... For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact. .......... What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place. ........ many people — including those we might see as good and kind people — could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group. ................ It’s the autonomic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences. ........ Its invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it. ........... The United States and India are profoundly different from each other — in culture, technology, economics, history, ethnic composition. And yet, many generations ago, these two great lands paralleled each other, each protected by oceans, fertile and coveted and ruled for a time by the British. Each adopted social hierarchies and abides great chasms between the highest and the lowest in their respective lands. Each was conquered by people said to be Aryans arriving, in one case, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in the other, from the north. Those deemed lowest in each country would serve those deemed high. The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest. ......... Both exiled their Indigenous peoples — the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States — to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted an amalgam of laws to chain the lowliest group — Dalits in India (formerly known as the untouchables) and African-Americans in the United States — to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there. ............ “Perhaps only the Jews have as long a history of suffering from discrimination as the Dalits,” the American civil rights advocate Yussuf Naim Kly wrote in 1987. “However, when we consider the nature of the suffering endured by the Dalits, it is the African-American parallel of enslavement, apartheid and forced assimilation that comes to mind.” ........ both caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. ......... In both countries and often at the same time, the lowest castes toiled for their masters — African-Americans in the tobacco fields along the Chesapeake or in the cotton fields of Mississippi, Dalits plucking tea in Kerala and cotton in Nandurbar. Both worked as enslaved people and later for the right to live on the land that they were farming, African-Americans in the system of sharecropping, Dalits in the Indian equivalent, known as saldari, both still confined to their fixed roles at the bottom of their respective societies. ........... What is called “affirmative action” in the United States is called “reservations” in India, and they are equally unpopular with the upper castes in both countries, language tracking in lock step, with complaints of reverse discrimination in one and reverse casteism in the other. ........... The Indian caste system historically has been said to be stable and unquestioned by those within it, bound as it is by religion and the Hindu belief in reincarnation, the belief that a person carries out in this life the karma of the previous ones, suffers the punishment or reaps the rewards for deeds in a past life, and that the more keenly you follow the rules for the caste you were born into, the higher your station will be in the next life. ............ a fundamental truth of the species, that all human beings want to be free. ......... Some Dalits felt so strong a kinship with one wing of the American civil rights movement and followed it so closely that in the 1970s they created the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther Party. ........ In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon. ........ “Anything that causes the Negro to aspire to rise above the plow handle, the cook pot — in a word the functions of a servant,” said Gov. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, elected in 1903, “will be the worst thing on earth for the Negro. God Almighty designed him for a menial; he is fit for nothing else.” ....... the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, “85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories,” wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, “agriculture and domestic or personal service.” ........... “If white and colored persons are employed together,” the sociologist Bertram Doyle wrote in the 1930s, “they do not engage in the same tasks, generally, and certainly not as equals.” He continued: “Negroes are seldom, if ever, put into authority over white persons. Moreover, the Negro expects to remain in the lower ranks; rising, if at all, only over other Negroes.” No matter how well he does his job, Doyle wrote, “he cannot often hope for promotion.” ........... Since the early 20th century, the wealthiest African-Americans — from Louis Armstrong to Muhammad Ali — have traditionally been entertainers and athletes. Even now, in a recent ranking of the richest African-Americans, 17 of the top 20 — from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan — made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports. ........... Johnson knocked Jeffries down in the 15th round and was declared the victor, to jeers and epithets. It was taken as an affront to white sovereignty and triggered white riots across the country, in the North and the South, including 11 separate ones in New York City, where white mobs set fire to Black tenements and tried to lynch two Black men over the defeat. .......... What did it mean to be white if someone with actual white skin was not white? ............ A Japanese novelist once noted that, on paper anyway, it was a single apostrophe that stood between rejection and citizenship for a Japanese Ohara versus an Irish O’Hara. .......... the unyielding rigidity of a caste system, defiant in the face of evidence contrary to its foundation, how it holds fast against the assault of logic. ................. If there is anything that distinguishes caste in America, it is, first, the policing of roles and behavior expected of people based on what they look like, and second, the monitoring of boundaries — the disregard for the boundaries of subordinated castes or the passionate construction of them by those in the dominating caste, to keep the hierarchy in place. ........... Modern-day caste protocols are often less about overt attacks or conscious hostility. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one person interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. It is a form of status hypervigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them, as they see fit. ............... Through no fault of any individual born to it, a caste system centers the dominant caste as the sun around which all other castes revolve and defines it as the default-setting standard of normalcy, of intellect, of beauty, against which all others are measured, ranked in descending order by their physiological proximity to the dominant caste. ............ Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles — the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child Indigenous peoples and the scapegoat caste at the bottom. ............ The highest and lowest rungs are seen as so far apart as to seem planted in place, immovable. Thus those straddling the middle may succumb to the greatest angst and uncertainty as they aspire to a higher rung. ........... Everyone in the caste system is trained to covet proximity to the dominant caste: an Iranian immigrant feeling the need to mention that a relative had blond hair as a child; a second-generation child of Caribbean immigrants quick to clarify that they are Dominican and categorically not African-American; a Mexican immigrant boasting that one of his grandfathers back in Mexico “looked just like an American” — blond hair and blue eyes — at which point he was reminded by an African-American that Americans come in all colors of hair and eyes. ......................... “No matter what happens, they can never become ‘Black.’” Hacker continued, “White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve Blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world.” ................ the seductive power of nationalistic appeals to the anxieties of ordinary people ......... “The survival of a group,” Fromm wrote, “depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives.” ......... “Group narcissism leads people to fascism.” He went on, “An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on.” ......... A person in this group “feels: ‘Even though I am poor and uncultured, I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world — I am white’; or ‘I am an Aryan.’” .......... A group whipped into narcissistic fervor “is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify,” Fromm wrote. “The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him.” The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group, Fromm teaches us, sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.
How Fauci, 5 other health specialists deal with covid-19 risks in their everyday livesFauci: I do physically go to the grocery store, but I wear a mask and keep my distance. I usually go at odd times. ........ I don’t disinfect the bags. In general, I will take the materials out of the bags, then wash my hands with soap and water, and then use Purell, and let everything sit for a day. ......... Q: Do you take any precautions with your mail or packages? Fauci: I used to, but now I just bring the mail in, wash my hands, then let it lie around for a day or two before I open it. .......... Q: Are you willing to fly? What about bus, train, subway? Fauci: I’m 79 years old. I am not getting on a plane. I have been on flights where I’ve been seated near people who were sneezing and coughing, and then three days later, I’ve got it. So, no chance. No Metro, no public transportation. I’m in a high risk group, and I don’t want to play around. ........ Q: What is your best guess about when a vaccine will be available? Fauci: We have multiple candidates, and my hope is that we will have more than one, probably by the end of this year or the beginning of 2021.
Coronavirus: Quarantine hotel ‘acting like bandits’ in ChinaDuring their mandatory quarantine stay, the returnees from Pakistan were provided meals that were found to contain maggots, ladybug or small pieces of metal scraps ......... Millions of Chinese citizens have been stranded overseas because of coronavirus-related travel restrictions, and many of them want nothing more than to return to a country that has largely gotten the coronavirus under control. ........... However, some of the overseas Chinese that have managed to go back to China said they were greeted with poor service, profiteering hotels and a lack of empathy from authorities and their countrymen, while they were under mandatory quarantine. .......... there are about 10.7 million Chinese living overseas. Many have been unable to return to China as countries went into lockdown and imposed travel restrictions since earlier this year. But the ones who do manage to return are often viewed by their fellow citizens as being wealthy, unpatriotic and spoiled. .......... the perception that those who could travel abroad are rich ......... In March, a report of a returnee from overseas asking for bottled water during quarantine sparked debate on the Chinese internet, with the majority of commentators accusing the returnee of being unappreciative and demanding.
