Sometimes, there’s only one story. That was so 19 years ago after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and Flight 93. The “war on terror” was everything. You may recall that a breathtakingly cynical official told subordinates it would be a good day to put out bad news because no one would notice. It’s like that now, except we’re engaged in a war on the coronavirus. The damned thing gets into everything, dominates everything, subordinates everything else.
A false story came out recently that Bernie Sanders was abandoning the presidential race. But even if it had been true, it would still have sunk swiftly without a trace. We’d have tried gabbing about it for an hour in the hope of making it exciting, then we’d have returned to the fascinating subject of our contagion, like moths to a flame.
Plagues, panics, depressions, and doom have, of course, always been occasional visitors upon humanity. But no one has gone through anything quite like this. A deadly, viral disease that is highly communicable with a long incubation period has burst into an era characterized more than anything else by mass communication and travel.
We’ve devoted most of this week’s magazine to the coronavirus. Jay Caruso gets his arms around the huge scale of the pandemic and its horrible ramifications — the politics, economic meltdown, healthcare cracking, doctors exhausted, and empty streets, restaurants, and bars turning American cities into ghost towns.
Tyler Grant reveals how China has ramped up its propaganda about the coronavirus, spreading a false narrative that Beijing dealt effectively with the outbreak, whereas, in truth, the tyranny’s characteristically dishonest and dictatorial response did much to generate the pandemic now afflicting the whole world. American pundits and news media, keen for a continuous stream of unflattering comparisons with which to tar President Trump, are parroting these falsehoods. But Grant exposes what’s at stake, what China wants to achieve, and how U.S. media can stop being so manipulable.
Phil Klein unpacks the epidemiology of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and shows why it is so much more dangerous than the common flu. We also publish a chart of other big causes of death in America, from infectious diseases to auto accidents, and Seth Mandel explains how these widely differing killers need to be interpreted. Timothy Carney argues that near-mandatory social distancing to avoid the coronavirus reveals the folly of voluntary social distancing that Americans have chosen in recent years, even when not driven to it by the threat of fatal illness.
Finally, we offer ideas for those perplexed about how to fill their solitary confinement agreeably. Christine Rosen suggests what to read, Kyle Smith recommends movies and TV, Mark Hemingway has ideas for music to listen to, and Eric Felten pours a couple of catastrophe cocktails to drink. Oh, and Rob Long advises on what you really shouldn’t do on lockdown!
