The president is a sick clown. His vile regime is staffed with "acting" flunkies, corrupt plutocrats and fascist stooges. The whole trumpist package, together with the servile GOP, is terminally stupid and dishonest. Feeling safer yet?
14
The source of SARS corona virus was linked to Civet cats. The source of panic and fear if the current Corona virus COVID-19 is due to scardy cats and columnists and chicken little and the sky is falling crowd. There are people with vested interest in causing panic and that is a big threat to the well being of our country.
2
Many people have been warning for years that the general trend of downsizing, just-in-time supply chains, and choosing to spend millions of dollars on blowing things up abroad instead of building things up at home was a disaster waiting to happen.
Disease and drought have long been the two stresses that push vulnerable civilizations over the brink. If a government doesn’t put money into infrastructure, healthcare, eco-preservation, food/water stockpiles, emergency preparedness, and social safety networks, it can’t expect to be ready to ride out a tough time.
It’s a shame that a country with so much wealth has deliberately done everything that it can to make itself weak instead of resilient.
18
I realize that most readers here are not well versed in financial/economic issues, and neither are most journalists. But today this virus jumped out and into the realm of 'a black swan.' (Please google this if you are unaware) Just as Katrina became Bush's black swan and led to his feeble second term, it may be the case (History does not repeat but it does rhyme) that this virus will be the unwinding of Trump and his defeat. Politicians are always using data, stats, focus groups, etc. to boost their strengths and minimize their weaknesses. Trump can rant and rail about the markets, but in this case, whether he points to interest rates or fiscal policy, this virus may end up being the great equalizer and reveal the absolute impotence of DT.
7
The source of SARS corona virus was liked to Civet cats. The source of panic and fear if the current Corona virus COVID-19 is due to scardy cats and columnists and chicken little and the sky is falling crowd.
1
Maybe mother nature is trying to eradicate the infestation known as "humans"
4
It's not a test, Ross. It is not a test of faith. It is not a test of institutions and medicine. It is a random disease. Life doesn't work like two entities doing battle forever throughout time. That's an error. There is no purpose to disease. It isn't meant to make us better. It's just the result of different forms of life existing in the same area. It's unfortunate that people have died. Researchers and doctors are at the ready to help the sick. But the coronavirus offers no lessons beyond prevention and response. There is no cosmic design to it. It is just biology.
11
I crossed the border from Shenzhen, China into Hong Kong on February 6 and took a flight from Hong Kong to San Fran (and going on to DIA) the next day. I had been expecting at least the same level of temperature checks and travel history documentation upon entering the US as I had experienced in HK but... nothing.
I explicitly told the United representative in HK that I had been in Shenzhen the day before, but there was no additional screening on the other end of my flight. In San Francisco, not only was my temperature not checked but I wasn't asked at any time whether or not I had traveled to China or Hubei province during the last 14 days (yes to the former, no to the latter).
I'm grateful for the smooth flight and immigration experience, but the lack of screening makes me wonder about the preparedness of the US to identify infectious individuals. Non-invasive temperature screening and asking for travel history seem like the very basics in identifying people with COVID-19 possibly coming from China. If we can't even do that, how can we hope to control the virus's entrance into the US now that it may be a global pandemic? Logistically, we may already be dropping the ball.
18
Excellent article! I've been thinking this for some weeks. Global capitalism is the bipartisan link here. Pro-business Republicans have had their heads in the sand (along with Trump supporters). On the left, political correctness enforces see-no-evil dogma on Third World problems, multiculturalism, internationalism and mass migration. (P.C upper classes love to travel internationally and consider themselves "citizens of the world." I'm a college professor who teaches a course on the evolution of health care institutions. I always begin with a documentary on the Great Flu Pandemic of 1918. We then compare "then" and "now." There was a lot of self-imposed ignorance then, too, in part because Woodrow Wilson wanted to continue WWI--continued filling packed troop ships. (Today we have airplanes as incubators. Trump will get the blame for not having prepared the health care infrastructure for a virus that is already here. BTW, no one is mentioning that millions of college students will be traveling all over the world on spring break in a couple of weeks. That will stir the contagion pot quite a bit. Good luck to us all.
1
Is it a bat? Is it a Civit? No, it’s a pangolin! No! No! It’s Super Climate Catastrophe Wuhan Plague!! Either live your life in constant fear, or don’t. It’s just a state of mind.
1
Coronavirus has revealed something that wall street, and right wing apologists, basically ignored for trump's trade war but for some relatively light hiccups on and off. The full domestic economic impact on ourselves by throwing up a tariff wall to severely impede the flow of chinese products into the US had calling trump's bluff not worked and had he carried his play to the predictable end as he did with his atlantic city debacle. Who can forget sir cedrick hardwicke's closing narrative in the 1953 film; "The Martians had no resistance to the bacteria in our atmosphere to which we have long since become immune. Once they had breathed our air, germs which no longer affect us began to kill them. The end came swiftly. All over the world, their machines began to stop and fall. After all that men could do had failed, the Martians were destroyed and humanity was saved by the littlest things which God, in His wisdom, had put upon this Earth." Just substitute trump for martians and contemplate the self-injurious policies of an incompetent occupant of my oval office being exposed by "the littlest things".
4
It is a beautiful day, here in California. The sliding glass door is open, revealing plum blossoms on the tree, and the sounds of happy birds. Despite it feeling counter-intuitive, I gathered supplies for our family this late afternoon, under the warning of the CDC: Extra toilet paper, anti-bacterial wipes, gloves, glasses, and masks. I was not the only person searching for these items. Tomorrow I will gather more items. It all feels very unreal, and I would love to believe it is unreal, but we must prepare for a pandemic: food supplies and medicines in case the supply chains are disrupted. Denial protects us from becoming over-whelmed, but it can also prevent us from necessary preparations. I would like to think that we were already prepared as a society, but unfortunately, with the exception of a CDC warning, we must gather individual lists of what we should have available to us, instead of having a "suggested list". Perhaps the epidemic will focus across the country and not here, but we should all be prepared.
6
The Left is using this crises to point the need for universal healthcare and their argument is a good one. But conversely, this episode is also a strong argument against the free flowing immigration policies endorsed by the Left as well. A controlled immigration process includes background checks, health screening, sometimes quarantines, and most importantly, the ability to know the names and addresses of those entering.
This is why the vast majority of legal immigrants, be they from Asia, Europe, or Africa are the strongest proponents against unchecked illegal immigration. We jumped through the hoops and understand what it takes to get here. It's not only a matter of I had to do it the right way so why shouldn't you, though there is some of that. It's that we understand and appreciate the concept that a nation has a right to secure its borders against threats whether they be economical, medical, ecological, sociological, etc.
It's time for both the Left and the Right to consider things deeply without partisan biases. That would have been impossible just a few short weeks ago, but now that we're in a potentially frightening crises perhaps it will compel both sides to look at each other's arguments with honesty.
And maybe the Western world wil be shaken out of its apathy to realize that we are now great, We have always gone through clycles of light and feelings of declension in American intellectual history (see Perry Miller, Harvard historian). As John Q. Adams told the Supreme Court (in Amistad), we are deluding ourselves that greatness is not in us--we are who are Founding Fathers were.
Marianne Williamson (from A Course On Miracles) the one thing all of us on earth fear and to try avoid is realizing the greatness within.
What is most needed is clear, thinking and reason. So much of what was believed about the Spanish influenza virus in 1918--origin, scope, etc. which was concealed by wartime censorship and fear has been found to be totally wrong in the last 10-15 years. Turns out it originated in Kansas where the US sent all its troops for training before being shipped overseas in WW1. The Spanish king got the virus and there was no censorship in Spain so it was called Spanish. Live virus was recovered and analyzed from a body frozen in the Alaska permafrost and traced back to its inception in Kansas.
1
If the troll in the White House had half a brain, he'd compliment China--its government and its people--for doing a pretty good job, all things considered. China acted late, according to how we traditionally measure these things, but when it acted it went big, and by now has probably curtailed the spread of the virus through its own population. (I said "curtailed," not "stopped.")
Our own government and people couldn't do nearly as well. First, of course, because of the science-denying incompetents currently running things. But even if Hillary had been elected, the U.S. government still lacks the legal authority to restrict movements of large parts of the population. And Americans are so fully of baloney by now that many of them would write the virus off as a scare story invented by progressives to prevent MAGA rallies.
No, in the time of cholera, go with the Chinese, not the Americans.
4
Is there any evidence that covid 19 is any more serious than the typical winter influenza? Seriously, in a typical flu season in the U.S., 20,000 will die. Those numbers are so terrifying that we can't get people to get the vaccine or stay home from work when they are sick.
1
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease control, between 3,300 to 49,000 people die from contracting the flu in the USA in a given year. Now this is estimated because other complications can pile up on top of a case of the flu.
http://www.urgentcarefl.com/many-people-die-flu-every-year-us/
Over on Wikipedia, the numbers range as high as 500,000. That's a year.
This stock market panic is not about this virus. It is about supply chain disruption coming out of China. If you break up the supply chains of the big U.S. tech firms like Apple, Cisco, Dell, all the IT security companies and all the retail that sells stuff from China - Nike, the lot, who use China for the cheap labor - then, that means lower sales and they miss on revenue in subsequent earnings. This is a preemptive sell-off to avoid bad earnings down the road. It is cynical in that the market isn't worried about people. It's future earnings!
On the flip side, this sell-off is long overdue. There is so much air pumped into these stock valuations, with so many junk companies using IPOs to fill up the pockets of insiders and the bankers who back these bad IPOs that Covid-19, if that has to be the trigger, is as good as any reason to see the market put back in its place.
In the epicenter in China, the fatality rate among the infected is running under two percent. Bear that in mind before you panic.
The flu is killing a lot of people already. This joins the list of things that can kill us.
4
I seem to remember hearing just before Christmas last year, of efforts to reduce the funding of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). If that effort is real and has not been stopped, then what Ross Douthat says today is mostly irrelevant. America will be unprepared.
3
What are you talking about? "Thus the liberal instinct toward minimization: It’s not much worse than the flu..." Liberals such as Rush Limbaugh, who thinks this is nothing more than an attempt to oust Trump? For real? Are you that stupid? Did you see the questioning Rep. Neely Kennedy put on the head of Homeland Security? Do you think he was in any way ready to handle this? He had no information at all! Ignormaus! Such a feckless column!
9
Conservative thinking is so confusing. Here Ross seems to blame "liberal-globalists" for not reacting with enough vigor to the coronavirus threat. Meanwhile Rush Limbaugh blames the liberal media for overreacting to coronavirus, which in his mind is another version of the common cold being weaponized against his his bestower of the Medal of Freedom.
But conservatives do remain united in aggrievement.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/25/limbaugh-coronavirus-trump/
5
Rebecca Solnit in today's NYT quotes historian Heather Cox Richardson: "Forcing someone to accept what they know to be untrue reinforces the dominance of the person telling the lies.”
This astute observation perfectly encapsulates Trump's methodology in using so many media platforms (Twitter, 1st & foremost) to compel the subjugated amongst his contemporaries to repeat absurd fictions that he concocts to suit whatever goal he picks from the many that he is obsessed with.
Trump's method & the acquiescence of the subjugated in his lies are dangerous, because now we have a crisis that impacts people's health. If Trump refuses to allow actual data to be released, or even adequate testing to be conducted, because this is an election year, we may never know exactly what we are being exposed to where.
Think of all the Americans with asthma. Or COPD. This infection will hurt them badly. They may need hospitalization. They may be stuck with huge bills. They may die.
If Trump has his way, many Americans will lose the little health coverage they have.
Lies repeated by bosses or authorities are an intolerable betrayal of the people. Trump lies constantly. His groupies at Fox, at the WSJ, in the GOP join in. Italians & South Koreans are at least certain that the facts about infections being revealed are at least shared with them promptly. Can we hope for as much in the US?
SKorea tested 35000 sick people & found 1000+ cases of SARS-CoV-2. Italy's PM said 4000 tests found 200+.
4
This is not a test. This is not a game of political football. This is a disease that is spreading. We need leadership. Not finger-pointing.
3
I suggest that you eschew writing in airports Mr Douthat. An opinion piece in the NY Times should be worth more of your time and effort. After reading this the term "word salad" came into my mind.
So use lots of hand sanitizer during your travels, it is sure to protect you from the liberals sitting next to you on the plane. They could easily give you give you a cold, or even something more serious, like a different perspective.
9
Excellent points, but the NYT should be setting the standard for English. Wuhan is not the epicenter, it's the center of the outbreak. An epicenter is the point on the ground directly above some event, almost always an earthquake. Coronavirus may be a metaphorical earthquake, but still ...
2
PLEASE, the countries (esp. C.) that participate in unsafe cultural practices that harm the world, humans and animals, please stop.
3
I'm sure that our "Stable Genius" will have everything under control. Trump will appoint Tom Cotton to head up the Blue Ribbon Panel on "Wuhan Virus and China's Germ Warfare."
2
Travelling by aeroplane is a more hazardous form of transport in these dangerous times as the plane uses recycled air and you are much more likely to pick up a virus of any sort.
Ross's use of hand sanitiser on his journey will therefore only be of limited value to his health.
1
Finally one of the people in the CDC's that the corona virus will hit all Americans will dealing with a epidemic biblical proportion and the Trump administration is downplaying take aspirin water. His predecessor before him George Birch Junior do you remember him and Katrina where thousands of American died due to his handling of the hurricane. Republican Party they want get less money to people in need in a crisis they should not be responsible for their actions they need to be removed from office, you can thank the tea partiers and the 30% errors that voted for Pres. Donald Trump.
I would not accept any people into our country that has a corona virus Pres. Donald Trump has flew in some sick people that has the corona virus to our military bases for isolation well in Japan we have several military facilities why would you take an affected person and put them with us Mr. Pres. are you crazy is time for action is time to dump this president and Republicans all them before November will be responsible for the deaths of the corona virus that would hit all Americans November 3, 2020 cannot come quick enough. Pray for the Americans people that are going to be in the line of fire from this virus God help us all.
"This morning’s classified coronavirus briefing should have been made fully open to the American people—they would be as appalled & astonished as I am by the inadequacy of preparedness & prevention."
-Senator Richard Blumenthal
9:48 AM · Feb 25, 2020
https://twitter.com/SenBlumenthal/status/1232316382253133824
4
Trump’s CDC’s comment on the coronavirus: “This might be bad.” Looks
like Trump’s got it figured out.
1
It’s okay everybody, that world renowned physician and deep thinker, Rush Limbaugh, has declared that Coronavirus is a plot to discredit Donald Trump. “Coronavirus” he said, “is just the common cold.”
Tens of thousands infected...hundreds dead. Wonder when Trump tweets the conspiracy?
3
"the globalist project"
It's nice the New York Times gives a platform to people like Douthat, who filter the fad discourses of the far right for a housebroken audience, but this "liberal technocratic globalist" stuff is such nonsense.
Oil globalized the world long before just-in-time manufacturing did, and long after spices and silk and slavery already had. What could be more "globalist" than using money from arms deals in Iran to fund rebels in Nicaragua, under the (presumably, in this framing) populist Reagan? Smh.
2
The ignorant headline does not advance the writer's objective of avoiding "misgovernment and mistrust." The coronavirus is not a disease, it is a virus.
2
This is probably going to hit big cities, Trumpers won’t care - until it affects their 401K or federal programs.
2
An insightful column. Let me add this thought: fighting the virus may actually help bring Americans together. It is, after all, a common enemy. I see that the initial reaction of the Dems to Trump's request for 2.5 billion dollars is that it's not enough. My prediction is that Trump will quickly agree and ask the Dems how much they would suggest. This, in turn, will pressure the Republicans to accede. BTW, spending on a universal problem like the virus is one that the Republicans can easily support.
One other observation: the virus will result in a recession and a hit to the stock market. But I suspect that the public won't punish Trump for it. Rather, he will appear much more competent and decisive than Bernie. Also, the last thing one wants to do in a crisis is change horses mid-stream. Trump the stallion should prevail again.
Protecting the public health is one of those governmental competencies that we tend to take take for granted... until we realize that it has been eroded by political incompetence. I hope the COVID-19 spares humanity but I will not shed a single tear if it brings down this Administration.
4
Globalism was a mistake, a huge one. Well, at least it held within in it the potential for disaster beyond the more immediate ones of hollowing out industrial and other production in the US.
Once everything is shipped around the world all the time, guess what?, you are then utterly dependent on everything being shipped around the world all the time. Big problem in the event of wars that could block shipping, cut international fiber lines and eliminate travel by business supervisors. Also, did anyone consider the potential of a pandemic?
Here's how a lot of businesses operate now in the US. If you want to make and sell something, you don't bother building factories (so 20th century). You design the product and look for someone in Asia to make it. Easy. Less investment, less time to market and potentially more profits. Who thinks about disruption?
The GoPro action camera was made in this way. I don't have access to the full record, but it appears the idea came here, everything else came from over there.
Apple is utterly linked to foreign manufacturing and assembly. So is Dell Computer which, as far as I know, makes none of its regular products here.
Every army knows it can be defeated if its supply lines are broken. Now we are going to learn the same hard lesson.
3
In a couple of months, no one will be talking about the virus.
More than 100 people/day die in the U.S. in car accidents. At least 10% of those are a result of distracted driving, people texting on their precious smartphone, instead of taking care of the business at hand.
Maybe we should be talking about that.
1
Trump’s policies have increased the threat from Covid-19. His breaking of Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran has pushed that country into the arms of China where it caught Covid-19 which it now is spreading throughout the MidEast. His economic sanctions on Iran, Russia, etc., and his trade wars with many countries have made it harder for most countries to buy needed medicine and medical equipment and have weakened the world’s economy. His cutbacks on funds for the CDC and for science more generally have put us all at risk.
To save lives and the S&P500, we should immediately end all trade wars and economic sanctions.
1
CORONAVIRUS & LIVE ANIMAL FOOD MARKETS
The chickens, as they say, have come home to roost. This new coronavirus--like the 2003 SARS epidemic--originated in China's live food markets, where animals, both wild and domestic, are crammed cheek-to-jowl with the human population: a disaster waiting to happen.
Very similar markets exist in NYC, in Los Angeles, Oakland,
San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, et al., all posing
serious threats to all concerned. Frogs and turtles str routinely stacked four-and-five deep, without food or water; many butchered while fully conscious.
California annually imports some TWO MILLION non-native American bullfrogs for human consumption. Most are commercially-raised in China and Taiwan. God only knows what these frogs have been exposed to before shipment. Many are released into local waters, where they prey upon and displace the native species.
Compounding the problem, the majority of the frogs carry the dreaded chytrid fungus (Bd), which has caused the extinctions of 200+ amphibian species worldwide in recent years. Some 30 necropsies on the market frogs and
turtles document that ALL these animals are diseased and/or parasitized, though it is illegal to sell such products for food.
Unspeakably cruel and hazardous to human health, these markets should be permanently closed-down worldwide as they now are in China. Legislation is in order, both state and federal. And maybe a few lawsuits.
7
I think we all need to take a deep breath and read reputable sources of information before over reacting.
https://www.livescience.com/new-coronavirus-compare-with-flu.html has a very informative article with links to benchmark scientific journals and websites. Our family reacted to what we considered a worst case scenario weeks ago when the news first began trickling out of China. We considered how the Chinese government treated the SARS outbreak and decided how we could protect ourselves if an outbreak arrived on our shores.
We have a good supply of hospital grade chlorine wipes and 3M N95 masks in case they’re needed. Our first line of defense is we practice common sense methods of breaking disease vectors. Washing your hands with warm soapy water if possible and the use of an alcohol based hand sanitizer when you can’t wash are good measures to control disease in your daily life, not just in this outbreak. Keeping oneself informed from reputable sources is the best way to keep yourself as protected as possible.
1
@Michijim but this infection spreads by respiratory droplets, which means, via inhalation.
3
Nothing to see here if all else fails The Donald's wall will trump the coronavirus
The most obvious thing about this column, is Mr. Douhat's attempt to be even-handed, a novelty to be sure for his ilk. His mention of Limbaugh should make every thoughtful person, right or left, examine the mentality that gives rise to those types of idiotic declamations. That's likely idealistic on my part; that mentality will sink us, all of us, left or right. Maybe not this time, but the reckoning it yet to come. Rulers that can't deal with reality are not isolated to our country or our century.
I won't bother with the obvious argument in favor of a stronger, more well-run government. It's clear that the increasingly dysfunctional government we have is still better than nothing. For America, and for the right-wing Dementors, good government is in the past.
2
Trump has cried Wolf too often. Now that there is a real wolf in the Coronavirus facing America no one will listen to him. Given Trump’s outstanding physical condition he may be the only person untouched by the virus.
Right now, Trump is in a developing country (India) shaking hands with the locals, holding rallies, etc. Right now, all the Democratic presidential candidates are holding rallies, debates, shaking hands, kissing babies, etc. When all these politicians, who have far better information than we have, stop mingling with the public because they are afraid of Corona virus, then I'll believe this disease is really dangerous.
Meanwhile, perception is the real issue here. If the world economy tanks because people are afraid, it doesn't matter who is in charge.
The global supply chain has arrived at lean just in time deliveries for all kinds of essential products based on the need to cut costs at every opportunity.
The law of unintended consequence now reminds us that such optimization results in a fragile interdependency and loss of control when the system gets pushed.
In other words it is good to bring manufacturing back from overseas. Especially for medical products such as ventilators, heart monitors, personal protective equipment, and medicines.
While we're at it, we should pay for more people to go to medical school. Half our doctors are from overseas. Where is their allegiance in the face of a pandemic in their home town 6000 miles away?
3
In many countries in Europe, medical school is free or close to it. I can’t blame talented, caring people for not wanting to shoulder the absurd expense of an American med school education, or the malpractice premiums thereafter.