Even a coronavirus vaccine won’t offer an easy way out of the crisisThe WHO chief and medical experts agree there is no going back to the “old normal” any time soon, and warn that how people and governments behave is critical to getting things under control. ........... whether it will embed itself permanently in the population and circulate every year. ....... “We need to realize that this is truly an unprecedented virus for which there is no appropriate historical analogy” ......... Several places that appeared to have had the contagion under control saw case numbers spike after social distancing measures were eased. ......... Two factors that can drive these sudden increases are the spread of the disease by asymptomatic and mild cases, and the potential for superspreading events ........... With a vaccine unlikely to be ready before the middle of next year, the public should be prepared to deal with these measures “at any time if there’s an outbreak… but it’s all very unsettling and uncertain” ........... While vaccines are seen as a way to control the crisis, they should not be the basis for long-term measures .......... the virus is also taking hold in India – the world’s second-most populous country – and South Africa. .......... “If there isn’t long-term immunity, [in the absence of a vaccine] it could just become a vicious cycle of ongoing infection” ............ early vaccines were not likely to “completely prevent any infection in anyone”, she said.Instead they could be used alongside other control measures to reduce transmission, especially for at-risk people.
Hong Kong’s third wave of Covid-19 ‘getting a bit out of hand’an international study indicated mutations in one strain of the virus had increased its infection rate by 30% ........ If people relax their guard, cases will shoot up and we will face a bigger outbreak ....... “I think both the government and the public may have to tighten up measures to maintain social distancing and avoid going out as much as possible.”
The Week America Lost Control of the PandemicSixteen states have reported record caseloads since Sunday. ........... What should concern all Americans is that, as more and more states see their outbreaks intensify, the country will lose its ability to understand what is happening. .......... some of the country’s major testing providers are backlogged and overwhelmed, and are no longer able to turn around test results as quickly as is epidemiologically useful ......... Governor Gavin Newsom of California enacted some of the strictest pandemic rules outside the Northeast, but Los Angeles is seething with cases right now. Many of the states now facing outbreaks did not struggle much with the virus in March or April—except for Louisiana, which saw a major outbreak in March and is seeing cases spike again now. What seems to unite many of the most affected states is that they reopened indoor dining, bars, and gyms. What will distinguish them is how they react now. ........... The South is burning with infection at the same time other regions are trying to reopen. This feat—opening one region while suppressing the pandemic in another—has never been done before, and there is no guarantee that it can be done. Many public-health leaders signaled this week that they do not think it is possible. ........... “This is really the beginning,” Anne Schuchat, the principal deputy director of the CDC, told Congress this week. “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking around the country that Hey, it’s summer. Everything’s going to be fine. We’re over this—and we are not even beginning to be over this. There are a lot of worrisome factors about the last week or so.” ............ the U.S. could soon see 100,000 new cases a day. If that prediction comes true, then what befell the Northeast could look like mere preamble. ......... The U.S., by one estimate, avoided more than 4 million infections. We are now losing that work, watching weeks of pandemic suppression vanish in days. It took the country acting in concert to subdue the virus in the spring. We may need to do the same, again, to avoid the worst now.
