• From Timothy Egan’s excellent piece of the same name in the NYT, (Highly Recommended), a telling quote:
“The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful,” wrote Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times. And he asked: “Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode?”
• For anyone interested, the data scientist Guyang Yu ( Twitter | LinkedIn ) has created a remarkably accurate adaptive model of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can view projections by country or state-by-state. It’s based on the SEIR/SEIS model using the daily death total provided by Johns Hopkins’ CSSE to simulate the COVID-19 epidemic in each region. The parameters/inputs of this simulator are then incorporated using machine learning techniques that attempt to minimize the error between the projected outputs and the actual results. It’s one of the models the CDC now uses, and a terrific solo effort worth following.
• An exploration of why the Canadian response to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is considerably better than the one in the US. HINT – it has something to do with leadership and a functioning national government: Canada succeeded on coronavirus where America failed. Why?
A shout out to MGH’s FLARE (“Fast Literature Assessment Review Email”), a daily MailChimp Newsletter reviewing SARS-CoV-2 and COVID 19 issues that’s put together by MGH’s Pulmonary & Critical Care Divisions and Dept. of Medicine. They do an excellent job of putting together a succinct, referenced review of salient topics. Details and recent issues located here and you can subscribe here.
From a very good opinion piece by Barry Berke in the NY Times; he makes some excellent comparisons between Trumpian behavior before and after impeachment, including making the point that Trump dealt with governors seeking COVID-19 aid the same way he dealt with the Ukranian Prime Minister. Quid Pro Quo indeed. Impeachment Taught Trump All the Wrong Lessons
A restful day at Long Point. I’ve always found sitting on the beach, listening to and watching the ocean, very meditative.
• From an article by Susan Glasser in The New Yorker – The Coronavirus and How the United States Ended Up With Nurses Wearing Garbage Bags:
“What they did not foresee was that the federal government might never come to the rescue. They did not realize this was a government failure by design—not a problem to be fixed but a policy choice by President Trump that either would not or could not be undone. “No one can believe it. That’s the No. 1 problem with the whole situation: the facts are known, but they are inconceivable,” Ries told me. “So we are just in denial.”…Independent reporting has corroborated what Ries and other volunteers saw for themselves: “a fragmented procurement system now descending into chaos,” as the Associated Press put it. The news agency found that not a single shipment of medical-grade N95 masks arrived at U.S. ports during the month of March. The federal government was not only disorganized; it was absent. Federal agencies waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders for the urgently needed supplies, the A.P. found. The first large U.S. government order to the big U.S. producer 3M, for a hundred and seventy-three million dollars’ worth of N95 masks, was not placed until March 21st.“
• I thought this was an outstanding, thorough, and accessible synthesis of the history and science of genetics, interwoven with stories that demonstrated points made and enlivened the read. I don’t know how Siddhartha Mukherjee could possibly find the time to work as a clinician and research and write both this book and The Emperor of All Maladies; however he managed it, they are outstanding reads. Brilliant work! The Gene, ISBN 978-1476733500.