The American healthcare system is broken. It benefits insurance companies and whatever Kaiser thinks itself to be at the expense of patient care, people’s financial security and common decency.
Kudos to the many devoted healthcare workers who chop through this thicket every day to care for us. It’s time we both got some relief.
Medicare For All / Warren or Sanders, 2020.
4
Only a Republican who won't acknowledge anything bad about his party would make this a "both sides are equally evil' issue.
Ross knows darn well that having the dishonest Trump and his band of Republican toadies empowered to say and do anything so that Americans no longer know what is true or not is incredibly dangerous.
If there are bad results, that is the fault of Ross' beloved Republican party which has underfunded the CDC and has decided that power is far more important than truth or doing the right thing.
Republicans, empowered by Ross Douthat, decided a tax cut for billionaires was much more important than funding the CDC. Ross Douthat owns that and like most Republicans, he is trying to blame someone other than his own party and himself. He owns this.
5
CORONAVIRUS & LIVE ANIMAL FOOD MARKETS
This new coronavirus--like the 2003 SARS epidemic--originated in China's live food markets, where animals, both wild and domestic, are crammed cheek-to-jowl with the human population: a disaster waiting to happen.
There are very similar markets in NYC & California, in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Sacramento, et al., posing serious threats to all concerned. Frogs and turtles are routinely stacked four-and-five deep, without food or water; many butchered while fully conscious. Not acceptable!
California annually imports some TWO MILLION non-native American bullfrogs for human consumption. Most are commercially-raised in China and Taiwan. God only knows what these frogs have been exposed to before shipment. Many are released into local waters, where they prey upon and displace the native species.
Compounding the problem, the majority of the frogs carry the dreaded chytrid fungus (Bd), which has caused the extinctions of 200+ amphibian species worldwide in recent years. Some 30 necropsies on the market frogs and
turtles document that ALL these animals are diseased and/or parasitized, though it is illegal to sell such products for food.
Unspeakably cruel and hazardous to human health, these markets should be permanently closed-down nationwide as they now are in China. Legislation is in order, both state and federal.
3
I wonder if Mr. Douthat considers Bernie Sanders a "globalist." Probably not right?
1
It is indeed a test, like a nuclear weapons test. Such is germ warfare.
Just wait till plague is released from the melting permafrost.
Gee, and I thought this was going to be a piece about how Trump has basically ignored coronavirus until the last day or so. I guess there's always a way to find fault with liberals on this page.
2
This is what Douthat wrote in his Opinion: "The coronavirus is not a civilization-ender, not Stephen King’s Captain Trips come for us at last, but it’s increasingly obvious that we do have a lot to fear from it, both medically and economically"
We know so little about this virus. When do we realize that this virus could be at least a NEAR civilizaton-ender?
1
Terms like liberal, moderate, and conservative have become so twisted and broadened and conflated and changed over the years that you should really tell us what you mean when you use the term before you describe globalism as a liberal value. Because people reason in part based on their understanding of a term’s meaning.
1
The USA won’t really have a response from this administration until Fox News decides its real. Since this virus is just Fake News right now, there is virtually no Republican coverage of it. By the time they realize the truth marches on, whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s going to be too late.
2
The Coronavirus is a test of whether conservatives will believe in science in the future and fund NIH, CDC and prepare for future epidemics in the US since it's too late for the Katrina-like storm heading our way. NIH stated the death rate of the annual flu is about 0.1% while the death rate for the Coronavirus is more than $2.5%. Keep fighting funding health care in the US Republicans and you will suffer the consequences.
3
Of course if COVID-19 cases and deaths are mistaken for the ordinary flu outbreak, it could mean the virus is about equally threatening. Which is not to say it is benign; influenza is a dangerous disease that many people foolishly minimize.
And outdoor temperature has nothing in itself to do with transmission of disease. What happens in the spring and summer is that people spend less time indoors in groups, reducing the changes for transmission.
1
Regarding the continuing stock market bungee plummet, I have yet to see any analysis of the obvious. That being the fact that since Trump's December '18 debacle and stock decline, we have been living in a hyped up Donnie La La Land of supposed overall economic and market strength.
This boom has been artificially buoyed up by his de-regulation junk food binge in which we willingly trade poorer air, water, food, health, etc. which we already are now and will continue to be experiencing for decades - traded for the illusions of government purported right-sizing, tenuous economic strength and highly dubious personal financial benefits to please the red hat crowd.
Hang on to see how deeply the current malaise(s) - epidemic and/or economic - will infect our physical and financial health. In the meantime, worst case scenario - this whole thing becomes Trump's nation and worldwide Katrina.
2
But our Presidential Medal of Freedom winner says this is all a bunch of bunk - it's just the common cold. The most effective propaganda has truth woven through it: The common cold is caused by one of four corona viruses. This is a corona virus, so it couldn't be that bad, right? Thanks, Rush.
I love the comment that this is to "bring down Donald Trump". Implicit in that statement is that when confronted by a crisis he will crumple like thin tin. He knows our Donald well then I would say, though I would add "and blame someone else" to "crumple like thin tin".
2
Let me remind Mr. Douthat and others that according to the CDC in 2017-2018 (and this year is worse) there were an estimated 45 million people who had flu symptoms; of those, 21 million had medical visits, 810,000 hospitalizations and 61,000 deaths- in the US ONLY. We should ALWAYS be mindful to wash our hands incessantly and cough into our elbows during flu season. People are fearful of the unknown so let's let the scientists speak when they have the information and stop listening to the conspiracy theorists. Keep your heads people!
3
so the next third world aka developing nation that capitalist will exploit will have to give us their "unequivocal assurance" ( the phrase Nicholas Katzenbach used to George Wallace when Wallace didn't want African Americans admitted to the University of Alabama) that they've got all their medical t's crossed and all the medical i's dotted. The point being clear that exploiters of labor really have zero tolerance for any kind of interruption: they're (capitalist) a no excuse excepting force.
2
Having lost an aunt whom I never knew in the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, this coronavirus may not be THE ONE, but one is still lurking out there, waiting for the right sequence of events, the right mutation, and the right lethality to lay waste to this sand castle we call civilization. My Mom, Jane, was born with her identical twin, Jeanette, in August of 1918, just as the flu was spreading rapidly in Europe. And given the end of WWI in November of that year, and the large number of US troops coming home, the spread here was inevitable. The twins were born at home, as was common at the time, so I've often wondered if Mom was really Jane or Jeanette, since she died at home during the winter of 1918-9 while Mom pulled through, but that's another story.
It would be almost fitting if our massive, ubiquitous, presence on the planet we all share would turn out to be as fragile and fleeting as to be laid low by something so insignificant as to be microscopic, but there it is. Maybe not this time, but...
4
Well, at least we haven't heard heard from the so called president the word "hoax".
I really boggles the mind that Douthat can find a way, in the midst of historic corruption from his political party, to lay the blame on "liberal globalism".
I have thought since the '90's that there would come a national problem so great, of such a threat to all of US, that we might find a way to come together as a Nation.
We had the attacks on 9/11 and the republican rush to war led to more divisions.
We had the great global economic crisis of 2007 and republicans divided US further by their complete obstruction of the new President.
I wonder if a global pandemic might finally persuade people to stop blaming scapegoats and realize that we are really in this together. Globally.
We shall see, because the coming Climate Crisis is going to make coronavirus look like a walk in the park.
5
Coronavirus is simply a deadly symptom of an equally, if not greater pandemic: Morality. The former can't be eradicated until and unless the latter is cured first. Nobody's fault. Everybody's fault.
1
The coronavirus isn't a 'disease' but an infectious agent, or pathogen. Upon infection, it can cause an immune reaction that in some people in poor health makes them succumb to their own immune reaction.
Ironically, it's the 'illiberal' Richard Nixon who 'opened' China to world trade. If globalism is indeed the problem, then it's Douthat's conservatives and corporate heroes who've been the culprits.
3
China's dependence has been revealed. Authoritarian regimes are brittle and break instead of bending.
@Matthew Hall:
And you think the U.S. is going to handle this any better?
We are utterly unprepared.
2
There is clear potential for a major public health crisis in this country. Given the millions of people who have no health insurance, imagine what will happen if that population of people gets hit with the coronavirus or something similar. IT WILL NOT JUST BE THEIR PROBLEM. In many ways, the lack of proper healthcare is a time bomb for the health and economic welfare of all.
7
It's only a "test" if you believe in a supreme being whose actions determine everything that happens in the lives of human beings. Why else would a supreme being bring such stress into the lives of the human beings that he (?) supposedly loves so much?
Stop it. There is no such being. It is a disease.
2
The "sustainable decadence" of the western nations may sustain through coronavirus and other such tests but it will surely not sustain through climate crisis. In fact, it will only hasten it. Good luck and enjoy the decadence while it lasts.
2
For the love of God, it’s not a disease; it’s a viral pathogen. ‘Disease’ does not consistently rank very high in terms of ‘existential risk‘, whereas the same cannot be said of the virus.
“I believe in my own thesis enough to assume that we’ll muddle through...”
Respectfully, it was Friedrich Nietzsche who popularized the theory of nihilistic decadence. And no, it’s not sustainable.
3
"The Coronavirus Is More Than a Disease. It’s a Test." Wrong, it is a disease, no more, no less. It has no agency or political agenda and trying to color it as such is a disservice to medicine and science.
2
So you think we'll get through this God willing? Don't hold your breath. If God saw fit that we have Donald Trump, then it tells me that there's no limit to the suffering God will allow.
5
When this virus is spread by people too poor to seek care then maybe Republicans will see the necessity for including ALL people in a healthcare plan, including legal or illegal immigrants.
156
@Lynda Demsher Not to be too pessimistic, but I doubt it. This country has become so disconnected, and the average person full of so much anger and self-centered behavior, for me to think the deaths of others because of a lack of care will shake people to their core in that manner. They will blame the individual, not the system. And, of course, their chosen media will help them with that process.
35
@Lynda Demsher
I admire your optimism. But I think it will be more seen as an opportunity to reduce the number of the poor.
7
@Lynda Demsher
Yeah, and not to forget the need for regulation to assure a safe food supply.
4
People tend to forget that not only is China our greatest creditor thanks to idiot George W Bush, but they are also our enemy. One day soon, they will call in that debt and their manufactured viruses will be the least of our problems.
2
I believe we'll muddle through without any intervention from a mythological god.
5
Does a moderator at the democratic debate dare bring up the obvious health disaster open borders presents to the American public? Unlikely since the media questioners are in bed with the Democrats on this issue. They cant retreat on an issue no matter how damning the facts.
2
@Chris - "Open borders" is a misnomer, especially as you use it here to imply everyone you view as your opponent is proposing borders where there are no public health measures. No one is advocating that.
6
@Chris:
We don't have "open borders."
Try harder.
(Oh, and news flash -- viruses don't respect borders.)
3
this column is blind to neoliberalism and its affects
3
The Coronavirus is just like the Trump presidency, both are a plague to the world.
Hopefully both will be over soon.
7
Will Trump be throwing out containers of Purell to stop the virus instead of paper towels?
7
@Jacquie
the germophobic Trump will simply sequester inside the white house... behind secret service security, in a mobile clean room environment.. and wait it out... while tweeting how it is everyone else's fault.
5
There is an "old" article in the July/August 2013 issue of The Atlantic by Justin Fox, "How Shareholders Are Ruining American Business". We are experiencing an outcome of Financial Capitalism's short term worldview; Greed is Good, The Ends Justify the Means. Globalization is the outcome of the Wall Street shareholder's incessant drum beating to cut costs and seek cheaper labor. The social and economic disruption and formation of an extended and risky supply chain is the result. The virus is one of many Black Swans waiting to happen.
5
Excellent article. As World Health Organization officials remain on the cusp of calling this a pandemic, Rush Limbaugh utters the following:
“It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Limbaugh said during his Monday show. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”
This, coming from the recent recipient of the Medal Of Mislead-em Award. And as a cancer patient with suppressed immunity, he knows better than to minimize the risks.
6
Lets see, the Chinese, the Iranians, the Italians, they all have "socialist" Universal healthcare? Lucky them. An infected American who gets sick and has so so coverage might not want to survive it, for future economic reasons.
4
America, with Trump’s “leadership” or whatever, has been lucky. No major domestic crisis that has, so far, caused him to miss a tee time. Now, something dangerous this way comes. The thing can’t be seen and travels on airplanes with no thought of taking over the aircraft and flying the plane into a building. So, what’s the answer? April! Make it to April and climate change generated heat will kill the little devil. Then, “everything is under control”...because I say so. What’s next, buy a red hat and save yourself?
3
My comment was taken down because it inaccurately stated that the Trumpo administration had eliminated the group at the CDC that dealt with pandemics.
What I should have said was that according to an article by Pulitzer Prize winner Laurie Garrett on January 31, 2020 in Foreign Policy magazine the administration “fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command back in 2018 and never replaced them with anyone.”
My initial comment while inaccurate was in effect substantially correct.
8
Mr. Douthat wants to make coronavirus do his political legwork, but he seems to have some basic misunderstandings of the science.
In brief - if Covid-19 does turn out to be spread more or less like the flu, and/or if it turns out to be infectious prior to the appearance of symptoms, it will not be containable - any more than the flu is containable each winter. In which case, more testing, more isolation of people, etc., will be futile, and the actions he says a less globally naive polity would take would be pointless - a waste of time and resources that could better be spent ameliorating the disease, since preventing it will be impossible.
So, thus far - no. Covid-19 is not a test case of the mistakes globalization makes us fall into!
2
Ross finally pens a paragraph I can actually agree with:
"A truism of our times is that media hysteria quickly envelops every major story, with social media virality and cable-news imperatives combining to make any domestic controversy feel like Watergate, if not Fort Sumter, and any international incident feel like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand — until the next story rolls around and last week’s crisis is forgotten."
Unfortunately, Ross is part of the problem, not in any way a guiding light out of the darkness.
1
The worst news of the past week has been the spread of the coronavirus into Iran. The Iranians are now exporting infections to neighboring countries. That can't happen unless a significant portion of the Iranian population is now infected. There are likely tens of thousands of infections currently in Iran, and exponential growth could turn that into tens of millions within a few weeks.
I have no faith in the government of Iran's ability to stop this. Obviously there should be a complete ban on Iranians entering the US, and any Americans returning from the region should be in a mandatory quarantine.
The situation in Italy and South Korea should be closely monitored. The big lesson of those two outbreaks is that there may be other undetected clusters of infections in countries that are currently reporting no coronavirus infections. Not every government can be trusted to tell us about cases they have, and places with primitive healthcare will not detect the spread of the disease until it is totally out of control.
We should consider fever checks for all inbound international travelers from Asia, Africa and Europe. That would enable us to detect the export of coronavirus from countries which are trying to conceal problems. This might not be necessary for strong American allies with good healthcare systems, but there are a lot of governments out there that can't be trusted to keep us informed of the threat their people pose to us.
3
@Schrodinger, you say, "Not every government can be trusted to tell us about cases they have, and places with primitive healthcare will not detect the spread of the disease until it is totally out of control."
Totally agree. I would include the US in with countries with "primitive" healthcare systems who can't be trusted to tell the rest of us about infections. Our system is fragmented as can be, decentralized, non-universal and extremely expensive. None of those are helpful factors in this situation.
4
@Schrodinger
Quote: "We should consider fever checks for all inbound international travelers from Asia, Africa and Europe."
As has been reported umpteen times, by epidemiologists and other physicians and scientists, "fever checks" don't help.
People can be infectious before they exhibit fevers. People can suppress fevers with medication. And those thermometer guns that you see in so many photographs are notoriously unreliable.
Again, all of this has been reported copiously, repeatedly.
4
@Lisa Simeone Some of what you say is true, however you are missing the point. Fever checks don't detect every case, but they do detect some. That provides us with a warning of countries which are exporting the disease even if their governments don't want to admit to their problems.
The first case outside of China was detected on January 13th because Thailand spotted an inbound traveler with a fever on January 8th. At that time the Chinese government was insisting that the outbreak was under control.
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/01/report-thailands-coronavirus-patient-didnt-visit-outbreak-market
@May Black....We might have an Italian-style cluster active in the US. Obviously we need to find these problems fast.
1
Can I also mention that 90% of the raw materials for our generic medications are presently produced in China? That there have already been severe doubts about the quality of the production standards for our medications, prescription and nonprescription, from India and China? (See the carcinogen-tainted Xantac story). This is a great opportunity to start producing some medications, maybe begin with epipens, insulin and antibiotics, right here, properly regulated, in the USA. And when we do that, under government control, we can discuss capping the prices. And actually produce many decently salaried, dignified jobs. Anyone seriously want to try treating a child's ear infections without antibiotics? Or have an operation cancelled because the proper antibiotics are not on hand in the event of infection?
9
The column tells us that maybe we shouldn't let our politics get in the way of exploring the truth about a possible global pandemic. And then everyone who comments responds exactly as predicted based on their politics.
5
@Working mom:
"Everyone who comments"?
Looks like you haven't read very many of the comments.
1
Flight to safety - that could be the story of our time.
Gated community, walled country, face masks and hand sanitizers in the pocket. Security theater - let us all “feel” safe.
Throw the trash in the river (atmosphere) that’s a downstream problem. What matters is the economy - I heard that on the news.
Populist, socialist, pragmatist, pauper - when the storm comes we will all get wet.
7
".....liberal-globalist imagination: an overzealous “remain calm” spirit".
Really Ross, does this stuff just write itself as you think....If a panic button had been pushed you would have written, The liberal globalist imagination wants a panic to bring the stock market down and Trump with it. It's a wonder to read your columns.
6
Hey could the NYT please give the freaking coronavirus story a rest. Great, thanks.
1
I enjoy waiting to see how it's Liberals' fault. Thanks, it only took a para or two.
10
"the liberal-globalist imagination" Can you say this in plain English ?
3
Don't rely on the Purell Ross, clean your contact surfaces with alcohol wipes and wash your hands...
2
Is it just me, or is a pandemic a particularly bad time to have an imbecile for a president?
17
Trump has zero empathy, a true me, myself, and I, kind of guy. "Muddle through" is the operable thought in the Trump world of make believe. Spur of the moment decisions based on nothing but the air in his head. Being that Trump does not give a damn about anyone but himself, he is ok about being indifferent to a disease that in his mind will not effect him and is ok with a body count because it culls the population. Life goes on, so what if some people die, just keep the stock market up and all will be fine. And his sycophants will spread the word.
4
Leave it to this nattering nabob (or should I just say schmuck) to frame everything in terms of his narrow ideological label- and talking point-driven worldview. On the subject of our reaction to coronavirus, an alien invader from the microbial world that knows nothing of politics and disrespects borders, Mr. Douthat nonetheless quickly finds his way to such garbage observations as “liberals always have a partisan agenda.” No, Mr. Douthat, it is you and your ilk who absurdly see everything ithrough your tired old partisan label-ridden ideological lens.
9
$Trillions for weapons, pennies for biological defense. What idiots people are.
10
Really, Ross? Liberal-Globalist? Is everything - every single damned thing in the world - an us-versus-them struggle?
Governments of all stripes are doing what they are doing, and not necessarily what they can, to contain the outbreak. Some are doing more than others. People are still dying.
The juvenile pursuit of political tea leaf reading can happen later, right before history judges us all.
4
This epidemic is a reminder that we must reassess sanitation practices on our public transport. How often and thoroughly are subway cars, city buses, school buses, and other transportation disinfected?
I hope NYT will do in-depth reporting about whether and how major airlines are modifying disinfection procedures during and after every flight.
Every single passenger should be given sanitary hand wipes, and asked to wipe down their screen, magazine pockets, tray tables, seatbelt buckle, arm rest and window shade handle!
Several times on each trip, flight attendants should wipe inside and outside door handles of restrooms, plus toilet handles, bathroom faucet handles, soap pump handles.
Several travel blogs and magazines have reported in the past year that the water used to make coffee and tea onboard planes does NOT pass the safety standards we would expect of restaurants. Airlines are only required to disinfect their water tanks four times a year.
United and Delta hit that inadequate standard.
And the pipes releasing the water are not regularly sanitized.
An EPA study says one in eight planes fails the agency's standards for water safety: 12 percent ofcommercial planes tested positive for fecal bacteria in the tap water supply.
Water for hands with in an airplane bathroom and the hot water that goes into your tea and coffee may contain some fecal matter, and some passengers may be sickened by this.
Add in exposure to a virus!!....
2
Can I pay extra to get a version of the NY times that doesn't include your silly articles?
6
Meanwhile His Heinous wants to cut funds to public health research and prevention, including to the CDC, NIH and WHO. He's a leader, all right -- he is leading us right into hell.
5
Under republican administrations HIV and embryonic tissue use were ignored, until republicans were affected.
I remember the "God hates Fags" signs and the all life is sacred nonsense. Then Nancy found it could help Ronnie;s Alzheimer's. And movie star friends were dying.
It will take a a quarantine of a trump property or two to get the administration awoke.
One problem will be recruiting knowledgeable staff for shuttered facilities that know that as soon as the pandemic is over their jobs are gone again to give the 1% tax breaks.
People who have had to relocate may not heed the call.
5
Yes, Mr. Douthat, you are correct to signal liberal emphasis on the White House's unpreparedness in responding to the coronavirus threat. Does Trump's right wing base know that in May 2018, under then National Security Advisor Bolton, their President removed the official and his global health security team in charge of a US response to pandemic crises? Do they appreciate the outcomes of such a poor decision? Or is that decision for them one of the Trumpian components of making America great again? In a way it reminds one of Reagan early on being unable to pronounce publicly "AIDS" as a national dire concern. The CDC is dancing in the dark, hamstrung by a politically motivated administration that lets fall to the wayside departments which safeguard the wellness of our nation and yet staffs crucial posts with loyalists with no competence, think Grenell. We are in deep trouble when 40% of the electorate has no qualms that this President surrounds himself with Yes Persons who only tell him what he wants to hear, truth be damned.