Over half of coronavirus patients in Spain have developed neurological problems, studies showNew research indicates that Covid-19 is causing a wide range of disorders in the nervous system and may be directly attacking the brain .......... The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus attacks the respiratory system, but there is growing evidence that it also affects the nervous system. ............. some research indicates that the virus is directly attacking the brain. ........ the most common symptoms experienced by coronavirus patients were myalgia, headaches and dizziness ....... Another 20% of patients (they are not exclusive groups) developed neuropsychiatric problems such as insomnia, anxiety and psychosis. .......... In a dozen cases, the patient went into a coma. What’s more, neurological complications were the main cause of death in 4% of coronavirus victims .......... 90% of cases simultaneously experienced changes to, or the loss of, the sense of smell and taste ........ the coronavirus can enter the brain. ........ “The brain is characterized for being isolated from the bustle of the world. If there is a pathogen in the rest of the body, the blood-brain barrier stops it from entering,” explains Segura. This defense system allows oxygen-filled blood to reach the capillaries and even the neurons, but filters out toxins, bacteria and viruses that travel in the bloodstream. “The rupture of this barrier is an effect that we have not seen before,” he adds. For Segura, finding the endothelial cells (the thin layer of cells that line the interior surface of blood vessels) in the samples of analyzed brain tissue could indicate that the coronavirus has overcome the blood-brain barrier, and that the neurological problems have not been caused by weakness from the immune system’s response to Covid-19. According to Segura, the world is facing “a respiratory virus that is also neurotoxic.”
Donald Trump simply doesn’t understand: We can’t deal with our economic crisis without solving the public health crisis.
And for all his bluster about his expertise on the economy, he is unable to explain how he will actually help the working families hit the hardest.
Tesla and the science behind the next-generation, lower-cost, ‘million-mile’ electric-car batteryNew battery technology is possible, allowing cars to go 400 miles or more between charges and lasting as long as 1 million miles. That could spur EV sales the same way the first 100,000-mile warranties on gas cars once did. .......... Vehicles with lithium-ion batteries, also used in cellphones, are expected to give way over the next few years to cars and trucks made with lithium-iron phosphate and other chemistries. This will cut costs, extend vehicle ranges to 400 miles or more between charges and enable batteries to last as long as 1 million miles. ............ “If you’re talking about batteries that can last twice as long for the same price, it completely changes the math for the consumer......... Iron phosphate batteries are safer, and they can have second or third lives as electricity storage.″ ........ Canning cobalt is one of the biggest elements of cutting the cost of batteries below the $100/kWh threshold that is a rough proxy for making electric vehicles as cheap as those powered by internal combustion engines .......... Today’s batteries cost about $147/kWh, down from about $1,000 in 2010 and $381 in 2015 ........... The most obvious is that the cost of electric vehicles — which recently has reached parity with gasoline-powered cars and SUVs in some luxury niche segments — could catch up to internal combustion engines by about 2023 ........ “I hope we get there sooner than 2025. Lithium-iron phosphate and its upgraded versions will have a major role in the future of EVs and fundamentally change large-scale energy storage.”
The flying taxi market may be ready for takeoff, changing the travel experience foreverThe goal is to link urban centers with suburbs while leapfrogging traffic — air taxis could cruise at 180 mph at altitudes of around 1,000 ft to 2,000 ft. But NASA has reported they can go at an altitude up to 5,000 ft. ......... The autonomous urban aircraft market may be worth $1.5 trillion by 2040 ....... The start-up is building a prototype that it says should eventually approach the cost of ground transportation and help a billion people save more than an hour in commuting time every day. ............ “Joby Aviation’s aircraft is designed for four passengers plus a pilot. It can travel more than 150 miles on a single charge, is 100 times quieter than conventional aircraft during takeoff and landing, and is near silent in flyover.” ........ It aims to make flying taxis cheaper than owning passenger cars. .......... “Air taxis are definitely the next phase of mobility” ....... They will usher in a nimble form of intracity travel, transporting people on the shortest possible route between two locations ........... “Everyone in the industry proceeds as though safety is guaranteed and technology will solve everything, which, as we know, is never the case” ........... Personal helicopter travel has been around for a long time but hasn’t expanded beyond wealthy passengers ........... “If they are priced correctly, air taxis may be able to democratize travel in cities where there is no public transport alternative or where the congestion and size of the urban area (Sao Paulo is the classic example) are so great”
5G is accelerating factory automation that could add trillions to the global economyImagine a manufacturing plant in which all the production equipment is continually changing in response to market needs. .......... Also known as Industry 4.0, the smart factory runs on data and artificial intelligence, but connectivity forms the backbone of operations. The new fifth generation of mobile networks (5G) is a catalyst for this new industrial revolution because it offers much greater speed and bandwidth than previous networks, as well as low latency, or time required for data to travel between two points. 5G will work with and in some cases replace existing fixed, wired connections, making manufacturing more flexible and ready to implement innovations. ............ 190 million 5G subscribers by the end of 2020 and 2.8 billion by the end of 2025. ........... “In the future, we might be able to create ‘what we want’ in smart factories and receive it in a short time as we do purchase mass-produced products at online malls like Amazon” ........... “For the customer experience, products will become unique, customized and enriched with services.”
