Hello,
It’s a short email this holiday weekend. We’re all hoping to get some time away from screens, I bet. To get outside and be with our friends and family — to the extent you can really be with anyone from six to twenty feet away while everyone’s wearing masks and vaguely worrying about The Plague Situation.
We’re taking time to thank veterans this weekend, to remember the sacrifices of people who’ve served. It raises the question of how we can remember the 100,000 people we’ve already lost to this pandemic, and the tens of thousands of others we’re likely to lose before it’s over. The process of building shared stories about shared loss is an important way people make their way through national tragedies like the one we’re living through.
But this crisis is in so many ways difficult to see. The virus itself, of course, we can’t see with the naked eye. The media have trouble portraying the human cost of the pandemic in photos and other images, so instead the pandemic is abstracted into charts and graphs that most people don’t understand. Since the U.S. pandemic was in its earliest days concentrated in a few coastal hot spots, most people around the country still don’t know anyone personally who has died from the virus. The social distribution of this loss is even more disturbing than the geographic distribution: Black and Latino Americans are nearly three times more likely than White Americans to personally know someone who has died in the pandemic.
Even the more wide-spread secondary effects of the pandemic are difficult to see. Unemployment nationally is above 14%, and has topped 20% in some states, rates that most Americans alive today have never experienced. But with public spaces still largely shuttered, and so many of us still sheltering in our homes, it’s hard to see the breadth of this economic catastrophe in everyday life, and to find comfort in how many others are experiencing losses and stresses that otherwise seem quite personal and individual.
Generally you expect national leaders to do this work of unifying the country around shared losses and sacrifices, of helping to craft a national story that people can use as a scaffolding for their own meaning-making. That leadership is absent here. So we’re left to make sense of it ourselves, through screens or in small groups in little circles six to twenty feet apart.
[In Brooklyn’s Domino Park, visitors relax in circles painted on the grass to guide physical distancing. Marcella Winograd for Domino Park]
// Things I’ve Been Reading and Watching
What it’s like to be trained as a contact tracer: “During a time of record unemployment, it struck me that this is a job that people can do from home, that connects them to others, and does good for their communities. And maybe it will help some of us feel less trapped and hopeless, too.”
— “I Enrolled in a Coronavirus Contact Tracing Academy.” Megan Molenti, Wired.Can’t measure, can’t manage: One of the key metrics for “reopening” states is the testing rate. The CDC is fudging the numbers by combining antibody tests and virus tests, clouding vital information.
— “‘How Could the CDC Make That Mistake?’” Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, The Atlantic.Until June 7th you can stream last season’s incredible production of Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare in the Park. Do not sleep on this one.
— Much Ado About Nothing. PBS Great Performances.A walking tour of seventeenth-century Manhattan.
— “When Manhattan Was Mannahatta: A Stroll Through the Centuries.” Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times.You get the virus from people, not packages. Updated guidance from the CDC says SARS-CoV-2 does not easily spread through contaminated surfaces. The latest in our evolving understanding of transmission.
— “Virus ‘Does Not Spread Easily’ From Contaminated Surfaces Or Animals, Revised CDC Website States.” Ben Guarino and Joel Achenbach, The Washington Post.
— “6 Feet Away Isn’t Enough. Covid-19 Risk Involves Other Dimensions, Too.” Brian Resnick, Vox.We accidentally smashed the curve on the flu season, a happy side-effect of anti-Covid physical distancing measures.
— “How Coronavirus Lockdowns Stopped Flu in its Tracks.” Nicola Jones, Nature.We missed the boat for hospital preparedness decades ago.
— “Boom-and-bust Federal Funding After 9/11 Undercut Hospitals’ Preparedness for Pandemics.” Jenn Abelson et al, The Washington Post.This expert panel about how to safely reopen was really helpful. It features three experts from Johns Hopkins: Tom Inglesby, Crystal Watson, and Beth Blauer, moderated by Stephanie Desmon.
// Next Week
That’s it for this abbreviated newsletter. Next week, I’ll devote the issue to the problem of disinformation, conspiracy theories, and how partisanship complicates risk communication during the pandemic. See you then, and thanks as always for reading!