6
Correct me if I'm wrong but it wasn't the "globalist" progressives who were hell-bent on moving most of our manufacturing jobs to China in search of profits thus ensuring that events there would be felt here.
5
@Thomas Kintner, it was the neoliberals. I guess you could call them "globalists" but they're certainly not progressive :)
1
I just read that a deputy minister in Iran came down with the virus while downplaying it yesterday. Oops. It would be a real shame if this new virus cut down other world leaders, especially those with age on them as it looks like seniors may be hit hard.
I also read today that the expectation now is that this virus will infect two thirds of the world's population. Most will have mild effects, some will be struck down, others may not even know they are infected.
Yes, we are way behind. While Mr. Trump is being feted in India and speaking ill against all he perceives as his 'enemies', we are way behind.
Good luck to all.
5
Everybody knows that Trump doesn’t have the capabilities to manage a crisis, worse if it is a pandemic like the coronavirus could lay on our shores. With no public facilities, with 88 million people practically with no insurance and a government that has proven to be incompetent and disrespectful of the basic human right to health we could face a catastrophe.
4
Trump is a complete incompetent in regard to preparing for an infectious disease outbreak:
He shut down the long-running "Predict" program designed to identify and research infectious disease in animal populations and their transmission to humans in the developing world. This program had run throughout the Bush and Obama presidencies.
In 2018 the Trump Administration fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.
Trump's first budget proposal contained severe cuts to the CDC that its former director Tom Frieden warned would be "unsafe at any level of enactment". Just a few days ago on Feb 11, in the middle of a developing pandemic, Trump proposed huge cuts to the CDC and National Institutes of Health.
Finally this past weekend realizing how bad it would look to have cut funding to health and infectious disease programs during a developing epidemic, the Republicans made a desperate pivot to and started asking for additional money. But experts say that what they're proposing isn't nearly enough.
4
I’ve been awaiting an event that would expose the rank incompetence and consequences of a President Trump. Will this be a wake up call? I predict that deaths from this corona virus will be secondary to the hit to people’s economic interests, when it comes to changing opinions of Trump supporters.
3
It’s not just a world-wide disease outbreak that can affect the US or World economy. Look up the Carrington Event, or, in recent years, a near-miss of the earth by a somewhat similar solar event. Such events can cause massive failures of our technological systems that have very rapidly developed and have been untested. The more complex and inter-related any system is, the more it is prone to unforeseen circumstances. There is no one in charge or no institution with political power—worldwide—to look at the big picture of risks and solutions of our interconnected capitalistic world culture. The proof of this is our US leadership, and the World Health Organization’s statements: If it finally declares a pandemic, so what? It is just another specialist organization.
Shouldn’t Trump be in the US coordinating efforts to fight a possible coronavirus pandemics and not in India? And certainly not tweeting insults at 3 am local time against Ruth Bladder Ginsburg, Michelle Obama and Sonia Sotomayor? We know he is incompetent, Rs know it too. Maybe is time for others to fill the vacuum.
6
Does anyone have any idea how North Korea is coping with the corona virus?
I suspect they would need help in containing any outbreak.
This is Trump's first major test and he is already failing miserably.
3
Covid19 is seemingly like flu; same mode of spreading, slightly more fatal. It’s a story, and a big one, but until the mortality rate spikes, isn’t worth worrying about too much.
Ross could have saved himself a few words if he had the boldness to think that maybe, just possibly, his readers know where the disease came from, it’s current status.... I mean, make your point Ross, move on; no primer please.
1
Wuhan alone has almost twice the number of people as New York City. It's an industrial and scientific and cultural mecca. Imagine the panic if they had announced it immediately.
By the time they announced it a couple of weeks later, China had already constructed a 1500 bed, fully equipped emergency hospital and stocked up on as many masks and testing devices as possible in that amount of time. When they finally revealed the virus, they were ready for the millions of panicked people who wanted reassurance and care, immediately.
Do you think America could do that? We'd still be arguing about who would fund the emergency hospital, and meanwhile the virus rages on.
4
Well, it's a test of rationalism, that's for sure.
Otherwise, the globalist/nationalist premise is faulty. This is one world we inhabit. Even accepting a nationalist "ideology" requires extensive communication of humans and commerce beyond a country's physical boundaries and with virtually all other nations simply to sustain the nation. Borders can't be closed; autarky is unrealistic at the standard of living the overwhelming majority of citizens of any state have come to expect, and should demand; no country, therefore, is self-sufficient.
So viruses will also communicate. It is the reaction and response to them that matters. In time we'll understand better what happened in China and why the Chinese government imposed such crippling measures to try and control the spread of the disease. I expect mortality and even morbidity to be far less in the developed West than in China; sadly the virus may ravage the developing world. The key for the developed world though is balancing the response to the threat, and the risk posed in the nationalist mindset is decidedly toward an irrational and uncivil overreaction.
1
The stock market is not run by progressive globalists, Douthat. It's run by the wealthy arch-capitalists who in no way represent the average person. The stock market rose when DJT was elected, and during his tax cut. Any sane person has long since disregarded it as an indicator of good sense. It reflects the incredibly fragile confidence of the people with the most to lose.
8
It is odd to me that people don't think numerically about this outbreak. The numbers tell a story. A 2% death rate and 15 deaths in Iran tells us the number of infected persons there is many times the official count, simple algebra puts the count of cases there at a minimum of 2,500. The number of travelers to and from religious sites in Iran and the number of Iranian soldiers, agents and smugglers moving across borders from Iran, tell us that tens of thousands of people, including many infected carriers, have already dispersed from Iran across the Middle East. The 6 day doubling time for the viral infections and the 2.3 R-naught tell us that when there are not strict quarantines the disease spreads. The appearance of cases in Italy, Lebanon UAE and Afghanistan tell us that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has escaped containment and is spreading mostly unseen through the Middle East and Africa. From Afghanistan there is no barrier to spread to Pakistan and from Pakistan to India.
1
"one can extrapolate forward from China’s developing economic slowdown, and from slow-building delays and shortages worldwide, to a scenario where the coronavirus finally brings the post-2008 expansion to a grinding, deglobalizing halt."
This is faulty reasoning. First, it is a straight line projection. Second, it does not allow for any secondary effects.
Straight line projections are an easy first approximation. They are almost always wrong. Other things happen to complicate the thing being projected. It does up or reaches a natural limit and stops.
Secondary effects are many. Here, there is likely to be a rebound of pend up demand. An economy constrained in an artificial way for a brief time tends to rebound, as supply catches up to the pent up backlog of demand.
Another example parents will know about of secondary effect is when a child loses weight during an illness. Once past that, the child makes up for lost meals, and regains the weight. Just so with an economy.
That of course is not true if the effect is too prolonged or fundamental. However, this is a flu-like virus, not the Black Death. Rebound is to be expected. Therefore, the secondary economic effects will likely see a secondary effect in which they rebound.
Re: "The curious absence of hysteria probably reflects an interplay between polarization and ideological preconceptions."
Nope, it reflects the efforts by governments, banks and the media to downplay its impact, to impose damage control on its economic effects.
Even if the Covid-19 ravaged the world and infected all 8.5B of its human inhabitants, that would result in only 200,000,000 people dead given its 2.5% mortality rate.
1
And maybe the coronavirus will be the turning point for much-needed change, after laying bare the indefensible failings of a system focused on wealth care for Wall Street rather than health care for people.
7
So much for the "open borders" platform...
1
Ross, you love to blame the “Leftist globalists” but failed to mention that Trump has severely CUT the budget for the CDC; and last year, Trump got rid of Predict, a ten year old federal program whose mission it is to study, investigate and research outbreaks of infectious diseases! That’s gone! Trump has also gutted the U.S. Public Health Services!
So, Ross, you should be focusing on your party’s “populist” president and his ignorant and dangerous gutting of our Healthcare services and response clinicians!
6
Even dumb farmers know that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket. A reasonably intelligent farmer also knows that you shouldn't put all your chickens in one coop. Trump knows this.
Micheal Bloomberg and his globalist elites would like us to think otherwise. Maybe though, it is they who lack the "grey matter" to understand how truly foolish is their quest to concentrate the world's production in China - how utterly idiotic globalism is in practice.
Douthat makes the comment: "If globalism’s weakness is technocratic naïveté, populism’s faults are ignorance, incompetence and paranoia." I question the honesty or intelligence of such a broad stroke regarding populism.
Populism, as currently practiced in the U.S., is so intelligent that it has knocked the Establishment to the ground. Populism understands that the policies enabling the majority of the key ingredients in our drug and antibiotic supply to be made in predominately China is dangerous and as of now, idiotic. Populism is suspicious of the Chinese Communist Party's ambitions and aims. Populism wonders whether they are telling us the truth about the death toll in China - Is it a couple of thousand? Or is it tens of thousands... a number far closer to jibing with reports that crematoriums are running 24/7 in Wuhan.
You people can keep on stating that populists are morons. You can continue thinking you're the smartest guys in the room. But you're the only ones who continue to believe it.
1
As Douthat cogently argues, it’s the lack of trust in our governing institutions that has created the populist-establishment stalemate. Given the well-described context, it seems to me that, among both the populist and pro-establishment factions in the current Democratic field, only Liz Warren has come up with a targeted solution to the stated problem. Namely and specifically, as a first step, we must address and deal with the corruption of vested interests in our institutions and corporations. All the rest of the policy pronouncements are just reactive rather than proscriptive.
1
Crazy talk.
I’ve come to expect good writing from the Times, that’s why I’m a subscriber. Your article today stands out, Mr. Douthat. You may not know what you’re talking about...but damn you can write! I’m getting a copy of The Decadent Society today.
2
Let's be realistic. Trump knows little about medicine except that McDonald's hamburgers are the healthiest and safest food, and knows little about science except that Climate Change is a hoax and the scientific community is not to be believed, and little about Intelligence except that the professionals should be ignored. And woe to anyone in his administration who suggests that he, Trump, might be wrong. Our administration wants to project the image of full preparation for the coronavirus threat, as only he, Trump, the Stable Genius, is capable of doing--as he indicated in his "official tweet" where he insisted we are fully prepared and have nothing to fear (in spite of the appearance of sloppiness in getting Americans off that boat ---but sh-sh if you want to keep your job). So don't worry. Trump is in charge and all will be well. Lucky you voted for him.
And ---God Forbid--in case we get cases of the virus in America----it was all A.Schiff's and N. Pelosi's fault--because the radical liberals will do anything to undermine him. And besides he never said we were fully prepared.
(Were Trump a more believable person whose use of the Bully Pulpit was not always aimed at political gain while ignoring truth, his word might have had some effect on calming stock market panic.)
5
Donald Trump, unlike most previous Presidents, should have been at a national podium explaining how plenty of resources were being provided to assure that the US is capable of handling COVID-19 outbreaks, when they occur here.
Rather than consult with experts, Trump called President Xi, who assured him that he had the disease under control. That convinced our stable genius that it was under control and he could go back to purging his Administration of traitors. (Lately, almost secretively, Trump has requested $2B for COVID-19 development work.)
Unlike the leader he should be, Trump is unable to discriminate threats based on risk. COVID-19 is most certainly NOT just like the common cold. The secretive way it spreads defies early containment. There are no treatments and no vaccines. Private medical companies are discussing using existing antiviral medicines including ones for HIV. If that is the right path, will treatment of the population cost more than the defense budget?
The government MUST get its fingers into the development process to assure that prices are contained rather than controlled by big Pharma.
We need a leader who relies on experts, not minions not loyalists not his gut, for information. That is not Donald Trump, and it never will be.
6
There's a lot to unpack here.
COVD-19 is spreading globally,and we don't know what that means. We don't know how many people are infected, are likely to be infected, and if infected require critical care, and perhaps die. We don't know how many just sneeze.
We don't know if we have the kind of response necessary ready, or even if our CDC and NIH are still staffed sufficiently to handle it.
We don't know if our vulnerable population - the ones who have no healthcare or poor health care will serve as an incubator that exacerbates the deadliness of the virus.
We DO know - have always known - that single sourcing manufacturing outside of the nation leaves us vulnerable. We could have, at anytime, put on our big boy pants and recognized that it is not outside of the role of government to look for, and neutralize threats like we face.
We could have acceded to the idea that healthcare is a right, not a service, and like vaccines, keeps us all safer.
We could have acceded to the idea that US defense would require that we fund the existence of key industries at home - invest and insure that we can make medications, healthcare supplies, and necessary products backfill for global shortages in critical areas like energy grid, communications.
But we don't, because all that costs in the short term and the US - that's voters, investors, CEOs, and politicians - are incapable of looking at the long term until it slaps us in the butt.
9
Just more sophistry. What are you saying, Ross? So what is your suggestion for the best possible response. Okay Republican driven industrial globalism is bad so blame the Democrats for the liberal global world order. Respiratory infections spread rapidly. In this the coronavirus is spreading more slow than recent flu epidemics. Maybe all Republicans have done to destroy health care in American will help. There is a good response, let’s take more health care away. Let’s defund the NIH and CDC and NSF support. Perhaps republicans can lock up more people at the border and deny them health care. Always the best in times of global epidemics. Oh here is a better solution, all the white Christian nationalists (aka white Evangelicals and white Catholics. —the Republican Party) can pray. I am sure the PTL Club Fox News can lead them 24-7.
4
Yes, Ross, it's a test. Having a moron as president tests America mightily. And having a Tea Party in power, with their detestation of government, is also a test.
This is a test of America's capacity to restore sanity. To restore any sense of communal bonds. To restore any faith in science. In the legitimate use of government to protect its citizens.
We'll all know on Tuesday, November 3, 2020 whether we pass that test. Vote "D", straight up and down the ticket. We can go back to partisan squabbles and policy debates afterwards.
8
Why is your world black and white? Everyone in two categories—liberal or conservative. Such a shallow and trite analysis. No empathy for actual people. Let me help—the rich stay healthy; while the sick stay poor.
7
We have nothing to worry about and are safe. Trump and the GOP are running everything.
Their great belief in scientific fact is precisely why they refused to agree to Congressional Democrats demanding for over a month that more money and resources be deployed to battle the Coronavirus, and that there must be national and international effort to combat it, led by the US.
We're fine because Trump has said it's no big deal, will go away when the weather is warmer, and like Rush Limbaugh, says it's no worse than the Common Cold.
We're fine because if that doesn't work Trump will say the the Coronavirus is "Little" and he's a "Stable Genius".
We're fine because if that doesn't work Trump will call the Coronavirus Fake News.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame Ukraine.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame the Deep State.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame Mexicans.
We're fine because if that doesn't work Trump will blame George Soros and Disloyal Jews.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame Puerto Rico.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame the Central Park Five.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame will blame Obama, Pelosi, and all Democrats.
If all that fails, and the Coronavirus kills tens-of thousands of Americans, we're still fine because....
Trump will Pardon the Coronavirus...
and, give it the Medal of Honor.
Don't you feel better already?
7
This ignores that Trump and the GOP are running everything.
Their disdain for scientific fact is why they refused Congressional Democratic demands for over a month that more money and resources be deployed to battle the Coronavirus, and that there must be national and international effort to combat it.
Imagining Trump trying to deal with this crisis is a terrifying joke:
We're fine because Trump has said it's no big deal, will go away when the weather is warmer, and like Rush Limbaugh, says it's no worse than the Common Cold.
We're fine because if that doesn't work Trump will say the the Coronavirus is "Little" and he's a "Stable Genius".
We're fine because if that doesn't work Trump will call the Coronavirus Fake News.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame Ukraine.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame the Deep State.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame Mexicans.
We're fine because if that doesn't work Trump will blame George Soros and Disloyal Jews.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame Puerto Rico.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame the Central Park Five.
We're fine because it that doesn't work Trump will blame will blame Obama, Pelosi, and all Democrats.
If all that fails, and the Coronavirus killing thousands of Americans, we're still fine because....
Trump will Pardon the Coronavirus...
and, give it the Medal of Honor.
Don't you feel better already?
1
Mr. Douthat is a poor conservative pundit. He is even a worse epidemiologist. He goes forth with "hand sanitizer in my pocket."
5
Oh Ross ... really the globalists are to blame???
Go build your wall and watch Humpty Trumpty take his big fall. Then all the right’s pundits and all of Trump’s fools....will have egg on their faces.
3
Well here's a "conservative" pro-GOP columnist penning a column about a lack of hysteria from the right, where he's subtly telling us we should be more hysterical. Although he's got no background in medicine, infectious disease, public health. Opine away though, what's that about opinions and something else? We all have them.
Interestingly no mention of Trump's intent to take funds away from the CDC, the NIH, all those pesky research endeavors that squander taxpayer money. The Pentagon needs the money to do research on futuristic weapons! Do you think the top brass in the military aren't concerned about contagions becoming pandemics or epidemics? It's not like the next unknown virus could possibly infect the men and women of our armed forces now is it? People training and sleeping in close quarters, transported to our military bases spanning the globe? Fear not, we don't have any bases in Wuhan, or Iran . . .
The closer's a doozy though. "Decadence" is fine, we'll continue apace. "Continued stagnation?" Maybe Ross should travel to Australia. You know what else is decaying? The ice sheets and the permafrost, glaciers that provide drinking water for billions. Insect and bird populations, fish stocks in our oceans.
Stagnation indeedy. Almost rhymes with start-up nation.
3
The chief Islamic leaders should direct that the haj be carried out at home this year. Instead they have drawn Iran and Saudi Arabia, two of the most primitive countries in the world (in health science) toward the pandemic via the holiest sites in Islam...Money? Superstitution? Just business?
The Japanese should cancel the Tokyo Olympics. Instead they have doubled down not to cancel it. Ignorance? Supidity? Loss of "face?"
The WHO has refused to classify it as a pandemic. Arrogance? Ignorance?
There is no information about how to support people at home in the Bay Area, where many quarantined persons have been brought. Fear of slowing down business at the airport, etc.? Politics?
The news that the quantine period may be 29 rather than 14 days has not been widely broadcast. Cowardice?
So what's to worry about? Stupidit. Greed. Cowardice. Fear. Ignorance. Greed again.
Your best hope is to stay out of crowds, stay at home, and go out twice a week to the grocery store. Carry your own bags.
Don't visit friends. Don't go to concerts or the movies.
Don't spend money.
That's really the only way we can send a message to our political leaders.
I wonder how Trump is being insulated in India where Covid-19 has broken out. I don't know if it spreads more easily in hot than cold countries.
It would sure help if the WHO could tell us more about the plague...what you call an outbreak in the NYTimes also has a big effect.......
3
"...to exploit American misgovernment and mistrust". But what is the source of that misgovernment and mistrust? Could it possibly be GOP obstructionism, their total unwavering allegiance to the interests of their corporate overlords ranging from the NRA to Raytheon to Koch Industries etc over the public good? Could it be down to their sinister propaganda and conspiracy theories of death panels, birtherism, climate change denialism, Obama being a secret Kenyan Muslim...?
4
Poor Mr. Douthat faces the impossible task, as a conservative writer for the NYT, of explaining why liberal policies (robust government services including healthcare, cooperation between nations, belief in science rather than superstition) are the cause rather than the solution to a pandemic.
The best he can do is to falsely state that liberals are the ones shipping everyone's jobs overseas. Sorry, no.
4
Ross is more than a conservative. He's a compassionate conservative
Ross never fear Wilbur Ross is here. All we can do is wait and see. And by the way I dont think your hand sanitizer will help but if it makes you feel better go ahead.
3
"Everything we do before a pandemic will seem alarmist. Everything we do after a pandemic will seem inadequate."
-Secretary Mike Leavitt, US Department of Health and Human Services, at Pandemic Influenza Leadership Forum,
June 13, 2007
https://twitter.com/V2019N/status/1232115701604765698
2
Impeached Trump's cuts to the CDC aren't looking like such a good business decision now, are they?
6
What is the alternative other than to muddle through? Out of the extremes presented -- draconian overreaction or remain calm passiveness -- maybe the muddle through captures both extremes when needed, a muddled middle ground -- and ends up being the right choice.
2
If the US escapes the brunt of the Coronavirus outbreak it will be in no small measure due to Trump's rapid implementation of a travel ban between the US and China.
If mainstream Democrats and Republicans had not made the US a business unfriendly country and confronted China's abuse WTO rules and currency manipulations decades ago when it first began, America's industrial base would not have been hollowed out.
It is only since Trump's election that real policy differences between Republicans and Democrats have emerged. I am looking forward to a November contest between Trump's Republican's and Bernie's Democrats.
@stanz
Quote: "If the US escapes the brunt of the Coronavirus outbreak it will be in no small measure due to Trump's rapid implementation of a travel ban between the US and China."
OMG, hilarious!
Epidemiology clearly isn't your friend.
3
Even if we had universal health care access we would still have a capacity crisis. If the infection spreads out of control, most of those who need critical care will not get it.
5
So the stock market is taking a bath. For me, I think it was nothing more than a sugar high fostered by low interest rates, the corporate tax cuts, and the stock repurchasing. The outbreak of the coronavirus just accelerated the downfall.
2
I have worked through the SARS epidemic and the H1N1 threat. I am still on the frontline seeing 100s of patients a week with respiratory illness. Unlike those other global threats, I feel abandoned as a physician in this one. We have very few N95 masks at my workplace, and no preparedness training. We have so many Coronavirus cases worldwide and very few case descriptions-when you work with children sick with viruses for decades you develop a good understanding of the clinical presentation of each. Having more information on what a typical case looks like is essential. I applaud the Lancet for having open and free articles on this crisis but I still cannot find case info. I cringe every time I see the CDC algorithm for whom to test-one still needs to have been in China to even be considered for testing! I also am aware that even amongst us doctors, there is definitely a culture of not speaking about this. That is the greatest danger of all. In the interest of protecting our patients and working to contain this virus, let's advocate for MUCH BROADER TESTING so we can know the true extent of this virus and OPEN DISCUSSIONS about what we are seeing, and finally, THOROUGH PREPAREDNESS TRAINING with SUFFICIENT AVAILABLE PROTECTIVE GEAR.