U.S. Intel: China Ordered Attack on Indian Troops in Galwan River ValleyGen. Zhao Zongqi, head of the Western Theater Command and among the few combat veterans still serving in the People's Liberation Army, approved the operation along the contested border region of northern India and southwestern China, a source familiar with the assessment says on the condition of anonymity. Zhao, who has overseen prior standoffs with India, has previously expressed concerns that China must not appear weak to avoid exploitation by the United States and its allies, including in New Delhi, the source says, and saw the faceoff last week as a way to "teach India a lesson." ........ the deadly and contentious incident – in which at least 20 Indian and 35 Chinese troops died, and reportedly a handful on each side were captured and subsequently released – was not the result of a tense circumstance that spiraled out of control, as has happened before, but rather a purposeful decision by Beijing to send a message of strength to India. ........ Beijing's attempts to make India more amenable to future negotiations, including about contested territory, instead appear to have pushed the economic giant closer to the U.S. .......... Much is at stake, far beyond territorial control. The U.S. has pressured India for months to back away from employing Chinese tech company Huawei to help build its 5G infrastructure. In the aftermath of last week's incident, Indians were reportedly deleting Chinese social media app TikTok and destroying phones made in China. "It does the very opposite of what China wanted," the source says. "This is not a victory for China's military." ........... On June 15, a senior Indian officer and two non-commissioned officers traveled unarmed to a meeting place where they expected to be met by a comparable delegation of Chinese troops to discuss the withdrawal, according to the source familiar with the U.S. assessment of the incident. Instead, dozens of Chinese troops were waiting with spiked bats and clubs and began an attack. Other Indian troops came in to support, leading to a melee that caused more casualties from the improvised weapons, rocks and falls from the steep terrain.
The hard truth is that it didn’t have to be this bad, but Donald Trump ignored the experts and refused to take action. He has failed our nation. pic.twitter.com/WAhigUtsxz
1 number that proves 2020 is *nothing* like 2016 "After Trump's unexpected victory in 2016, there's a temptation to avoid making political projections. But one election result shouldn't cause us to ignore the data. And right now the preponderance of data points to a great election for Democrats." ....... At this point in the 2016 race. Clinton had a 1.1-point lead over Trump in the national polling average. Right now, Biden has a 9.1-point average lead over Trump in national polls. ....... Biden is also running close to Trump in longtime Republican strongholds like Texas, Arizona and Georgia.