4
@Maria Saavedra, that is truly frightening. I expected as much from our lack of a healthcare system. This is what happens when everything is fragmented and privatized for profit. Of course you have no training and no communication about what to do----you're only a money making tool to whatever for-profit health system lord you serve.
1
Cutting our budgets for scientific research and review, firing our scientists, totally disregarding necessary science for the survival of our country and us, hollowing out our government and hiring people with no experience, background or education to combat worldwide pandemics, is not the way to protect our country and its citizens.
4
Great article as usual. Good points. I wasn't aware of the overall media response since I'm not on mainstream news outlets.
We're planning on potential boredom. At least its hitting the old and sick. My husband is a prime target, and I'm not that far out of the range, but my kids should be all right.
Arrogance and ignorance, what a combination.
1
It is a profound statement about us as a nation that the primary concern about a new, increasingly global, epidemic is its effect on the stock market.
14
@Dave Indeed.
4
When one speaks of tests one is acknowledging that there is an opportunity to find an answer to a question. In this case what is the question being asked? Like much of Ross' writing he obtusely presents a series of anecdotes and derives meaning and connection between them but never is clear about the question and therefore can fudge the answer his ideology supports.
During the ebola outbreak Obama was in office and right wing media screamed about his inept response. They screamed so much that everyone had to scream despite the fact that based on scientific knowledge all that Obama had done was correct. Ross fails to see that simply we now live in a game created by the Right but prefers a much more complex construction to explain our reality. If the Right think something will hurt their winning then it is ignored or lambasted. If the Right wants us to believe an idea they will promote it even in the face of facts. Ross, trapped in this reality, assumes the Left plays the same game denying the possibility that the Left is responsible and wishes to know more facts before they react.
Anyone with a brain would know that our current mode of operation would fail in the face of a global pandemic. The importance of healthy relationships has been known for millennia and the bullying of others has proven detrimental from earliest times. I'm glad Ross wrote a book so he can explain this to everyone in his own unique, complex, and unhelpful way.
6
Yeah, and I feel so safe right now in the US, you know? We are living in a country that doesn't have universal healthcare or any federally mandated, paid sick leave for workers. Gee, I wonder how this haphazard system will handle a pandemic when we can't even take care of all the US citizens who have diabetes! My word, how ever will the healthcare cartels and big pharma make profits then if we must care for everyone?!
Does anyone else find this as frightening as I do? Our culture here is one that encourages people to try to walk off, ride out and ignore any and all health problems as much as possible to avoid missing work (to avoid missing pay) and to avoid the exorbitant costs associated with healthcare in general. That doesn't bode well with me.
If this is going to be a test, we need to cheat off our neighbors and friends and copy their systems pronto if we want to pass this one. We can not continue to keep giving in to the healthcare cartels & big pharma who are just stealing our money.
8
Once Trump and his administration start recognizing that the coronavirus is a threat to the economy that Trump claims credit for, they will react in the worst possible way. If this becomes a crisis, I would not be surprised if Trump uses a "national emergency" as an excuse to claim direct authoritarian powers to use ICE and local police to enforce quarantines, stockpile medical supplies for the loyal few and cancel the election. Sadly, as many have pointed out it is the fact that so many Americans have no effective access to health care and public health services have been gutted that makes us vulnerable.
6
The Covid-19 outbreak is political only in a secondary way. The evolution of the infection and its transmissibility are following well established patterns for pandemic influenza, and have little to do with seasonal flu, so please stop giving credence to the view that things will get better when the weather warms in the northern hemisphere.
The real political danger is that the United States has a team without a quarterback. The 'reality president' is uniquely incompetent to deal with the harsh reality that is coming.
5
The twin (but mirrored) propaganda regimes of Xi and Trump are correctly pegged as 2 sides of one coin, so on that, Ross is correct.
On the other hand, he's doing something that is both outside 'globalization' and inside 'spreading the pandemic', namely, making a trip in an aircraft. So why attack 'global supply chains'? By the way, 'hand sanitizer' is for fighting bacteria, not visuses, so chuck that 'solution' too.
The Western countries have enough food reserves and other reserves to easily survive an epidemic that lasts say 2 months. Unfortunately, the Ayn Rand regime of Donald Trump neither cares who dies (unless they're in the Trump Family) nor about anything else, so he'll be bleating "blame Adam Schiff!"
4
A big problem is managing this global crisis is that we cannot distinguish truth from lie in communications from the Trump Administration. Is there anyone left in the White House we can rely on for a believable account, for solid information to guide us?
11
@Rose - This is why Trump ended the traditional daily White House briefings where the press secretary was responsible for answering journalists questions. He then replaced them with his own disinformation campaign similar to Putin's cozy relationship with his media sympathizers. The only person who might offer insight into the truth is Senator Mitt Romney whose constituents aren't Trump loyalists freeing Romney to wander out of the Trump lying paved talking points when addressing the press. Don't count on him, one man, to offer the truth though as Trump has complete control over information between his sycophant legislators and Supreme Court lap dogs. Best to read newspapers from other countries for insight into the truth of what's happening in the USA.
2
Let this serious crisis be a dress rehearsal for future ones, because a crisis of mass displacement and economic chaos will come, it's just a question of time, and we'll need all countries pulling in the same direction.
5
Perhaps it is time to recognize that we collectively are only as strong as our weakest links. Why don't we have universal health insurance coverage -- and paid sick leave?
Preparing doctors and hospitals to receive sick patients is only half the battle -- the other half is getting sick people to seek medical attention and get tested, as needed.
Are home health care workers themselves covered?
7
"Globalism"
As if there were a choice.
7.8 billion is, by definition and without exception, "globalist".
The question at hand remains: do you operate in a globalist world using a zero sum game of I win when you lose or do you finally recognize we are all sitting in the same life boat and it might be wise to stop pounding holes underneath one another's seats as though we won't all get wet.
Ultimately prosperity and poverty is global and constrained by the laws of entropy. Not because of this or that ideology but because of simple reality on an isolated orb that is simultaneously fragile and resilient.
Things like Ebola, COVID, SARS, MERS, Avian Flu, tariffs, Syrian civil wars, Arab Spring, etc. are just quick little practice quizzes.
Based on performance so far I would say we are woefully understudied for the semester exam and we are out pub crawling on a bender the night before the test.
6
A combination of two words, that should strike fear into the heart of every American: Pandemic and Trump. Imagine the possibilities.
NOVEMBER.
6
Dr. Micheal Osterholm, a infectious disease specialist from MN, just gave a stark warning on TV a few minutes ago. Get prepared for the virus since your government will not bother to help you. He said our hospitals and medical facilities will not be able to handle the outbreak and get together with family members and hatch a plan.
5
There was an interesting article in NY Magazine that the authoritarianism of Xi has produced a structure where it is assured that he will be lied to, because "bad numbers" and bad news are not supposed to happen under the rule of an all-powerful leader. Therefore accuracy and facts become politicized and then lethal. He does not know what is really going on in his own country because there is a value for lying, built in.
Trump is building an ego-based political system filled with incompetent loyalists. He lies all the time and everyone knows and expects that now. So who believes him when he says "the virus is contained"?? And who will he put in charge- one of his "kids"??
Trump showed us the holes in our democracy- reality is about to show us the holes in the Trump balloon.
6
@Kay Johnson : Kay! No worries! Jared must surely be on the case by now.
2
Was this opinion article meant to be funny? I thought it was.
"liberal-globalist imagination: an overzealous “remain calm” spirit in the face of the real risks of a hyper-connected world."
As if globalism is liberal or conservative. Walmart is itself responsible for the closure of countless American factories - forcing their owners to relocate to China or perish (see: Rubbermaid). The Waltons - paragons of American liberalism? Ha! You don't get more conservative than that - and yet they love globalism 'cause it helped make their employees rich. Ha! I think we all know who profited - Walmart employees still need food stamps to eat.
Mr Douthat wrote;
"The political right would normally react to the menace of a viral outbreak ...with demands for quarantine and a zealous government response" and "But these incentives ... been outweighed by liberalism’s ideological bias toward global openness ...and comfort to anti-globalization forces"
The truth which Mr Douthat avoids is that the rich and powerful - be they Democrats or Republicans - want production to continue. They want all the worker bees to keep the gears of industry going - even if it puts them at risk. If production slows - they take an immediate hit on Wall Street. We mustn't have that growth impeded - there is that 6th or 7th home to be bought.
It's a simple as that. There's no deep philosophically based intellectualism behind it. So like Bush said after 9/11 - "Get to the malls! Shop!"
8
Surely this is stating the obvious?
Douthat lacks the expertise to address the medical impact of COVID19 and does not cite any experts. This makes his opinion on how to prevent COVID spread naive and uninformed.
He does make a good case for the impending economic impact which is driven by fear of the disease, not the actual disease. His article is no doubt meant to invoke fear.
1
The Chinese government is reaping what they sow.. For decades they have promulgated their authoritarian regime across China and stymied every single outlet of free speech and expression of its' people. To this day, people are still afraid to talk openly about the massacre at Tianamen Square. Muslim internment camps are "cultural centers" and the Corona virus is a non-issue, so much that the Doctor who sounded the initial alarm was censured by the government. Now the virus is spreading globally at an alarming rate while China remains silent in the shadows. When all this is over, somebody needs to send them a bill to pay for this!
2
No, the media are going berserk about cornavirus and that's clearly disproportionate to the risk. Meanwhile, in the US in one month this year, influenza killed 13 kids, according to the CDC's website: "13 influenza-associated pediatric deaths occurring during the 2019-2020 season between weeks 2 and 7 (the weeks ending January 11, 2020 and February 15, 2020) were reported to CDC during week 7. "
Another excellent column. Douthat is one of three "must read" NYT columnists.
Just what is needed in this very dangerous crisis; politicizing it!
Rush Limbaugh, in his infinite wisdom, has just declared it a communist, left, plot to get Trump. Are we really going there?
4
Lots of areas in American w/o doctors and this flu kills like the two waves of the 1918 Spanish flu
1
I'm just waiting for Donald Trump to announce that he knows the real story behind the whole virus problem: It's all part of the insidious Liberal plot to undermine his plan to Make America Great Again.
it doesn't take long to politicize and impair a correct response. Yesterday Pelosi and Shummer already started with their nonsense, and Pelosi will probably add a poison pill to her proposal to address the problem Hopefully the democrats do not interfere with a response, and are punished for extraordinarily irresponsible behavior. However, I never have confidence with the US government handling any health care issue, and they will probably fumble up this one just like they did with Ebola, irrespective of president
But let’s blame the liberals first, because Trump and Republicans care solely about people, not power, money, political victory. Good to know.
2
It takes a minimum of six months to grow a vaccine. That's after one has been developed, tested and determined to prevent the virus without causing the human immune system to go into overdrive, which itself can be a killer. Vaccines are our best hope. It takes a year, minimum. Meanwhile, Trump is cutting the budgets needed to finance these efforts in government labs.
3
The globalism that Douthat describes is definitely not what progressives have in mind. What he describes is a result of capitalism's exploitation of cheap foreign labor and natural resources. The vision of progressive globalism is government protections for all of the world's people precisely so that capitalism can't eschew the full costs of production which include disease, poverty, and pollution.
The coronavirus outbreak is not causing panic in the U.S. because the number of cases here is statistically zero. If progressives are concerned, it is because of the human toll being borne by workers in China. The stock markets are concerned about uncertainty of their cheap labor sources.
314
... won't be statistically zero for long.
13
@syfredrick - American businesses will relocate their manufacturing to Mexico to take advantage of the new NAFTA (USMCA) and avoid tariffs. Meanwhile the American service dominated sector will take a hit from the slowed down economy as well as abrupt decline in wealthy Chinese tourists and consumers. New York city and other popular tourist destinations will lose a huge chunk of their income while less and less people decide to venture to public places like malls, concerts, restaurants, bars, sports events and use less gasoline and taxi services in the process. A slowdown in consumer purchasing means that much of the economy will come grinding to a halt.
12
@Dunca
You completely misunderstand and misrepresent how expensive it is to move manufacturing operations around globally.
It is a path of last resort for companies, not first resort, nor second, nor third.......
As for the service sector of the US economy, it does not stop simply because global manufacturing does.
5
Any infectious disease is these days de facto potentially a global problem. The problem is that, because a certain strain of antedeluvian nationalist thought is abroad in the world, especially in the US, a coordinated global response is rendered very difficult.
2
A world based on alternative facts and conspiracy theories, with a general hostility toward science, data, education, and women, not to mention 15,000 lies/misleading statements and counting and a purge to replace experts with loyalists? That's not a track record I want in leadership when facing a possible pandemic. Yet here we are.
415
@Lawrence Welcome to the Dark Ages, the sequel.
23
@Lawrence And don't forget the millions with their heads in the sand believing that God will solve the problem for them.
33
@Lawrence - While Trump dismisses the seriousness of the global outbreak, quietly he directed his Chief of Staff, Mick Mulvaney, to stay home from the trip to India because he had the sniffles & Trump didn't want to risk contagion. Also, secretly the Trump administration is scrambling to come up with billions of emergency dollars to screen passengers arriving at USA airports, increase hospital readiness and fund epidemiology which will be the only area of stocks that will rise in the future. Don't be fooled by Republican public comments of apathy & calm under pressure as privately they under a lot of pressure to keep the false facade of Trump's perfect economy intact until after Trump is re-elected.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/24/trumps-economy-just-caught-coronavirus/
8
Mr. Douthat makes a serious mistake in diagnosing 'globalism' as a liberal value. It is rather a capitalist value that has many different ideological political viewpoints behind its hegemony. Anyone with any knowledge of economics or the world around them can see as much.
377
@T Rees ... free, unhindered movements of peoples; e.g. immigrants, migrants, refugees; not a "liberal" value? A borderless world not a "liberal" vision?
3
@T Rees
Partly true, partly false.
It is true that capitalism funded and profited from the rise in a globalization model across the world.
BUT....
It is also true that globalization has helped bring many 2nd and 3rd world nations up the economic scale and ultimately into consumerism..... in other words a domestic version of the American Dream... and THAT is liberal in nature, influence, and support.
I think you need to get off your tribal US vs THEM band wagon and embrace the fact that hundreds of millions, if not billions of world citizens have been materially lifted in their standards of living, courtesy largely to capitalists promoting and funding a globalized economic and trade model. It is a much better outcome than 18th and 19th century imperialism that used to drive all commerce and trade, largely courtesy of monarchy driven governments in Europe.
4
@T Rees "Liberal" in the economic sense is not "liberal" in the social sense.
5
“for all our gridlock, stagnation and decay, the cushion of our wealth, the weakness of our rivals and the tranquilizing effect of virtual entertainments make continued stagnation much more likely than true crisis or collapse.”
Amen.
When Trump scoffs so frequently about data and science, no wonder he is troubled. Who should he believe: Fox News or reputable scientists. Here's hoping he make the right choice.
It does strike me as ironic that conservatives work so hard to debunk science that is contrary to their ideological/religious beliefs, but when they are personally impacted by an event they rely on the best science (i.e. case in point: Rush Limbaugh who spent years denying the health effects of cigarette smoking and climate science now is relying on the best and latest research to fight his lung cancer).
Science only gets the respect it deserves when there is a real crisis.
4
@Publicus1776 : I have never understood how Republicans get on an airplane.
1
67 million potential Typhoid Marys?
One of the weak points it highlights is that million Americans lacking adequate health insurance or any insurance. In an epidemic, it's important for people who might have the disease to be identified, isolated, treated. But our system of medical finance discourages these millions from seeking medical help unless they are already very ill. So they go off to work or school or other gatherings, hoping that what they have really is a cold because they can't afford the hundreds or thousands of dollars a trip to the ER might cost them.
In an epidemic, if my neighbor lacks medical insurance that is a direct threat to my health, even though I have excellent coverage.
4
@writeon1 The Republicans, who don't want to provide health insurance, now face their own personal threat from those very people who will spread the Coronavirus to their families. How did they think they would be immune sitting in their gated communities?
2
What happens when people who have been exposed have only bare bones health insurance—or none? Do you really think they will rush to get tested to find out if they have the coronavirus vs. flu?
Faced with a medical bill they cannot afford, won’t we all be put at risk of an epidemic?
Why aren’t we offering free testing for this?
1
Beyond being a pandemic amplified by the media driven social contagion Coronavirus is a reminder of common roots of humanity and the common nature of the joys, sorrows, and miseries to be addressed only by caring and sharing-the basis of existence.
2
Two percent death rate? At this time, 10:53am EST, the death rate reported in China, based on figures reported in the Washington Post, is 3.4 percent. This may be a reflection of the likelihood that their medical system is becoming overwhelmed, so that the roughly 20% of patients who require hospitalization aren't all getting that level of care. So should this become widespread without mitigating vaccines or better treatment options, death rates ranging from 10 to 20% may be what plays out. Now that's a test, for sure.
@Revoltingallday Good point but Congress had nothing to do with Limbaugh’s tribute. You’re confusing the Congressional Medal of Honor with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
@Peabody: Well, the republican Congress did ignore Trump's continued violations of the US Constitution so the Republicans in Congress are complicit in every evil thing that Trump does.
The ill considered shift of our manufacturing base to Asia that Ross mentions is very much at play in a direct manner with COVID-19. A good friend who works for a federal public health agency has been agitating for years to get more attention to the fact that much of our medical supplies come from Asia. This includes most pharmaceuticals, as well as simple things like Tyvek suits, face masks, and all those nitrile/latex gloves that you see in use virtually everywhere health care professionals must touch someone.
When COVID-19 gets here, all these things are likely to be in short supply, both because of the exponentially higher demand and the disruption in the supply chain. With the current animosity between Americans that Fox News and our administration have been feverishly feeding that last several years, we are in danger of a public breakdown of order and cooperation. Those that we ought to be empowering and trusting are the same government scientists and public health officials that this administration has been dismissing as knowing nothing, or members of the so called "deep state".
I expect that these professionals will shrug off the abuse and go about business in their usual professional manner. I hope the public will listen to them -instead to of Trump, Fox, Limbaugh, Facebook, and the TV punditry.
7
The pandemic uncovered the next layers of Chinese totalitarian and dictatorial system that without a free speech leads to very bad outcomes.For the decades started by the US all western world gave China a chance to be part of democratic world and tried to believe that China would transition into country with a democratic system.Within last decades many US companies moved to China as an opportunity to multiply a profit and our government proved shortsighted to allow strategic industries (computers, rare metals) to migrate losing millions of jobs needed for American workers.Soon before 2016 election Xi made himself a country leader for life in reality a dictator and still our sceptics did not acknowledge it by continuing self-loathing. Around 2012 China has intensified building their military but even before has started spreading their influence everywhere in the world. It was estimated that, perhaps a million Uyghurs and others, who are being held in secretive Chinese prison camps. We have absolute indications that China has not following the path that everybody counted on.President Trump’s administration was first to became vocal about threat of China and he started working on extremely difficult situation with the trade that put our country in a very vulnerable position. Blaming President Trump for exploiting the Coronavirus situation is just another mistake to blame Trump’s administration rather than China for the very bad consequences of the growth a totalitarian regime.
1
Trump leads a totalitarian administration, so exactly what should we expect from it?
Not a lot, apparently, when cabinet secretaries such as for DHHS are far more concerned with keeping Trump happy, keeping their jobs, and salting away money (MoscowMitch on the legislative front comes to mind) than protecting the American populace, including health professionals whom we will all need if COVID19 spreads here.
2
Well Mr. Douthat at least blame some on the decadent West instead everything on China. China has been transparent from the beginning. She has isolated the genome and informed the world, though some criticize China for violating human rights by sealing Wuhan, a city of over 11 million, and then Hupei, a province of over 58 million. At the risk of economic disaster essentially shut down China for over a month. The new cases outside the province is now in single digits and China is in recovery mode. While West didn't use the window of opportunity to prevent the spread and looking at China as "Sick Man of East Asia", laughing at such draconic methods of control and talking forever about democratic primary. Well we'll see who's laughing last.
4
Thank you!! I’ve been commenting in the NYT comment pages for weeks about the obvious deficiencies of our response. The cdc is not yet testing health care workers with pneumonia of unknown etiology. Canary in the coal mine and nosocomial nightmare.
3
Initial Chinese leader reaction to information from their own medical scientists about the Corona virus was to silence the scientists and babble political reassurances about something these leaders do not comprehend above the level of a newspaper headline. The parallel event is the climate bulldozer, where people are hearing only their political leaders — who know nothing about climate science — speak of science, and deny what the scientists tell us. The only people who actually understand climate science and can predict what is going to happen are our climate scientists and they need to be heard with the same respect and attention we are now giving to medical scientists in the face of the Corona threat.
1
Judging by the comments today in this section, it is most apparent to me that this particular coronavirus (COVID-19) is either a conservative/Republican or a liberal/Democrat. But I can’t tell which one?? Maybe we should have an election and debate before we vote?
4
President Trump has requested $ 2.5 billion to fight the Coronavirus outbreak. Why are you and your readers doubting his ability to handle the crisis?
3
@MCH Trump has done away with the infectious disease specialist and many more who organize and plan for epidemics for the US. We are left with people who don't know the science. The reason we have it spreading in the US is because the State Department didn't listen to the CDC when they were told NOT to bring infected people into the US.
4
Because he probably wants to build a wall on the southern border to keep the “virus” out.
DHHS cannot be relied on to take the right steps immediately—that takes money Trump would rather spend on traveling to Mar a Lago and playing golf at taxpayer expense.
1
2.5 B isn’t going to come CLOSE to covering the necessary equipment and personnel needed when the outbreak reaches a pandemic in the states.
The problem is more then half this country doesn’t believe what Trump says- so when it’s necessary to have faith and listen to our leaders - which will likely be the case with this pandemic- few will trust the words coming out of Donnys mouth.
1
I like the way Ross omits mentioning the fact that in May 2018 the bellicose moron John Bolton, then National-Security Advisor, got rid of the official in charge of overseeing global pandemics and dismantled his team. Does that make Ross part of the problem?
Fortunately, Acting Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security is actively tweeting for advice on how to get behind an apparent membership wall that will give us access to Johns Hopkins map of corona virus infections. "Has the Johns Hopkins map of the coronavirus stopped working for other people, or just me? I just tried again, and it looks like Johns Hopkins put the information behind a membership wall of some kind. Seems like bad timing to stop helping the world with this (previously) useful resource. Here's hoping it goes back up soon."
Pat Robertson turned a hurricane, so maybe one of Trump's Evangelical sycophants can do a miracle and turn a virus. So many talented people to call upon in the Administration these days!
6
No less of an expert than the award-winning Rush Limbaugh says this is just the common cold being weaponized against trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/25/limbaugh-coronavirus-trump/
3
In the U.S. with the Trump Administration it's pretty simple:
Since Trump could care less about the country's citizens:
Trump wrongly claimed that the coming warmer weather would make it "go away". After the 1000 point loss in the Dow Trump stated that it's a great buying opportunity, showing he is a financial moron as if we didn't already know that. Finally, as John Marshall said: “The White House appears to see the coronavirus purely as an election issue and as a threat to stock values.”
Trump doesn't have an ounce of compassion. Must be why tens of millions of Americans love him. Wait until he's re-elected. Then the compassion will really come out as the Republicans eliminate Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and what's left of the environmental laws. What a great country.
6
After Trump’s assiduous efforts to undermine and dismantle his government, I have no confidence that he is doing anything to ensure the public health. While he has spewed volumes on the need for a border wall to keep out Mexicans, I haven’t heard a peep from him about what he is doing to keep out this virus and mitigate its effects here. This is the stark downside of putting an ignorant, incompetent blowhard in charge and the folly of the loyalist lackeys he selected to deal with problems like this.
2
Trump no doubt believes that the “wall” will keep the virus out. Wouldn’t surprise me to learn that that is what Stephen Miller is whispering in Trump’s ear!
1
Yes, this is all about us.
2
"The coronavirus is not a civilization-ender, not Stephen King’s Captain Trips come for us at last . . ." Correct, the coronavirus is not a civilization ender, but the uncontrolled heating of our planet is.
4
1. I wonder when (or if) Ross Douthat is ever gonna figure out that the word he’s groping about for isn’t “globalism.”
It’s, “capitalism.”
2. I’m not sure what Evil Liberal Media this guy’s watching, but when I got up today, extended coverage on MSNBC. Also, NPR. And, it occurs, maybe at leat glance at the front page of the paper you’re writing for?
3. As for weaseling around the fact that Trump’s been lurching around as per usual on this one, submitting budgets that chop CDC epidemiology and disease research, yelling one week hooray for letting Americans off a cruise ship and yelling who let these people off the cruise ship the next, well, as per usual.
Lefties aren’t the ones fouling this up, Ross. And no, Obama didn’t foul up the Ebola response, let alone pull the Trump and go off about how aid workers need to accept the consequences of their aid.
6
This is a test of what happens with a relatively abrupt reduction in fossil fuel emissions. Is the atmosphere "clearer" or showing a reduced increase in the amount of carbon dioxide? This is an excellent opportunity to measure this all out. J.Roll.
The threat of COVID-19 is not primarily to the individual (unless one is elderly or already ill), but to the collective elements and institutions of society (as a result of its ease of spread and likely scale of impact). As such, it will certainly be a test of health systems throughout the world making clear the varied weaknesses that underlie different systems. It will also be a stress test of the inter-connected economic and political systems that both drive and are impacted by health. COVID-19 will most likely not be sufficient to thoroughly destabilize the existing global order, but its ability to expose weakness, can and should be a stimulus to drive change towards improved systems.
5
@YMadrid Precisely, I'm also for Universal healthcare, the wealthy can pay for it..
One major weakness in battling any such health threat in the US is our fractured health care system. When people are afraid to see a doctor for financial reasons, any contagious outbreak has opportunity to take root and to spread. If anyone could immediately go to a clinic that is free of charge, people would go without delay. Instead most people will hold off until too ill or too afraid to wait any longer. In the meantime, family members, co-workers and anyone else they encounter are placed at risk.
To anyone who argues against public health care, keep in mind that a nice neighbourhood and a stock portfolio offer no protection against a sniffling waiter or the coughing kid in the elevator. If we do not decide to protect each other, we will not be able to protect of ourselves in a major health crisis.
8
I share your concerns. Insurance deficiency for many people in USA will make people delay seeking medical care, and worsen the spread. Think of maids and food servers in hotels!
As I recall, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger we’re responsible for opening China to US trade and travel interests in 1975. They are the same Republicans who trafficked in the Domino Theory and saw China as the menace that supported N Korea during the Korean War, and who supported N Vietnam during the Vietnam War. However, Nixon made a politically motivated decision to use China as a way to deflect his critics away from the escalating Watergate investigation. Nixon and Kissinger wanted to really open the flood gates of global commerce, and let the China/ US trade relationship be as unencumbered with regulations as possible. Sensible regulations necessary to protect Americans were nonexistent. Over the years, we learned about Chinese products made by slave labor, lethal toothpaste, tainted pharmaceuticals, bird influenza from live animal markets, and an explosion of new coal fired power plants that spewed a skyrocketing tonnage of toxins into the atmosphere. Notwithstanding these serious problems, Jon Stewart on his Daily Dhow summed it up best- Can you believe I can buy a ten-pack of Chinese tube socks for $1.99! Throughout the 20th Century, American corporate interests have turned over every rock in the world bent on making a buck, and Big Oil got it all started.
6
It actually is logical, and even seems fitting, that our whole economic and medical system could be suddenly broken and thrown into shambles by the trafficking of wildlife and by cultural practices which are rooted in cruelty to animals and disregard for other species. Human beings are going to pay a price for the horrific things we do, and this is only the beginning.
5
Ok, does anyone see the intellectual disingenuousness here? This is the same Dauthat that is constantly arguing that we are being too alarmist about the threat of global warming and the threat that Trump poses to our democratic institutions who is now is complaining that we are not being alarmist enough about the pandemic. And this wrapping it up in the larger narrative about the decadence (the subject of his recent book) that he tries to sell as a stagnation narrative but it reeks to me of Sodom and Gomorrah cautionary tale the religionticians have been propagating for centuries is intellectually empty.
9
Or is that there is too much confidence in public health security? Remember how we felt about NASA before Challenger - NASA was supposedly infallible? Or perhaps it is a great lack of public ignorance regarding the science of viruses and epidemiology, which is totally understandable because it is greatly difficult to master. However the people that have mastered this are the ones warming us very explicitly, for them
2
Globalism was not required for the flu pandemic of 1918. Douthat's pinched myopism is required to blame globalism for the spread of this coronavirus.
10
I agree, except maybe it was. Globalism has been a feature of human existence since we left Africa.
1
Not to make light of such a serious matter, but can't The Chosen One can fix it? He couldn't fix health care, but surely he can fix a simple little virus.
What this may expose is that one man, even a chosen man, is not responsible for economic booms or busts, though he and his party can be responsible for the ever-expanding foreign ownership of US IOUs which eventually makes us less capable of dealing with problems like pandemics, climate change, and all manners of foreign invasion.
3
"...populism’s faults are ignorance, incompetence and paranoia"
That describes the faux populism as practiced by Trump, but not true populism, which takes power and influence away from the elites and spreads it to the people. It creates the conditions that enable good paying jobs, and allow ordinary people to live their lives without the fear of being reduced to poverty.
The nearest thing we have to real populists are Sanders and Warren. If one of them manages to win, they probably won't get what they want, but it won't be for lack of honest effort.
3
So an epidemic started in China, and impacting Iran is ... Trump's fault?
Do you expect the US to send experts to China and Iran? The Chinese already rejected this.
The most interesting point is the very low death count outside of China. This is highlighting a ton of issues in the Chinese Government - from food safety to medical infrastructure. You have to ask yourself if this is a Chernobyl moment.
It has occurred to me that corona virus may just be what planet earth needs if it is to survive.
1
After all the finger pointing and criticism of other countries for their inability to “control” The spread of COVID-19 (an impossibility), I cant wait to see what chaos erupts here in the US, where we are in such denial that we aren’t even hearing about the already abject failure of our monitoring systems.
Hospitals will be rapidly overwhelmed; entire cities will shut down, and shortages of everything will spread quickly.
Nothing can be done. The virus will spread, many will die, and the Republicans and Trump will proclaim everything is fine.
And we will be, once again, the laughingstock of the world.
4
Unfortunately Trump is no FDR
4
Astonishing that even when Conservatives are in charge of the governmental response Douthat manages to blame Liberals for what he fears is an inadequate response!
What’s really inadequate and wrong is his thinking —- period. In order to again hit his readers over the head with his usual chicken little orientation he starts with a “truism” that he doesn’t bother to support, argues the inadequate response of the government, and ends by blaming “globalist liberals” for what he fears will result. I recommend that nest column he keeps this completely inadequate, biased logic in a dark tunnel. But, of course, he won’t.
4
"Liberal Globalist"?
As if the "Liberal" or "Conservative" Political label has any true relationship to "Globalist".
5
The US is at fault. It didn’t take long for that analysis. Never heard that before.
"Thus the liberal instinct toward minimization: It’s not much worse than the flu, panicking makes things only worse, don’t spread conspiracy theories about its origins, racism toward Chinese people is the real danger here."
Really? Me, nor my liberal friends have expressed anything close to that sentiment. Talk about partisan attitude. No wonder this country is so divided.
2
Don’t quite see the main a purpose of this article, except to throw shade on ‘capitalist decadence’ (undescribed) and the ‘globalist project’, (as if it were nascent or ever likely to return to agrarianism). If the US was isolationist, a pandemic would still affect us (see movie ‘World War Z’) and if all our supply chains were native, they would be subject to the same “structural danger for the globalist project”. They is nothing in this article of any reflective substance. I would agree that it will spread...like influenzas... and it may be disruptive. This may be a good non-crippling lesson for all on diversification of supply chains, employee disinter-mediating automation and better vaccination development.
3
Only someone in the twisted, toxic orbit of Donald Trump would suggest that a disease already claiming thousands of lives is just "fake news" designed to hurt Trump's re-election.
Rush Limbaugh better hope it's fake news with his compromised immune system.
5
Ross proves once again that there is nothing a member of the Professional Republican Commentariat cannot twist into a partisan attack. Using loaded negative descriptors against anyone not in the Kremlin Affiliate Party (formerly known as Republican)? Check! Attack globalism, the boogey man of the far right? Check.
I have a suggestion that Ross should like. If economic globalism is so horrible because it spreads pain, then religious globalism, which has spread pain, death and destruction for millennia, should come to an end. Roman Catholicism, for instance, should be restricted to Italy. I’m sure Ross will have no problem with that.
2
“ If globalism’s weakness is technocratic naïveté...”
No, Ross. Globalism’s weakness is its disregard for borders and the workers within those borders.
3
Once the global death toll reaches close to the death toll for common flu in the US alone, then we can talk. This media hysteria is ridiculous, and is what has triggered stock losses. third world developing cool weather countries will probably be harder hit, than warm continent countries or those developed countries regardless of location. I will mark my calendar to come back in a few months after spring hits and take note of the worry warts on this comments section who cry the sky is falling. I feel bad for all of you.
Opening paragraph a summary of our time. For a conservative who reads his kids Watership Down, Douthat rings of a sane, 21st century progressiveness to my ears.
I keep eagerly awaiting a column from Mr. Douthat where one can say unreservedly how easy it is for most people of good intentions to read and agree with.
I'll keep waiting.
1
I hear Rush Limbaugh is going to get a second Medal of Freedom for his research findings pertaining to the Coronavirus. he is quite the guy. https://timesofsandiego.com/opinion/2020/02/15/the-medal-of-freedom-is-for-american-heroes-rush-limbaugh-isnt-one/
2
Ross Douhat writes, “The curious absence of hysteria probably reflects an interplay between polarization and ideological preconceptions. The political right would normally react to the menace of a viral outbreak in a major geopolitical rival with demands for quarantine and a zealous government response.”
Vox article Dec 1, 2016
“When the HIV/AIDS epidemic began in the 1980s, the Reagan administration's first reaction was chilling: It appeared to treat the epidemic as a joke. In a new documentary short by Scott Calonico called When AIDS Was Funny, posted by Vanity Fair, audio of press conferences reveals Ronald Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, and members of the media joking about the HIV/AIDS epidemic — which they called "gay plague" — and laughing about one of the reporters potentially having it.”
1
People die, people suffer and there are people such as Ross Douthat who step back and look at as a test of government and finances. Cruel, self centered and coarse, Ross Douthat has no consideration for the pain. If he did he'd be writing about the mobilization the U.S. performs when it invades countries or occupies as we do in Africa, flying in and assembling in 3 days what could be considered small cities.
The U.S. can do anything, and has the ability to so much good yet here is why we have the current administration licking its chops over steamrolling the poor, the sick and the disadvantaged.
2
"But deliver us from Evil..."
How can God's will be parenthetical?
Let’s get real.
As a healthcare professional IMHO .... trump doesn’t care and he is stubborn in his ignorance and defunct as a leader.
Congress MUST and should ignore the White House and override their vetoes to protect our national interests and residents during this pandemic. There are no vaccines for this. A terrible way to achieve population control.
We are watching our governmental response. Local Health departments are beginning to struggle with no federal guidelines produced by CDC. No websites for residents to read for information.
Come on. Wage earning voters deserve better for garnished wages for IRS. !!!!!
Vote for the Women !!!!! 2020.!
2
Trump is sickening far more people than the coronavirus.
4
The disease isn't exploiting anything. It's the Republicans who will exploit, as they did with the AIDS virus.
I'll quote a GOP "hero."
"“It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump,” Limbaugh said during his Monday show. “Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus. … Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.”
1
Gee, Ross, thanks for the morning pick-me-up. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to put my head back in the sand.
Are you sure this is Douthat's column? Where's the plea for special treatment for his church?
1
Have you heard Rush Limbaugh's latest conspiracy theory? He's saying C-virus is just a common cold that's being exploited by the media to take down President Trump. You can't make this stuff up...
https://www.aol.com/article/entertainment/2020/02/25/rush-limbaugh-claims-the-common-cold-coronavirus-is-an-effort-to-get-trump/23933983/
2
COVID is BSL-2, well within normal research lab level, not BSL 4.
Scientists and doctors are overwhelmingly, mercifully, liberal and progressive. Economists, bankers, and business types are largely more conservative, although perhaps not as monolithically so. Apply these observations to every question of what should have been done years ago in the way of prevention, and preparation. What should the responses to the disease be, and how many potential treatments are available? I think the answers to these questions are obvious. This is another of many articles I've seen bemoaning the economic effect of the virus, in this case using it as an excuse to point fingers.
Go cry in your mansions. I have work to do on multi-drug resistance in my currently unfunded laboratory.
4
President Trump from India says ""The coronavirus is very much under control in the USA." and it's "going to go away." All along, this administration has shrugged off the outbreak and indeed just proposed cutting CDC's budget this year. In line with previous disasters, there are few signs that the government under Trump is preparing in any significant and coordinated way for a national disaster.
Given this, it's truly amazing that Mr. Douthat can write, "the virus has exposed a clear weak spot in what you might call the liberal-globalist imagination."
Sorry, Mr. Douthat. The "liberal-globalists" are not running the country right now. What happens now in the US is on the conservative-nationalists, or whatever you want to call yourself and your ideological associates.
Anyway, the whole notion that we could deal with a major new infectious disease by closing the borders is juvenile. Maybe if Trump was really competent at the rightwing program, he would have had the borders hermetically sealed as soon as the first report of the disease was reported. But all it takes is one person to bring the disease into the country. It's coming and what the Trump administration does or doesn't do once it's here could be a life or death matter for many Americans.
Welcome to the globe, Mr. Douthat.
9
The stock market is NOT real.. It's an aberration propped up now from Reagan on -- so the little people who used to keep their money in banks at 3% or better interest -- set up so the rich can get richer.... and meantime workers paid less. The Fed and the Democrats nominally Clinton and Obama have gone along with the hoax to keep the banksters happy... (And people complain about Trump?)
If all those good-hearted capitalists had thought more about consequences, maybe we would still produce most of what we need and use in the USA. Things like shoes, clothing, medication -- and not just guns and war implements.
Everything is made in China or elsewhere and SHAME. It used to be OK to actually buy things made in USA. Now it's not possible.
So far as the Corona Virus -- if it gets bad put a plastic bag over a duck billed cap and that will keep most droplets in the air away from your face. In fact, ordinary flu transmission can occur at relatively longer distances.
For any flu, pain relievers/temperature lowerers (ibuprofen, Tylenol) and hydration -- chicken soup, any hot and drink...applesauce... Rest. (Been there, done that -- the real flu which is debilitating because of so many days of fever...) Perhaps, everyone should be vaccinated for pneumonia -- which can accompany the flu... I do not know.. but common sense is a beautiful thing.
2
@Auntie Mame
“The stock market is not real” is on par with belief in a flat Earth.
There’s considerable room for argument about valuations, but at the end of the day, many (though not all) companies pay dividends. Dividends are most assuredly real income, no matter how uncertain you may feel about about capital gains.
There’s no grand conspiracy out to prevent “little people” from keeping money in savings accounts. And where, exactly, did you think banks got the income to pay interest on savings accounts? It doesn’t magically grow in bank vaults.
As for your simplistic views on health care, I’m _pretty sure_ the doctors caring for the patients who have died from Corvid 19 are familiar with your home remedies. Your “beautiful common sense” is akin to the way teenagers know everything and don’t see why adults don’t understand the obvious.
1
Yes, it is a test, but it is a test that we are failing. Clearly, we should be doing better than Trump's inane comments to the effect "What, me worry?" or "Don't worry, be happy." He only adds to the sense of unease because we have no sense that he has a plan or is taking measures to deal with the realities of what may be coming. He only cares about himself anyway, so what is it to him if a few thousand or a few hundred thousand Americans die in the coming months? You can be sure that his advance team in India is wiping surfaces clean before his next stop and that, in secret, he is wearing a face mask. Yes, we should hope for the best, but we should also prepare for the worst. Just like there are climate change deniers, there are Coronavirus/COVID deniers.
3
Douthat:
"I’m writing this column from an airport, about to embark (hand sanitizer in my pocket) on a small tour for a new book whose argument, in part, is that the Western world may be sustainably decadent — meaning that for all our gridlock, stagnation and decay, the cushion of our wealth, the weakness of our rivals and the tranquilizing effect of virtual entertainments make continued stagnation much more likely than true crisis or collapse."
Douthat offers two response options to our 'continued stagnation': true crisis or collapse. Surely there is a third option at least: course-correction and reinvigoration. If you no longer believe this is possible, Mr. Douthat, can you put up your pen please?
3
Actually, the anti-globalization populists are right -- and not just this time. It was globalization that directly contributed to the onset of World War One and globalization that got the US involved to bail out its loans to the UK and France at the direct cost of 116,000 American lives in just the short course of our involvement. That's not to mention to spread of the Spanish flu afterward, a direct result of the bombardment and churning of French soil, that killed millions here and abroad after the war.
This seldom-mentioned context puts the interwar populist America First movement in a fresh new light. They were wrong in that particular context but their isolationist justifications were nonetheless understandable. And if their predecessors, the so-called isolationists, had been heeded in 1916 and '17, there's a good chance that WWI would have ended with a more equitable peace that would have avoided the punitive measures imposed on Germany that, in turn, led directly to another world war and the ensuing Cold War as well as the calamitous overreach of US hegemony in the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
The globalists, no matter how loftily credentialed, have a lot to answer for.
6
@Pelham Thank you! I've thought this for years and you've said it far more eloquently than I. Globalism favors the few over the many, and has had catastrophic consequences, economic, cultural, and health-wise, now and in the past.
3
Yes, the extreme right-wing Trump Administration is failing to capably address what's clearly potentially a serious public health issue through a combination of having fired the people who were best trained to deal with it and downplaying the seriousness of the threat because otherwise Trump might look bad.
"Liberals" as Douthat calls them, while on the one hand politically motivated to take it seriously only because it would hurt Trump, also are motivated by their pro-globalism to downplay it, so they're avoiding talking about it also.
While Douthat's description of the craven response of Trump is absolutely correct, none of the second part of this is even remotely true. No one I've read is downplaying it except the Trump Administration.
Douthat's "both sides must always be exactly as bad in every way" worldview might seem like it's some sort of neutral stance, but it's really basically a Republican position, a way to downplay and make excuses for the Republican Party as they slid from conservative to right-wing to extreme right-wing to authoritarian dictatorship, playing a part if letting it happen by telling millions of readers along the way that it was just one "side" and the other side was just as bad, ho hum, what are you going to do, sides will be sides.
6
Whatever approach or approaches Trump adopts vis a vis coronavirus it's not a matter, as you argue, of waiting and seeing how he handles it. Let's be clear. Who in his or her right mind trusts anything Trump or those around him say? As you reap so shall you sow. Trump's strategy of casting doubt on anything but his own words may well backfire this time, and bigly. And perhaps that would be a silver lining in an otherwise dreadful situation. Public trust in government information and in the integrity of the processes that result in some scientific consensus are vital. The GOP has done everything it can to undermine these pillars of effective government. Let's see if the chickens come home to roost.