‘Zero percent’ chance of U.S.-China decouplingNow, Washington is reportedly considering a blanket ban on Communist Party members (and maybe their families) in the United States. It's one step short of a "nuclear option" in U.S.-China ties — consider it heavy ordnance that would personally affect Chinese leaders and their families in a way that sanctions and tariffs don't. .......... could render as many as 270 million ineligible for Stateside travel. Countermeasures could be massive. Beijing loves the appearance of symmetry; what if it banned all registered Republicans from China? ......... shows just how far Washington is willing to go, as Trump stakes his re-election on the China question. ......... Chance of full decoupling is “zero percent,” but the era of seamless globalization is over. ......... The rise of the digital Renminbi. Expect a rapid move toward the use of digital currencies, either privately organized or through central banks, Friedlander said, part of “a race to see who will control global payment systems.” ........... "What the U.S. policy toward China needs is ‘social distancing.’” ....... “In a world where Covid-19 shows emerging threats don’t respect national borders, decoupling the two largest economies in the world is unrealistic.” .......... “The tech world is now starting a much broader China [versus] everyone else Great Schism, moving well beyond the Great Firewall, to encompass access to advanced CPUs, 5G telecom equipment, and access to consumer and business user bases.” .......... Analysts seem to think that political repression and lifetime tenure for despots like Xi are good for Party longevity. Actually, history suggests that lifetime tenure leads to madness and dissolution.” .......... The CCP’s Leninist metal does not seem destined for American bending under Xi Jinping .......... “Until recently, China had an ability to sense where the line was for international business interests — and stop just short of crossing it.” ............. “In January 2018 I observed that the foundation of U.S.-China engagement – the presumption of gradual if slow convergence – was deteriorating, due less to China’s intention than inability to take the next steps on its self-assigned reform and opening journey.” ........... “the coming 120 days [leading up to] the presidential election will not just make U.S.-China relations unworthy of optimism, it will make them extremely dangerous.” ........... Beijing thinks the real power in America lies with Wall Street, not Washington ........... “overlook[ing] the vital fact that, when it comes to dealing with an external threat, fear always trumps greed … Washington has seldom capitulated to commercial interests when American security is at stake.” ............ Half of Hong Kongers are contemplating exit, but only four percent list the U.S. as their first choice, and 10 percent the U.K. ....... The top choice: Taiwan, followed by Canada and Australia. ........... Average Chinese are not sympathetic to their sometimes wealthy, often liberal-minded compatriots abroad. .......... What do authorities really mean in Article 38, which technically gives them jurisdiction over everyone in the world? .............. “TikTok doesn’t appear to grab any more personal information than Facebook. That’s still an appalling amount of data to mine about the lives of Americans,” Fowler wrote. “But there’s scant evidence that TikTok is sharing our data with China.” ................ Is a U.S. WeChat ban in the cards? .. WeChat is an essential tool for Chinese living abroad to stay in touch with friends and family, and they’d need to use a VPN or other workarounds if there were a ban — in other words, they’d feel like Americans in China have for about a decade.
Op-ed: Hyperwar is coming. America needs to bring AI into the fight to win — with caution It is important officials in each nation understand how emerging technologies speed up decision-making but through crisis acceleration run the risk of dangerous miscalculation. ........ For not only is technology changing, the rate of that alteration is accelerating. ......... AI, once fully realized, has the potential to be one of the single greatest force multiplier for military and security forces in human history. ......... AI-enabled capabilities could be used to threaten our critical infrastructure, amplify disinformation, and wage war .......... The distinctions between hybrid warfare and hyperwar are important. ........... “Hybrid threats combine military and non-military as well as covert and overt means, including disinformation, cyber attacks, economic pressure, deployment of irregular armed groups and use of regular forces. Hybrid methods are used to blur the lines between war and peace, and attempt to sow doubt in the minds of target populations.” ............. By contrast, hyperwar may be defined as a type of conflict where human decision-making is almost entirely absent from the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop ............. the time associated with an OODA cycle will be reduced to near-instantaneous responses. .......... While AI has the capacity to magnify military capabilities and accelerate the speed of conflict, it can also be inherently destabilizing. ........ Now is the time for the U.S. and China to have the hard conversations about norms of behavior in an AI enabled, hyperwar environment. With both sides moving rapidly to field arsenals of hypersonic weapons, action and reaction times will become shorter and shorter and the growing imbalance of the character and nature of war will create strong incentives, in moments of intense crisis, for conflict not peace. This is foreseeable now, and demands the engagement of both powers to understand, seek, and preserve the equilibrium that can prevent the sort of miscalculation and high-speed escalation to the catastrophe that none of us wants.
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