10
The news writers presume there could have been an adequate response to this epidemic. I question that assumption. Think of the problems. Politicians are not trained to think medically. Those infected and without symptoms shed virus unknowingly. The testing is often inaccurate. Some people resist quarantine.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
2
@minnie: Ignorance of science is de riguer to get elected to US public offices.
2
For weeks President Xi of China denied the threat posed by Coronavirus - because he feared it would not be good for his Party - and local officials in Wuhan did not report politically inconvenient facts about the virus.
We are now seeing Trump deny the seriousness of the threat to the U.S. - because he fears it will hurt his re-election prospects. And, it will.
The U.S. is woefully unprepared after Trump's budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control, elimination of our pandemic strike team and elimination of our director of health security who sat on the NDC.
Trump is still denying and downplaying the threat through his Twitter account while he has requested $1.8 billion from Congress to attack the virus.
It's probably too late. Such virulent viruses run their course through populations until people recover with antibodies or die. Cases continue to leak out of China and Wuhan won't be kept on lock down long enough or effectively enough for the virus to run its course in that area.
Trump can contain evidence of his crimes, by pressuring aides and Republican Senators to cover it up. But Trump will not be able to contain a virus that is going to bring him down.
9
Sustained decadence is immoral. Not one of us who profess to be moral humans should be working to sustain the current inequities in our system. That billionaires treat their workers like commodities and get rewarded with rising stock prices makes anyone who participates in that larger eco-system part of the problem. Invest responsibly. Reward those who sustained equality, not those who sustain decadence.
5
I'm not sure how much press attention the assassination of Franz Ferdinand got at the time, or how much the news penetrated the minds of ordinary people. What I do know is that nobody at the time could foresee the scale of the war that would result from this event. Likewise, there is no telling what the future holds when it comes to coronavirus.
If this spreads to the U.S., and it probably will, it could interfere with upcoming Democratic primaries, state caucuses, even the Democratic convention. The election might even have to be postponed, or cancelled. Then there is the question of what draconian measures the Trump administration might impose. Of course, even candidates and elected officials might suffer if this becomes an epidemic in the U.S. Lots of stuff to think about, if you aren't already busy thinking about other stuff.
4
Lisette Voytko quoted James Hamblin who wrote in "The Atlantic" recently the 45's budget "does not consider pandemic preparedness a matter of national security" in article in "Forbes" (2/11/2020). This attitude parallels 45's rejection of the Pentagon's assessment that Climate Change threatens our national security. In 2017, 45 directed the CDC to ban 7 words. Two of those words were "evidence-based" and "science- based". The suggested thinking behind banning those words denies science its raison d'etre and compromises its integrity. The result in response to the COVID-19 pandemic is to reduce the CDC budget by 16% and reduce by 40% USA's contribution to the WHO. It reflects a belief that what we don't know we don't need to know.
11
The Republican health care plan, a.k.a. Emergency room visits, is ill prepared (pun intended) to handle an epidemic. Can you imagine the impact when millions of uninsured people flock to hospitals for treatment?
And how about those insured that will go bankrupt when their insurance limits are met?
7
What it has pointed out is that globalizing a large number of key industries puts a country at risk. What industry was not affected by China's shutdown?
It exposed all the flaws of easy profits gained by outsourcing to countries without thinking about what could bring their production lines to a standstill.
Not to mention globalized travel and illegal migration affecting countries in western Europe. The thought of the virus infecting Africa would bring another wave of concern with migrants that cross the Mediterranean to get to Europe. But migrants from Africa and India are flying to South American countries to cross over into the US as well.
Every topic: open borders, migration, globalization are to be scrutinized. It is random as to how or when "Virus X" hits that mimics the numbers that influenza did.
Who will be prepared? Who will try to control the media? Who will not care? And who will try to profit from it?
1
Ross,
I would suggest you think of a statement from Carl Sagan concerning “the blue dot” x every human being who has ever lived is on this blue dot (Earth) like it or not, we are all interconnected. The sooner we figure out working together we can all do more than working as individual cogs the better off the future will be for all of humankind, regardless of race, creed or country. Or not, change is not mandatory, survival is optional.
6
Meanwhile, only 3 labs out of more than 100 public health labs in this country can even test for the coronavirus.
It's not that we have avoided the outbreak so far in the US, it's that we have no idea if there's an outbreak here or not.
Do we really think that there are outbreaks in Italy and Iran, but not the US? The US is home to most of the global trade and several of the world's busiest airports. Our heads are buried in the sand if we don't think there are more outbreaks here already.
13
The author is spot on: the Coronavirus is indeed a test. But so is global warming. Both are undeniable problems present in the physical world in which we live, despite serious efforts in some quarters to deny them, or belittle their significance, for political purposes. And both problems are blithely ignorant of borders, nationalities, religion and political parties. There is only one true way to conquer either problem, and that's for all participants of this planet to work together for the common good. One for all, and all for one. Good luck with that.
5
Once again the ideological warrior Douthat makes his same old arguments against "globalism" while ignoring the counter-argument: interconnection and coordination of national health services is a good way to prevent a pandemic.
3
Sure, let’s blame globalism. Because the Black Death that spread from China to Byzantium to Norway was so easy to contain in an isolationist splintered world with small population! The only salvation from coronavirus will come from the maligned pharmaceutical industry - the preferred target of demagogues on the left and the right. They are already working on a vaccine. And while antibiotics are of no use against a viral infection, they are also developing an anti-viral medication that will ease the symptoms and ultimately reduce the disease to a variant of bad flu. But meanwhile let’s vote for a candidate who makes Big Pharma the target of his populist rhetoric. You don’t need Big Pharma - until you do.
1
It is refreshing to hear a conservative admit that Big Government is needed for an effective response to global threats, and for once not be referring to the military. However, Ross’s instincts in this column betray his predilection to conspiracy and bias over science. Until we have effective antiviral medication or a vaccine, what would be the purpose of expanded testing for the novel coronavirus, assuming such a rapid field test were even available? Without more data on the pathogen’s infectivity, virulence and route of transmission, what effective means would we have a for quarantine, short of inhumane total isolation of the infected a la leper colonies? The current estimate of the coronavirus case fatality rate (~3%) is not much different from that of measles or whooping cough in an unvaccinated population. There is no scientifically sound argument to be made for escalating public concern. Ross would love for the coronavirus pandemic to fit into his thesis of decadence and globalism (and perhaps help him sell a few books), but we should give him no more credit than we give John Bolton. He is asking for the equivalent of “TERRORISM THREAT LEVEL—RED” which frankly does no more than induce panic.
1
Mr. Douthat is right about one thing: our response to Coronavirus does explain a lot.
Primarily that people are more frightened about Coronavirus than about the yearly influenza which has not only infected more but also killed many times world wide (and an estimated 30,000 will die of the flu in our country this year while so far not one has died of Coronavirus) and end up buying worthless masks but don't get the flu vaccine explains why Trump is our president.
People refuse to recognize reality. It's like going back to the Salem witch trials where science and logic were pushed aside and replaced by fear and hysteria.
And as to Mr. Douthat's book he mentions. I saw him on "Morning Joe" this morning and he said that no time in our history has our country been so drugged up with opioids and marijuana. He may be right about marijuana but with regard to opioids if he knew anything about American history, he'd know that the opioid epidemic of the last quarter of the 19th century was far worse than anything we've experienced since. Opioids and, by the way, cocaine could be bought without any prescription and were contained in many patent medicines.
Mr. Douthat and his fellow Times columnists have a right to their opinions. I don't believe they have a right to their own set of facts.
2
'So already, the virus has exposed a clear weak spot in what you might call the liberal-globalist imagination: an overzealous “remain calm” spirit in the face of the real risks of a hyper-connected world,' states Douthat.
So wrong. I am confirmed liberal and I do not share this overzealous "remain calm" spirit. In reality, we have a president who ignores any and everything that does not play into his richest, most powerful-man-in-the world vision. This pandemic does not, hence the downplay. Liberals, for all Douthat's "splaining", do not control this scenario. Thanks to complicit sycophants, the president is in complete control. It will be interesting to see who he throws under the bus this time if this blows up.
It may be the time to see if the McConnells, Grahams, Cruz's, Barrs, etc. get what they wanted, or more importantly, what they deserve. Maybe a million or so dead, low class Americans is exactly what they have in mind. Certainly those who live in ivory towers with private doctors to care only for their families are significantly less at risk. And who will miss a bunch of sick seniors? (Think of all that cheap real estate.) Certainly not those who wish to divert Medicare funding to, say, build a 1000 mile vanity wall.
3
HIV should have taught us that the main problem is a lot of people being infected without knowing it till it was too late. Is it allergy to learning?
Oh, God, Douthat's column links to *another* Wall Street Journal editorial, this one by Scott Gottlieb. His argument is, "let's get things done quickly by skipping randomized controlled trials" (and regulations), or, in layman's language, "let's get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant." https://www.aei.org/op-eds/why-does-the-u-s-have-so-few-confirmed-coronavirus-cases/
To realize the hypocrisy of this WSJ editorial, you have to know that Republican administrations, on the state and federal levels, have been cutting back on the very public health agencies that we need in predictable epidemics just like this. https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/
Gottlieb's most exasperating point is:
"Fifth, federal public-health authorities should equip their local counterparts with the funding, staff and supplies they need to fight an uncertain viral threat. Preventing outbreaks will depend largely on 3,000 local health authorities across the country."
Yes, *somebody* should replace the budgets that were cut from local public health authorities by Republican (and some Democratic) state budget-cutters. During the New England Compounding Center meningitis outbreak (when Gottlieb was in the FDA), it turned out that local health departments no longer had the resources to identify and monitor infections.
Where are your editorials from the public health budget-cutting, Gottlieb?
4
This is an excerpt from Heather Cox Richardson's daily newsletter. "Last weekend, as I wrote here, the World health Organization suggested that the window for containing the coronavirus was closing, but many scientists think the window has already closed.
And yet, the U.S. seems to be unprepared. In May 2018, under then-National Security Advisor John Bolton, the administration got rid of the official in charge of overseeing a U.S. response to a pandemic and disbanded his global health security team. Today Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli went on Twitter to ask people if they, too, were having trouble accessing the coronavirus map maintained by Johns Hopkins University. “"Has the Johns Hopkins map of the coronavirus stopped working for other people, or just me?" Cuccinelli tweeted. "I just tried again, and it looks like Johns Hopkins put the information behind a membership wall of some kind. Seems like bad timing to stop helping the world with this (previously) useful resource. Here's hoping it goes back up soon."
I've been looking for some in depth reporting on how our government is responding to this crisis, beyond the stock market's reaction of course. Trump's denial of real threats to our national security and his fabrications of artificial threats do not inspire my confidence. Please, someone, get on this.
3
Wash your hands.
Don’t go to the mall.
Order from Amazon.
Watch Netflix.
Communicate via the internet and the cell phone you frequently sterilize.
Eat less meat, or none at all.
Quarantine illnesses and be a responsible member of your community and work place by not going in when you’re not feeling well.
Telecommute.
Go on Virtual Reality vacations.
Read more books.
Watch less network television.
Love the people around you.
Appreciate your health.
Beware of pandemics being the cause of the suspension of our democracy.
Oh.
And,
Eat more peaches.
3
"The curious absence of hysteria probably reflects an interplay between polarization and ideological preconceptions. "
Uhh, we just had a 1,000 point drop in the Dow, as well as every major news outlet pointing out for the last week that we are either on the verge of or in a pandemic. So what do we get in this essay? Risible nonsense.
4
It's a test we will fail with an incompetent buffoon in the White House and people like Ken Cuccinelli on his "Coronavirus Task Force." Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't this the same Cuccinelli who couldn't find an online map of virus hotspots produced by Johns Hopkins University. And isn't Trump the same president whose budget cuts CDC spending, having already got rid of a team of world-class infectious disease and public health experts who used to advise the National Security Council.
4
You're right, Ross. It's also a test for journalists to show some restraint in their hyperbole, but I think we are failing in that regard, too.
1
Trump is in the WH, the GOP controls the senate, and stops anything the Dems in the House, do, and yet you find the ability to blame them as well? I do fear the lack of urgency - a friend - a Trumper - got the message from a CDC video that all is well. Trump tells everyone what he wants them to believe, not the truth. He knows if it pans out as expected, it will eliminate his claim of a great economy. While he continues to lie, eventually he will be forced to point blame, as nothing he does is ever wrong. Just ask him.
1
There will be accountability in China. People will oppose the Communist regime especially when the truth emerges. It’s started. Two unimpeachable independent sources assert
that the current coronavirus pandemic did not originate in that wet street market in the city of Wuhan. The Chinese Academy of Sciences asserted Friday on the distribution platform ChinaXiv, that “the SARS-CoV-2 source at the … market was imported from elsewhere”. That was the opinion expressed previously by the highly respected Lancet which concluded that 13 of the original 41 patients had no links to the Wuhan wet market.
So where did it come from? Most likely it escaped from the Wuhan Virology Institute’s BSL4 laboratory down the road from the marketplace. Lab mistakes or lapses in biosafety procedures are often unreported, even if known or realized at all. This one lab in Wuhan is the only declared and official government-run BSL4 lab in China. It studies mutations and modifies corona viruses. Lab incidents are quite common in China. During the previous SARS epidemic, that virus was carried out of a BSL3 lab in Beijing by two different lab technicians. Xi Jinping and high ranking officials have recently alluded to and issued guidance directives to Virology labs and the need for greater vigilance to “protect the People”. The coming blowback against the CCP will be substantial when the truth comes out.
1
Globalism's disorder? The United States refuses to participate in the International Criminal Court. It withdraws from the Paris Climate Accord. It withdraws from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran's nuclear development. It ridicules the role of the United Nations and ignores its near unanimous resolutions on Israel and the Palestinians. Its funding as a percent of GDP for international health and relief organizations is a scandal.
Nationalism is a useless and destructive tool in an age of international travel and trade and light speed world wide communication and access to data. Those leaders who preach to its seductive and destructive siren call must be rejected.
1
As a liberal I worry less about Xenophobia and more that it's just callous and self-serving to worry about supply chains and the stock market when people in China are suffering and dying. But leave it to Ross (and Rush Limbaugh) to find a political angle.
1
The technology for a rapid diagnostic is well established. A readout in 90 minutes is doable. Why isn’t this being deployed? The CDC has great expertise. The only conclusion is that this is a failure of our political leadership in Washington DC. And spare us the false equivalence Mr. Douthat. This would NOT happen under a Democrat administration. We are learning that xenophobia can also be a fatal disease.
2
Douthat’s need to blame everything on liberals never ceases to amaze me. Globalism is now a “liberal” cause? Just who is it that’s usually protesting globalism at G7 summits?
In his desperate need to somehow, someway connect the threat of a pandemic to liberals, he’s not even connecting the dots correctly. It’s not international trade that’s the driver of the majority of international travel, nor immigration, to pick a current conservative bugaboo. Short of a massive change in human behavior, or a total meltdown of civilization, people are going to travel. To avoid the problem you’d need truly draconian isolationism.
Addressing the issue shouldn’t be a political football. Historically in the US it hasn’t been a conservative vs. liberal issue, even though Douthat tries to spin it that way here. The top-down reality denial of the Trump administration is an aberration, not the norm.
2
All Mr. Douthat can talk about is liberal globalism. I don't think it was liberal globalists who said today, "The virus is going to go away" -- it was the president who says all the best words. And I don't think there was any holding back the alarm by liberal globalists -- the president, Rush Limbaugh, and the Fox Disinformation machine have all stated or implied that it is just a ruse to prevent Trump's re-election. Ross, just clam up and help fight the outbreak. Your unending crusade to blame both sides for any and all things and then hope everyone finds religion is tiresome.
2
Should China be held financially liable for damages resulting from the disease they that created?
1
"by liberalism’s ideological bias toward global openness..."
Amazing how you can rewrite history to suit your personal narrative. It was union-busting conservatives in the 80s and 90s who gleefully offshored high-paying American jobs to second world countries. What economists might call a "bias toward global openness."
3
For all our research, data gathering and debate, we really don't know what the virus is. Scientists say they are non-life entities that need to enter a cell to replicate.
We do know that they are capable of mutating, and that viruses can be murderous or beneficial to sustaining life as we know it. The world's oceans would be walkable, greenish-brown plains of sludge without them.
I hate to say this, but to keep the bad ones from destroying millions of lives we need authoritarian reactions.
"The 1918 influenza pandemic (January 1918 – December 1920; colloquially known as Spanish flu) was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic, the first of the two pandemics involving H1N1 influenza virus, with the second being the swine flu in 2009.[1] It infected 500 million people around the world,[2] or about 27% of the then world population of between 1.8 to 1.9 billion, including people on remote Pacific islands and in the Arctic. The death toll is estimated to have been 40 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million." from wiki
1
I am becoming fatigued at the overuse of “surreal”. Tell the people in Wuhan they are having a fantasy experience as they try to survive the facts of a significant viral epidemic. Events like this have been predicted based on factual models by experts long enough for board games and movies to be based on them.
A virus does not respect a wall, a country, xenophobia, racism, kindness or cruelty.
The way to combat the virus is with science, truth, openness and cooperation with worldwide organizations
to manage the virus. This is the very antithesis of Donald Trumps mantra of red hats and jeering crowds, hate
and disinformation. I doubt that he, the resident of the USA can even comprehend ways to protect us.
1
"Thus the liberal instinct toward minimization: It’s not much worse than the flu," No Mr Douthat, our instinct is not towards minimizing this this very real threat. But, I see just like many of your ilk, you can't help yourself when you have to admit to the continued gross ineptitude in your party, you have to take a shot at the OTHER side because, God forbid, the other side not be just as inept. Many get their news from PBS, I don't see the minimizing of a pandemic threat. And, as you've offered, NYT is doing well to balance its reporting with facts and logic that should go a long way to inform rather than panic. But, you can't help yourself when it comes to the GOP instinct towards partisan behavior. Trump has disappointed you as he's disappointed many but to continue to draw false equivalencies helps no-one but those who need an excuse to vote for him again.
2
The "remain calm" came from none other than the president, pontificated that the coming spring-weather would destroy the virus.
It did not come from the evil liberal-globalist imagination as Mr. Douthat opines.
3
The virulent spread of insular nationalism - ignorant, dogmatic, walled-off from the world - leaves all of us tragically exposed, both medically and morally.
A multinational approach to coronavirus is urgently needed - because we are learning all too quickly, walls or no walls, on this planet we all call home, what goes around comes around.
2
“The White House global health “czar” was supposed to coordinate international, national, state and local organisations, public and private, to confront a global epidemic, backed by the direct authority of the President.
After he became national security adviser, John Bolton eliminated the office as part of an NSC reorganisation, as he did not see global health issues as a national security priority.”
(The Guardian)
3
Wow, two-thirds of this column was sensible, reasonable and fact-based, before it veered off into the familiar anti-liberal bias.
Ross is right - a too-easily-spread pandemic is a very serious threat, one that must be taken seriously, and against which “remain calm” remonstrances can actually be damaging.
However... put on the other side of the scale a President and administration who are not only openly racist, they are also openly anti-science. Destroying government agencies, instituting propaganda where truth should be, replacing the honest and competent with the sycophantic and corrupt and pretending the unfolding catastrophe of climate change doesn’t exist don’t bode well for dealing with any major crisis not of their own making.
Climate change will be a significant factor in experiencing more and more such diseases developing and making the jump from animals to humans. I wouldn’t be confident about facing such a threat with this “leadership” in charge.
2
Well Ross- this is an international concern. But you don't say- and the media glides over the 17+ THOUSAND people in the US who have died from the FLU. That is an epidemic that is here, it is prevalent and it is killing people now. Where are the headlines about that?
U.S. stocks plunge as coronavirus spreads; investors concerned about global economic slowdown.
B- b- but what about MAGA?
Mr. Douthat is (painfully obvious) correct. This is where reality hits a reality TV persona out of his depth as a president, revealing his isolationist hobby horse to be the pale horse of the Apocalypse.
"How's your 401K?" Trump asks, as if he single-handedly is in control of anything.
1
Obviously Douthat has not been reading the Wall Street Journal, which has been "weaponizing" the virus in a dangerous way through its racist, sensationalist headlines. Its purpose is to bloody China's economy and its integration into the global economy, in the damaging Trumpian spirit. China ejected three WSJ journalists over this, though the fault lay with the WSJ headline writers, not the journalists.
Although China's initial response at the lowest political levels (municipal) was dangerously repressive of information, since then the self-discipline of its people in self-quarantine, as directed by the government, is truly remarkable.
This piece is one long build-up to promoting his book. I’m surprised he's allowed to get away with it.
4
Hey Ross. You need to understand something. Pointing out that the White House is unprepared and inept is not a partisan item. It's a national security issue. I'm really baffled that you haven't figured this out yet.
2
Trump is a well-known germaphobe. That’s probably not a bad thing now but with a virus that is highly transmissible even in the absence of symptoms, it was folly to ever think it could be contained no matter what any government did.
Here's an ideal situation for Trump to tell people not to buy from Amazon as the goods are Chinese and therefore infected. Only, there's his cherished stock market faltering; the "beautiful" wall is not built, and the Taliban will wave goodbye to us as they blow up Afghanistan. What's the poor guy to do but give Jeff Bezos and Xi Jinping a pass!
2
Americans have taken good governance for granted, the best of a sound bureaucracy. Now with global disasters & disease threats to homeland security, Trump has either left crucial posts vacant or hired ignorant lackeys or anti-science delusionals.
He fired both the head of the US pandemic response team in 2018 and the global health representative on the NSC.
Competence is not his criteria for serving the public good. It is plausible that Trump sees any serious federal mobilization against coronavirus as a threat to the stock market and, thus, his reelection. He relies on cover up, bluster and hype to sustain his sense of strength. These are limp when facing an insidious viral epidemic.
2
I wonder why Ross does not think this is a sign from God. The corona virus appears to be hardest on old men. That must mean something. At the very least it is ironic that the old men who cruelly rule are at the most risk. It certainly is funny to me. In fact, I'd say it's hilarious.
The corana virus is set to hit much of Trump's base harder than the rest of the country. If I weren't an atheist I'd almost think it was God taking revenge on evil.
2
Understanding the physiology of viruses helps here. Viruses are able to mutate and spread only if a population is sufficiently dense. The evolution of measles from rinderpest in human civilizations occurred when our average population density became greater than 300,000 in middle eastern cities in the Neolithic era (https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1743-422X-7-52). Many new viruses emerge from China, and they have a very large population grouped together in major centers which allow viruses to mutate and spread quickly. Our weakness and our strength as a race right now is that there are so many of us. For a virus to be devastating, it would have to kill billions of us. That isn't going to happen. Of course, the illnesses and deaths that do occur are tragic for individuals. Our fears that affect our businesses are unfortunate, because we do have healthcare infrastructure in place to mitigate the mutation and spread of any given virus. Excellent. We can focus on assuaging our fears. That will mitigate some damage. We can accept that viruses are living creatures with a predictable physiology, just as we are living creatures with a predictable physiology. We will survive this just fine. We will provide compassion and care for those afflicted, even in the USA where the healthcare industry and its insatiable greed will likely be responsible for as many deaths as the virus itself. We could work on that here in the USA, but even so, we will be fine.
All you folks out there just back from Anywhere, and all you folks with "regular old" flu: Now is the time to come to the aid of your country and write letters to the prez full of glowing praise for him. Don't worry about coughing or whatever as you write - it's the thought that counts. Make sure to lick the envelope seal and also the stamp, though self-stick stamps are still acceptable.
Let's cheer up the president with lots of very positive letters!
2
Trump sabotaged America’s coronavirus response when the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure.
Today it's coronavirus, tomorrow it will be a contaminated environment thanks to Trump's changes to environmental regulations.
1
What a stark contrast! The progressive media sworn to uphold one political party over the other shows professionalism regarding a disease but reverts to caveman-style huddling-around-campfires logic when covering politics or government.
Gritting your teeth in trained hatred is no way to go through life.
Response to Human caused Global warming was the first test, ...being spectacularly failed as we speak,..the pattern of the response to the Corona virus seems similar,..right down to Rush Limbaugh’s usual irresponsible, self serving blather.
And with a president who’s default is to lie every time he opens his mouth, and gut gov’t agencies by installing his incompetent proxies we can be pretty assured this will not go well.
1
I’m concerned that with all the Trump corruption, revenge firings and total disregard for the American people that the US is not equipped to handle and contain a breakout here. Maybe the next Revolutionary War will be carried out by a virus so tiny that it cannot be seen by the naked eye.
1
It is true that the silver lining of the coronavirus crisis is the testing of China centric structure of global supply chain - the single point of failure. All companies now should focus on making their supply chain reliable and self healing and this process may bring many parts of the supply chains back to US by employing robot controlled digital factories. This will bring manufacturing back to America and eliminate the security exposure of current system. Over time China will be the largest economy of the world and if Chinese Communist Party is not destroyed - US will be threatened China in both economically and militarily. The present technology of military eliminates the protection of long distance separation and US will have to face militarily with China.
One interesting point this crisis has exposed - the poor preparedness of the globalized world for pandemic - we need to focus closely on three things (1) WHO to establish standard protocol for establishing quickly the infection rap rate and death rate and incubation period, (2) the procedure to share the information between the countries and (3) institutional structure for global community to attack the crisis.
1
So "globalism" is to blame? And "liberal globalism" especially.
Once again, it's a Them or Ss kind of argument. Will this writer begin to think more truly global? If we do all live on one planet together, as we have seen from space, it cannot be any one ideology that has caused, what now could become, a pandemic.
I suppose, the White invaders that brought the Native Peoples chicken pox and sexually transmitted diseases were also "Liberal Globalists?"
As long as humans have traveled the planet, even what we consider now, in short hops, they have always brought their invasive species, cattle, the grasses that now grow on our continent, starlings, all manner of diseases with them where ever they went.
This argument of Us and Them, Liberals and Conservatives is very over worn and can only stretch so far.
Let's all wash our hands, do what we can to contain it, send help to those suffering from COVD-19 and forget about Us and Them while we weather out this new contagion together on our very small and fragile planet.
1
The “corporations” of the Middle Ages sent ships to China for silks and brought back rats carrying fleas with the Black Plague. Columbus brought European contagion to the Caribbean in 1492. The Dole company carried some of those same illnesses (measles) to Hawaii in the 19th century.
I have no idea why Douthat thinks globalization is an invention of modern liberalism. I don’t understand how he lays every evil in the world at the feet of liberalism. I fear it lies in a very warped interpretation of the teachings of Jesus. How sad.
2
National Emergency on the way. We have to protect Americans. Build wall! No immigrants! Marshall Law! No Election!
(A Trump reaction to a pandemic)
1
In the last paragraphs he came to his main point: he has a book to sell.
Wow, you forgot to mention a dismantled US government which reduces our ability to respond to a crisis. And seriously do you ever stop with the "liberals this, liberals that" argument?
2
Once again Douthat 's narrow.perspective on the world and politicization of everything is grossly misleading. Not blaming capitalist business greed.for.globalization on "liberals" is absolute nonsense
2
Now for the alternative facts virus update. “The stock markets are doing fantastic”. I just can’t wait till he starts showing up with a mask at his rallies.
2
We had a flu pandemic a hundred years ago and we didn't even have commercial air travel back then. These diseases spread because they are highly contagious, not because of left-leaning globalist elites.
1
It is a test: Can people learn from mistakes of history or are they too selfish to change?
If China is serious about preventing these types of outbreaks it would close all of these "food" markets that rely on eating animals, especially endangered animals. I have little hope the Chinese government will act and the world will again experience a similar outbreak in the future.
3
Once in a while a nugget is found among the rough. Mr Douthat might be onto something; albeit probably stumbling under some guise of never-Trumping.
Some cities across the world are on lock-down. Whose policy have they followed? Whose climate policy is being followed? To answer China, and or Asia to a lesser extent, is correct. Why? While hopefully not a complete distrust of Western ingenuity, it sure seems like a skepticism of Western intent(s). Certainly on climate; as should be.
If we survive the pandemic “it will be more from luck than prudence.”
Douthat describes American healthcare system perfectly; a pandemic would just exacerbate its giant “wheel-of-fortune” nature. Those who are lucky enough to be rich will be tested and treated or can stay home and recover. Same with those on Medicare and Medicaid. Everyone else unlucky to have a job without sick leave or private insurance with massive deductibles, and hospitals that will sue you for your every last dime for failure to pay, will have the giant wheel of misfortune land on their number. And they will go to work and avoid the doctor out of financial necessity, making a pandemic worse.
If America wants a “prudent” healthcare system that would wisely care for her people in pandemics and otherwise, everyone would have insurance, and it wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg to use it. America would have sick leave. But under Republican leadership such ideas and people who promote them, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are considered “radical” because the lucky rich don’t want to pay 2 more cents in taxes. In fact, when it comes to healthcare and pandemics Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders promoting Medicare for All are the most prudent people standing.
4
This might turn out to be Trump's Katrina moment, which could also trigger a recession all before the election in November. His gross mismanagement of the government will hurt him and us.
During the Civil War Lincoln said "the almighty has his own intentions." Maybe this is how God votes. I kind of saw the Great Recession in the fall of 2008 in similar terms.
Trump might wanna rethink his "I don't need to ask for foregiveness" thing, but everyone has to travel that road on their own path.
4
I've never panicked about a public health issue like this before despite having multiple autoimmune diseases which make me incredibly vulnerable to any virus.
I was frightened when the H1N1 struck in 2009 yet understood that the US government was competent, well-funded, organized, had excellent leadership, starting with President Obama, and that all agencies were prepared.
Does anyone believe Trump with his incompetent GOP sycophants who run everything yet don't believe in science can handle this? Their contempt for scientific fact is why they ignored for over a month Congressional Democrats demanding more money and resources to battle the Coronavirus.
Trump already dismantled much of our national and local defenses against pandemics, then pushed for more massive cuts last March, including a 12% cut to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a 10% cut for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
CDC cuts were a staggering $750 for 2019 alone. Trump proposed destroying federal and state public health protections after his cuts already crippled the capacity of federal, state, and local public health departments to respond to this dire health crisis.
Trump sought to cut $30 million more for public health preparedness and response and over $78 million for immunization funding, including the development of immunizations against new deadly strains like Coronavirus. Finally, Trump is zeroing out all funding for epidemiology research at the state level.
3
No more complacency about the coronavirus! If that's what Rush had to say on the subject, we'd all better start worrying.
1
This virus or something very similar is likely to be the Malthusian event of our age. Malthus, a philosopher of the early 19th century, wrote that population growth went unchecked until it outpaced the food supply. Then famine and disease reduced the population. This cycle is supported by the rise and crash of population in wave like pattern for hundreds of years in Europe and beyond. International food trade and transportation have allowed the population to grow unchecked in the 20-21 century. A virus now appears likely to replace starvation as the Malthusian factor.
4
Mr. Douthat gives a narrow political view of much larger threat to both US and world welfare. Our country is a good example of how special interests have corroded our healthcare system along with many other areas of public need.
In 2018 various private healthcare groups spent $281.5 million to buy influence from our politicians. (statista.com) Profit motive rules, regardless of the public health implications.
This budding pandemic is but another example of how expendable human life and health has become.
5
Liberal and public health expert here. I am not pushing a “remain calm at all costs” mindset. Follow the best available medical advice at the time (remember, this may change as we get more information about the new pathogen) and get your information from credible sources (i.e. not social media).
Furthermore, what I am suggesting is we need to provide ample funding for a robust global pandemic and epidemiological surveillance system that will better prepare us for this coronavirus scenario and future emerging emerging pathogens (an increase in which is predicted due to environmental/climate change).
The real question here is: how badly have the (largely) right-wing attempts to defund and discredit all kinds of science and evidence-based knowledge affected our willingness to confront an issue that requires a) listening to the experts, b) trusting advice from authorities, and c) providing equal care and epidemiological surveillance to rich and poor alike?
Right-wingers may yet come to reap the anti-science seeds they’ve sown.
14
Douthat argues that it’s easy for candidates like Trump to diagnose problems and blame their opponents for not offering solutions. But then Douthat does the same thing.
Where are HIS proposals? What would HE have us do?
It’s not enough to tell us both Dems and Reps are letting their ideology prevent them from acting. What’s working, Ross? What would YOU have us do — after we take our heads out of the sand?
2
I find it surprising Mr. Douthat can address the subject so directly without mentioning climate change at all. My wife's first job was working on the ecological impact of climate change through infectious diseases. Specifically virus mutations originating from, you guessed it, Asian bats. The risk to global supply chains has been well understood for over two decades. The research was out there. Investors, both liberal and conservative, didn't want to listen.
We now find ourselves in a vulnerable global position. The humanitarian cost is ultimately the same in the end. Planes travel regardless of supply chains. Perhaps the disease spreads more slowly. However, a pandemic disease is a pandemic disease. Everyone is exposed eventually. De-globalization would only prevent death in the sense that we might have more time to develop a vaccine.
Economically though, the fallout was inevitable. The IPCC has been talking about these outcomes for longer than I've known how to define climate change. It's impossible to sustain global interconnected economic relationships in an increasingly uncertain and collapsing ecological system. The costs and risks eventually become unsustainable.
That's why the IPCC repeatedly warned global GDP would fall permanently if climate change was not addressed BEFORE we start seeing deleterious economic impacts. That's also why climate change is considered on of gravest national security risks. Coronavirus is the proof we didn't want to see.
3
It appears that the Chinese political leadership doesn’t like facts, experts, transparency and whistleblowers. “Fake news” said the Party ...defined as whatever in non-fake reality is not The Party Line. That which doesn’t make The Dear Leader look good must be aggressively opposed. And the medical professional/whistleblower must be trolled and punished! Alternative facts are happy facts—right up to, but not including, The End.
Unlike America 2020, of course.
4
Limbaugh: "being weaponized by the press to bring down D.T."
This is not a good time to have a president who thinks of only himself, and his re election.
This may be the crisis that we all feared D.T would have to pretend to deal with_____because_______you can't believe a word he says.
8
Is the privatized for profit medical system in USA capable of taking on corvid-19 if it becomes a pandemic? Would the profiteers profit off this? Would uninsured people be denied medical assistance? To this Canadian who is appalled by the USA medical system, it looks like many Americans would die and the disease would be uncontrolled due to the weaknesses of the for profit medical system.
14
@Canuckistani covid-19 (autocorrect!)
First, I do believe we need a better medical safety net in the US,; but, why would t5he US system fare any worse than Canada or any other more socialized system? We have uninsured who get the flu now and are cared for. Guess we’ll soon see, but your comments have no basis than your implied hope that it fails.
@Ace No hopes for failure -- the opposite. To me your system has already failed because so many people are bankrupted and die due to the profiteering nature of your potentially excellent medical system.
Any new system will have faults. Testing will expose the faults and hopefully make things better. Our "hyper-connected world" is what it is and we ain't going back.
Whether this resulted from a "liberal-globalist imagination" or a Republican push for free trade and open markets is certainly debatable.
Either way, I would rather put my faith in a party that believes in science, than one that demonizes it for their own personal gain.
16
The central idea of liberal democracy is rational self-government. Unfortunately for conservatives, this means logical processes and cooperation over simplistic common sense and brute force.
Remember Obama's response to the Ebola outbreak? He immediately put a process in place at the CDC and throughout the government that united the world on a way to proceed. Trump, on the other hand, handles the situation by rage tweeting against democrats and pardoning political cronies. His only care, as usual, is the stock market and his own reelection.
Instead of providing cover for a thoughtless president, Douthat should behave like a real conservative intellectual and decry Trump's anti-rationalism in the face of a complicated and very serious situation that must be dealt with in an orderly and scientific manner.
6
Funny, when I saw ‘liberal democracy’ I thought you meant something else. You believed only liberals have the capacity to run the country. But I should have know that because conservatives would just say ‘democracy’ including all POVs, only liberals believe they have the only opinion that matters.
Ross, no need to go hysterical on us.
We just have to switch our priorities: from economic growth at all costs to a model of social and economic justice that takes science seriously.
Go Bernie!
11
Like Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba,China and Russia.
I can't help being amazed at the irony of a tiny and not especially deadly virus having the ability to stop this glorious capitalist global economy in its tracks. It demonstrates the fragility of the economic growth being celebrated by the political establishment and in the mainstream media, which actually is a house of cards that can be toppled by something that can't even be seen with most microscopes. Along with global warming, Mama Nature is clearly telling us to "check our privilege"-- that is, recognize that we humans do not have the standing to consider ourselves the best judges of how to treat our home planet, especially since we have made a mess of it. Too bad most of us aren't listening.
4
An alternative processing of the US-China relationship does not see it as threatening. Instead, I would say that it offers reason for hope. Imagine where we would be if the these ties were far weaker. The mutual economic stakes would be lower. We would know less about the disease. Its spread may well be extended are a result. The current mobilization of resources and global response is the direct result of these ties.
2
@PJM
Things are not as bad as they appear. The global economic market has its pluses and minuses. On one hand, China has been outed as a formidable competitor that steals from us. On the other hand, its high visibility has put pressure on it to respond to the virus responsibly.
Its restriction of movement is a plus. Its treatment of its citizens who have or are suspected of having the virus show some pretty horrible stories. Work to be done there.
The world is a messy place. People love to blame and point fingers. This is being handled better than pandemics before. That's progress.
1
I look at this another way. It has to do with who we in North America feel closest to culturally. The virus has been on public radar for over a month, when it was centered in China and perhaps South Korea. But when did the muck truly hit the fan? When it crossed officially into Italy with a gateway directly into Europe. Europeans are Us. Asians are Them. China has more of a direct bearing on the global economy than perhaps even Europe, yet the outbreak was downplayed in the media even as China struggled with it. But the minute it appears across the Atlantic, we take it seriously. There is a lesson here, somewhere.
4
@Rick Morris This story has been a headline in the NYT for weeks! If you didn't see it you weren't paying attention.
@479
But when did American and European stock markets react? Yesterday.
It stretches the point to say that politics is at the core of our lack of action in America over the coronavirus. It is because: we don't have free-ranging contagion here yet. And we have made good decisions in dealing with Americans exposed oversees when reentering the Country. When we do have a home-grown outbreak, if we do, there will be a wide and highly forceful domestic action. But, truly, does every issue have to be broken down to "polarization and ideological preconceptions"? Ugh. America is still alot more than that.
3
Decadence of the Western World seems to be the underlying theme of the article. And, as usual, it is used as a segue to criticize the United States of America in general, and the present Administration in particular. Globalization is now threatened. Questions: Where else would you want to be on the planet under a pandemic? And what other nation is doing more, outside its own borders, to preclude the spread of the disease? Globalization may, or may not, be a panacea for the World's present difficulties (and there are many), but name any other country which has made greater sacrifices for its present strength than the USA.
3
One key point about the coronavirus (like ebola) that's rarely mentioned is that it's a direct result of eating meat. Of course we don't eat bats in the US (or dogs) and presumably our slaughterhouses are better maintained than China's but many disease outbreaks in the US are from tainted meat, factory feed lots pollute our waterways and antibiotic resistant microbes result from heavy use of antibiotics on animals. Maybe it's a good time to consider greatly reducing or ending the practice of eating dead animals.
5
@Tibby Elgato Live animals don't taste good.
2
Since Trump was elected, there has been an anticipation of the "big one" -- that is, a market calamity. I listen to business radio daily (ex., Bloomberg, CNBC, etc.). Concerns are always mentioned by hosts. Guests are not seeing it. They talk about how strong the economy is.
Companies are taking a "wait-and-see" approach to the virus. They are not overreacting. Political pundits and the media, on the other hand...
1
This disease emerged from an unsanitary "wild meat" market in a country where unscientific traditions about the curative powers of exotic rare animal parts still hold appeal.
It was quickly identified by a doctor as a threat. He raised an urgent call for help, but was arrested and told to keep his mouth shut. He's since died of the infection he warned about.
It took hold in a country where masses of humanity are crammed together in huge apartment blocks, ideal for making transmission of a communicable disease easy to spread quickly.
The test is not about globalization or whatever some don't like about "liberals".
It's about: do we believe in science and facts, or tradition and the status quo?
9
@The Poet McTeagle We do know that the current "administration" does NOT believe in science & facts.
2
The fatality rate of this infection is 2% mostly attacking the elderly and those with compromised immune systems.
Wall Street is not an indicator of either the response of the WHO or national governments. Stock markets panic for one reason or another, but it has very little bearing on the actual statistics of this infection.
6
The causes of the corona virus epidemic are too many people on Earth, crowding into cities like Wuhan, too much intercontinental travel, and inadequate public health facilities and fewer researchers Thirty years ago, with polio and small pox being nearly eradicated, health officials were saying that the age of infectious diseases was over and that government had to focus its resources on overcoming chronic illnesses like heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Diseases mostly of old age.
Years before, the eminent bacteriologist, Rene Dubos ,wrote a prescient book called Mirage of Health, in which he argued that infectious disease would always be us. Viruses and bacteria would mutate spontaneously, with variants selected by the spread of anti-biotics and environmental conditions.
There is not enough funding for research on animal diseases, which can sometimes spread to humans.
Too much of our federal budget is being spent on armaments; not enough on public health.
9
I agree that it does not help to panic. However, the US is entering this pandemic without our Pandemic Response chain of command who all were fired in 2018 and never replaced. Money was recently taken from the CDC for other pet projects, so it is currently underfunded. Federal Reserve Board Chair Powell said the current over $1 trillion federal budget wasn't sustainable in a strong economy. He said that it could prevent the central bank from having ammunition left (to lower interest rates) if the economy takes a downturn. The pandemic is effecting the economy. We may be just fine, but it would feel a lot better if we were prepared. We are not.
10
@Hope , I am sure the Wall will keep the base safe and secure from the foreign contagion right?!
1
And finally we see the downside of exporting all work to a semi-developed place with few regulations & little real health infrastructure.
I have been following this story, reading a variety of sources and what I’m taking away is this: people most at risk are those over 60, who also have chronic diseases. (Same group who has most to fear from the flu. ) Many people who get this disease are being referred to as carriers; which is to say, you can get it and end up not very sick.
Hopefully now Republicans are beginning to understand the importance of public health organizations and planning and will reverse the cuts and neglect.
And Democrats will continue their response of vigilance without hysteria.
3
Ross must believe that God sent the Coronavirus to test globalists and to exploit American misgovernment and mistrust. Otherwise, I don't think that a virus can think hard enough to do that. Diseases are not generally "poised" to do much of anything except find a host to live on and make ill.
How we handle such epidemics is surely tested by our medical facilities, doctors and nurses. However, one thing to keep in mind - Viruses can "change" when getting little action and become more potent - or simply die from disappointment.
1
This is where having a leader who understands science and has a history of working with healthcare would come in handy, but she isn't President.
29
Our patched-up, profit-driven and largely inaccessible healthcare system is SO not ready for anything of this sort. So many people I know in NYC basically stay home and resort to home remedies rather than go to overcrowded offices, clinics and emergency rooms at which they have to argue about insurance and pay a TBA amount of money months later (in fact, I've got an unpleasant call over a medical bill waiting for me later today...). Frankly, I wonder how the USA would even know when the coronavirus is among us, given that most Americans now pretty much fight a lot of illnesses out "on their own"?
3
Seriously. Stop scoring points off each other. We need to all work together as a community to fight Sars-Cov-2.
3
Yes, this will help globalism get stronger; without the negative side that this natural movement towards greater harmony in the world has previously encompassed.
Here’s the real questions.
Is anyone confident that a government led by Donald Trump is going to be able to cope with the Coronavirus? Does anyone believe market-based solutions and deregulation will give us the answers we need? Do we think agencies suffering from budget and staff cuts under ‘acting’ leadership are going to be able to cope? Do we think a political party that rejects science when it conflicts with ideology will be able to cope with the reality of a disease that doesn’t care if you’re red or blue?
And of course the reflex Liberal-bashing over globalism ignores the fact that Liberals recognize that globalism is about more than trade wars and tariffs. It includes international cooperation on threats that affect the entire planet, and policies that are fact-based.
And if you think the primary politics are ignoring this, wait till the debate over healthcare intersects with people needing care in the face of a pandemic. Rationing, quarantines, Health system collapses - those are all issues that will affect the voters. Red States that rejected Medicaid expansion and have been seeing hospitals close are going to be in bad shape.
Pack lots of face masks and sanitizer Mr. Douthat, and count your blessings that you can afford healthcare.
7
@Larry Roth - - - So GLAD to see you approach things scientifically! For a moment there, I thought that you were one of those people who say that if we pay more taxes ans build up gov't power that it will fix global warming.
Anti-science has also held that the fertilized human ovum is not a new individual with all its unique qualities. Glad to see you're past all that.
According to Ross, “The coronavirus is a test, targeted precisely to the globalized order’s points of fracture and the mix of misgovernment and mistrust associated with the populist-establishment stalemate in the West.“ Finally, one of our more “neutral” observers of the public weal, got it right. The Populist vs Establishment stand-off is based upon a growing lack of trust in our governing institutions. However, the points of fracture and potentially devastating consequences are evident throughout the planet, not only in the West.
1
Despite the gradual rise in number of confirmed victims of this virus, travelers who are traveling to and from countries classified as level 1 by the CDC have not been closely monitored. Many travelers from countries such as Japan and Hong Kong are permitted to enter the U.S. without any questions or health checks. It is disheartening to hear ppl not taking this virus seriously and continue to travel to and from regions that have reported cases of rising contamination. Until people apply social consciousness and voluntarily receive health checks, this virus will only continue to claim more innocent victims
1
I can't help parsing this a little bit.
First your complaint that it's hard to get a perspective on this issue because of "...cable-news imperatives combining to make any domestic controversy feel like Watergate..." I'll remind you that the cable-news imperatives are a direct result of Reagan-era deregulation. So now are you willing to admit that news should be a regulated public service?
The you say the left has been quiet about this because of "[the left has] so far been outweighed by liberalism’s ideological bias toward global openness, its anxiety about saying or doing anything that might give aid and comfort to anti-globalization forces..." Balderdash and biased opinion. The left opposed globalism long before Trump was a gleam in Steve Banon's eye. It was the right-ward shift of the left that put it behind globalism. You claim to know the left, but you clearly are not paying attention.
You might be admitting there are problems with current globalism (unclear from your piece). But right-wing extremist populism is no basis for that analysis. I suggest you reread Ralph Nader for a start.
3
COVID offers the very real possibility of being the GOP's Katrina - but on an national scale this time.
Every other nation that has experienced outbreaks has had a public healthcare system open to all to cope with the sick. Not here.
The GOP has consistently blocked the creation of the structures we need to defend ourselves, and is tearing down the protections we do have in the CDC and science. All in the name of making the extremely rich a tad wealthier, but viruses don't respect stock portfolios the way Mitch does.
Even if you are wealthy with good health insurance, who is going to change your sheets, get your food or keep the lights on for you if the virus takes hold because people can't afford to go to the doctor?
7
I'm rather surprised no one on these op-ed pages has seen fit to point out the glaringly distorted priorities of the Trump administration with respect to threat assessment and its budget. The latest version, proposed in February, well after the coronavirus became a known threat, offered to cut HHS (which includes the CDC) by 9%. This includes cutting the CDC budget by upwards of half a billion dollars while at the same time requesting more than $2 billion for the boondoggle of a wall.
24
@MC Good point. These days, sadly, incompetence no longer stands out due to sheer magnitude of volume.
2
Ross,
Given the virus's low mortality rate we will no doubt muddle through this time. But epidemiologists warn us that it is only a matter of time before a virus mutates into truly virulent, deadly machine. Then there will be the impact of climate change, forcing the migration of millions and millions of people, altering food supplies, etc. This event is here, now. But your summation is off a bit. It's not that "we may know a lot about the resilience of our world-system..", we already do, and it is woefully unprepared. Leaders like Trump and Modi busily build themselves into authoritarians, fiddling away while Rome burns.
7
As usual, Douthat has it exactly backwards.
Every factor that is going to exacerbate and try our souls on this issue tracks back directly to mean spirited, selfish, greedy right wing policies,not liberal ideals. The latter is a mindset. The former is a set of concrete choices made by the GOP to defund every institution that could and should be on the frontlines in tackling this outbreak.
It is the right wing president that has defunded the UN, CDC, and WHO.
It is conservatives who snarl about any money spent on research and funding for diseases and disease control.
It is the GOP that refuses to hold this criminal presidency which-- on every single issue, chooses to do the wrong thing--in check.
It is conservatives who embrace an economic model that keeps the vast majority of citizens living paycheck to paycheck, a situation that ensures sick workers show up to work sick.
It is conservatives who block moves to offer nationalized healthcare to citizens who cannot afford to see doctors in the best of times much less in a crisis.
It is right wing fanatics who stoke fears of others, a situation the helps silo us in a country that refuses outreach with the global community that could provide resources.
So tell me again, Ross, (and this time with a straight face) how this can be chalked up to liberals. This article speaks to a level of cognitive dissonance that is surreal.
54
The Coronavirus may well be the test of Trump's destruction of our government's infrastructure and staffing. Right now, I don't feel very confident that there will be a quick, proactive response should the virus begin to pop up here in America on a larger scale. Trump is worried about his economic mojo and doesn't want it affected so it won't imperil his reelection bid. Perhaps, he and his administration should worry about the medical facilities and staff to deal with a wide outbreak here in America. Perhaps his administration should worry about how Americans will be quarantined to stop the quick spread. And perhaps Trump's administration should worry about the possible deaths that can and will happen with a wide outbreak of Coronavirus here in America.
6
Globalization is not a "liberal" idea, it is an economic idea which is by its nature is inevitable. "Trade" is the lifeblood of almost all economies.
Globalization cannot be 'tested'. The 'preparedness' of countries that are part of the global economy to deal with the crisis of an infection like Covid-19 (Corona Virus) IS at question.
Many countries around the world do not have the leadership, the infrastructure, the technology or the communication systems to deal with this or any similar infection.
An economic crash may threaten Trump's reelection, or the fear it engenders may be an aid to his second term election.
I've given up on understanding the American electorate.
6
I’ve not been that scared of the Coronavirus and see much of this stuff as wildly alarmist overreaction. It isn’t that deadly — not nearly as bad as the flu.
But that said, if it truly is a “test” then we’re in trouble. I don’t think we can handle much of anything at the moment.
1
Food for thought. That the coronavirus ought to give us pause, and instill some 'healthy' fear, is a given. It also is a reminder of how interconnected we are worldwide, and a 'test' to reveal that who we are, and how we react, is much more important than how much we have materially. Too bad we have a 'brutus ignoramus (by choice) at the helm, who could have instilled an ounce of trust if only he would have surrounded himself with honest people, much more knowledgeable than him...and if he were not a constant liar. You realize that somebody that cries wolf one too many times, if a real emergency occurs (i.e. a rapid spread of a viral infection), no one would pay any attention. Dangerous, right? And further, when people (and that includes disinformation from Fox Noise and the Limbaughs of this world) are afraid to tell the truth to power, as their 'firing' may soon follow, makes an earthquake a balsam by comparison.
3
What does this virus tell us.....that we are all vulnerable? All of China's military power and advancing economy is no match for what the natural world will throw at us. Building the wall and spending on all the advanced military and weaponry for us to keep ahead is all lost when a simple virus puts the entire world on edge. I have to chuckle, but seriously it's not funny. Because our societies tend to worry about things after they are obvious exasperates containment. Is this all the lead up to climate disruptions and all that it will bring to our world as we continue to ignore it and party on?
5
The coronavirus is another warning shot across the bow of the ship carrying humanity. It is not likely to be the end of us, not at all. That virus may not exist yet, or it may exist already somewhere, waiting.
It's reminding us that we are just another organism, a target, prey, food, the way we always have been, first with apex predators, including ourselves, but last and always with microbes.
Nature is saying control your population, take care of the Earth, since you depend upon it, learn my rules, if you can, and never ever forget my laws.
In short, nature can make short shrift of narcissist humanity, collective or singular (hear that, America?). And she doesn't care a whit about thoughts or prayers, only actions based upon the rules.
7
SARS and COVID-19 were both made in China, just as Ebola was made in Africa.
It's not about the people exactly, it's about cultural traditions of trading in wild animals for human consumption. This can end (mostly) with government action, and I sure hope it does.
4
"The extreme measures that have been taken to contain the disease inside China promise all kinds of global breakdowns if they endure there and spread around the world. The supply chains that now bind our world system have never been tested in a severe pandemic . . ."
If this is a test, its results yielded what we already know:
1. The totalitarian regime currently ruling China is brutal, inept, and readily lies about all matters trifling or momentous.
2. The people of space-age China have a Stone Age understanding of medicine, and display a child-like belief in the magic qualities of plants and wildlife. It was always quaint, but now it is catastrophic.
3. Companies foolishly relying almost exclusively on China for their manufacturing (e.g.: Apple) ignored the risk of failing to diversify, and now their shareholders suffer.
4. Nothing spreads fear, uncertainty, and doubt like the internet.
6
I’ve been pondering the world system too. Mr. Douthat says “we will muddle through” sustainably protected by decadence and stagnation. I believe the “we” he references is the US. However, the “we” I see is our global community. We the people of Planet Earth. And I wonder...could something like coronavirus help us unite globally? Become the thing that we can all care about and rally behind? Before it’s too late? It’s clear this president won’t lead that effort which is needed not just for coronavirus but on so many other issues that are essentially global in nature. Vote.
3
I was thinking something similar yesterday as I listened to a Chinese national describe how his community has become more caring toward one another in the face of the illness. Proving once again, to me at least, how more alike than different we all are.
1
Globalisation is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it exclusively Western (the Silk Road and the Malian Empire of Mansa Musa I to name but two, more famous, examples). Ever since there has been movement of people and subsequent trade, there has been globalisation. The shape it takes varies, but there will always be places that have a comparative advantage in something; whether it be raw materials or means of production, and that isn't going to change any time soon. As long as there are people there is globalisation and this idea that it is inherently bad or going to disappear is nonsense.
3
Actually I’m pretty confident that the CDC can be relied upon to deliver accurate and timely information. If Trump decides he wants to muzzle the CDC or attempt to replace the CDC’s judgment with his own, I just don’t see how that’ll work for him except among his most blindly ardent supporters. Primarily, though, Trump is concerned about himself. If he perceives a risk to his own health, he will overreact, and then we’ll know.
8
@MWR
No doubt he'll star purging health care professionals, too. Impossible to overstate how he keeps endangering us. Impossible to fathom why we stand for it.
6
The current variant on the common cold is a test alright. It is a test of how placid, malleable and suggestible the global population really is.
Forced mass testing is something we should be worried about. Especially if the victim tested is handed a bill for the services to society just rendered. There's nothing like a captive market now that colonialism is case.
The reports of the deaths from Corvid-19 seem always to leave out the identity and contributing factors that may have helped the common cold become lethal in their cases.
Remember the "face eating zombies" scare about ten years ago? That fraud made the rounds and some serious people were actually believing that hoax too.
25,000 people die each year in this country alone due to the flu.
BTW - I tend to get colds when the weather warms. whenever there is a change in the temp I tend to get chills and those not too warm temps are just wonderful for mold and germ growths and that drop in body temp is just the time when opportunistic infections can grab hold.
Remember countries are not the lands of the free or homes of the brave. They are far more likely to become gangs of selfish and frightened cowards willing to kill something else, anything else for their own safety. WE have been doing it in the ME for two decades. It's a chronic habit now.
2
The threat from COVID-19 is serious. The threat posed by the possibility of social dehiscence as a result of irrational actions in the face of COVID-19 may be even more consequential.
We all have access to an effective weapon to contain and mitigate COVID-19 if only we would muster the confidence to pull the sword from the stone and use it: good ole personal hygiene - the stuff your doctor and your mom have been telling you for decades.
I won't recite them all, since I pray to heaven you have some inkling what they are.
Nonetheless, I will highlight one of my favorites: use widely available, familiar household cleaning products to disinfect surfaces, especially in public / congregate areas, like airports, gyms, schools, day cares, nursing home and such.
The chemicals in these produces destroy SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 by disrupting its structure and the structure of every other germ there is.
So, let's pick up those bottles, squeeze those triggers and avert what could become the greatest public health emergency in our nation's history.
4
@Hugo Furst Current data, by no means complete, is that the virus is transmitted mainly via aerosol,not surfaces.
@Steven
Thanks, Steven. I know that. It's both.
So Ross, what evidence do you have to support the liberal-globalist attitude toward the coronavirus? Have you compiled a dossier of social media opinions, formally and informally, from liberal blogs and media sources? I doubt it. Please do not force your argument based on false premises. You and David Brooks do this all to frequently, positing polar positions based on your philosophical conclusions.
And by the way, a globalized world, sharing knowledge and cooperating regarding curtailment, is likely the best hope for avoiding the worst consequences with regard to the coronavirus or any other infectious disease about which little is known. Is such willingness to share what one knows and what one does not, in search of greater truth and in assisting the lives of others, a sign of decadence?
4
Chickens come home to roost. If Ross has a point, it could be that what happened to indigenous peoples when white Europe decided to rule the world will happen to the rulers. Diseases for which Native Americans’ immune systems were entirely unprepared nearly wiped them out when carriers from the continent arrived.
Today the carriers and the infected are the global travelers, the elites themselves reaching out with their coronaviral embrace. Yes, the rest of us are very much in their path and will suffer with them, but along with climate change, Mother Nature is once again emphatically making her central point: your money, your elite status cannot buy her off.
She really, really doesn’t like being ignored.
7
People are aware and worried but they don't know what to do right now. Should we prepare as if a hurricane might hit us? We have no trustworthy leadership any more. Guess we are on our own.
3
A disease isn’t big enough. We need a test? Weird but revealing title.
2
America is ill prepared for Covid-19 as we are focused on our decadent ways?
Despite Trump and the medical insurance industry, those who deliver our healthcare are ready and competant professionals ready for the test. If this flu hits the US hard, the greater number of those who will suffer and die are the ones without healthcare and folks who lived a careless life regarding their own health and are now elderly. The sabotaging of the ACA and gutting of the CDC and other health insitutions will be a plague upon the mean and short sighted conservatives (GOP) in general and Trump in particular. It is this decadent elite who live a spoiled and entitled false and immoral reality at the expense of average Americans resulting in an embarrassing and weak safety net for problems like this. Americans are fighters, and the masses are hardened by inequality and struggle who will manage yet another avoidable menace and unfair challenge. Although I am a moderate (Amy), politically this crisis hurts conservatives and favors progressives.
2
Prepare for the worst. Hope for the best. We are doing neither.
4
Blaming Liberals for globalization is wrong on the facts but also wrong in spirit.
Don't buy the book. It will be full of the same mean-spirited rhetoric that is evident in this column.
11
Selling a book seems to be the only reason this opinion piece is in today’s paper. I guess for the gullible it will get credit cards pulled out but for the rest of us we’ll plod along resisting the fear mongering and finger pointing.
1
Mr. Douthhat:
You write too many words. It’s time to call a spade a spade, make a plan and take the necessary action:
The Covid-19 epidemic is now a real global pandemic. It fulfills the WHO’s Phase 6 criteria for a global pandemic despite the WHO’s present cirxumlocutions and euphemisms. The epidemics in Italy and Iran have removed all remaining doubt in this regard.
The CDC needs to shift into high gear and be ready to pounce when community spread of Covid-19 strikes in the United States. The American people must cooperate. Quarantines, lockdowns and other unpleasantness might very well be necessary.
Will the American people be able to handle it? I honestly don’t know. Judging from the current state of political polarization, divisiveness and NIMBYism, perhaps not.
5
This. It’s good to see a comment that’s aiming true rather than pushing some political, religious, or personal agenda. Some of the comments I’m seeing here make me even more afraid for our country. People are so intent on being polarized and attacking others that they don’t realize we ALL have an enemy in SARS-COV-2. Now is the time to put aside hatred and work together.
2
@JTS
If the ebola circus in New Jersey was any indication, the answer is "No." Is there any doubt restricting movement would become another big battle, with pro- and anti-Trump forces mobilizing? It would be an extension of their ongoing Russian collusion and impeachment battles. Principles would be jettisoned in a New York second as pitchforks are raised.
1
Do the agencies of the US government have more or less expertise since Trump moved into the White House? Answer: less.
7
Rants, raves, manipulating facts, putting a good "face" on truths and faces. It's all a play of masks all governments indulge in. The present version of the GOP is over the top on this but regardless, the public is understandably not about to accept assertions at first blush.
I think Mr. Douthat is trying to twist the analysis of this epidemic to fit the thesis of his most recent book. It is a big leap to blame globalism for the reaction to Covid-19. Never mind the ridiculous assertion that this is a "test" (awfully Old Testament if you ask me). But then Ross has always blamed "decadence" - within which he wraps globalism - for all the wrongs in this world.
It would be more accurate to assert that this illness was kept under wraps by a totalitarian government that kept information from its citizens and the world at large. If anything, globalism revealed this epidemic sooner than the Chinese government would have liked. Left to his own devices, our own fearless leader would love to have the same type of government where dissent is not allowed and nothing to his detriment may be espoused. No Ross, I would call the response of the world press surprisingly measured and responsible.
1
You may blame "liberalism" for "emphasizing the White House’s unpreparedness in the face of a clear and present threat," but when the leader of our country puts the health of the stock market and his reelection above the health and safety of the rest of the country, I think that's putting the blame where it belongs.
Last I heard we don't even have anyone in charge of infectious diseases in this country (unless you count the brilliant medical mind Cuccinelli) and there are major cuts coming to the nation's health research.
For a supposed germophobic president, this seems to be the classic case of cutting off even his own nose to spite his face to avoid investing in science and research.
7
As noted on the Rachel Maddow show last night, in 2018, Trump fired the ENTIRE government pandemic response chain of command and replaced them with nobody, leaving the US uniquely unprepared to deal with the current situation.
This should be the lede of every column, news and feature article on the coronavirus pandemic. It should be the top story in every TV news program and it should go viral on every social media platform. It should be shouted from the rooftops so that every Trump enabler who gets off on the tweets and Trump acting like a tough guy knows the risk he's put them in.
It's all fun and games until people start dying, you know?
23
@Hugh CC
You are assuming that entire "chain of command" was up to the task. Judging from the poor quality of bureaucrats being paraded in the media by democrats, I remain unconvinced.
As for those CDC funding cuts, 80% of them were in funds spent in other countries. Did Maddow mention that?
1
@AACNY China was one of them...
@AACNY
It is like that claim about fighting terrorists. Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here! Like your guy, George W., said! One reason we haven't had Ebola here is the money we have spent fighting it in Africa.
1
Let me summarize the arguments:
1) Trump hasn’t done anything as bad as Watergate. The press just made it seem that way.
2) The same press is complacent in the face of Coronavirus because they’re all globalists.
3) We shouldn’t have globalism because diseases.
4) God sent coronavirus to show us the folly of our globalist ways. God won’t let it go too far though.
5) Buy my new book.
Safe travels, Mr. Douthat!
3
Mr. Trump has left this nation unprepared for precisely this type of problem. He has not only gutted federally funded medical research and debunked science in general, but has focused on bio-terrorism rather than naturally occurring threats. Sad that the president who stokes fear now urges calm when a real threat exists.
5
Read The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis. He describes what how Trump has gutted our government and what will happen when the stuff hits the fan. It’s about to get real.
6
First, this opinion ignores (and thus decouples) climate change from the spread of infectious diseases. And climate change only has global solutions.
Second, the idea that tension between the post WWII liberal-democratic order/globalism versus far right, race based nationalism...provides some beneficial stability feels wrong to me. I don’t get it.
And finally, while the author doesn’t address this one way or the other but...
Coronavirus proves the far rights race-based drumbeat of diseases being spread by illegal immigrants is false: the human disease vectors carrying this virus and those yet to come - will be legal travelers through established ports of entry.
Every dollar we spend on a lie is a dollar less we have to spend where we need it.
5
Media is failing to do any in-depth reporting on the cause of the virus. Have the Chinese permanently banned wild animal trade which was confirmed as its source? Will these wild animals cease to be a commodity?
Why is there no pressure from other countries demanding that Asia permanently stop the commercial trade of wild animals to prevent further epidemics? It’s shameful that no light is put on this issue by the media. The world now faces a pandemic because of this dangerous trade.
Where is the outrage?
3
What you call 'weaknesses in liberal globalist project' is actually the interconnectedness of all human beings. Viruses don't recognize borders, ethnicities, trade agreements or ideology. This realization may actually help the world right now.
1
Suggesting that “liberals” are “globalist” is lazy and uninformed.
Our President has business interests all across the globe—as taxpayers, we are billed millions for his children to tend to his global interests—and I doubt that the heads of our multinational corporations are sporting Feel the Bern bumper stickers.
2
We have nothing to fear. Fearless Leader and Supreme Omnipotent High Commander Trump is looking at it very strongly. Very, very bigly. And by now only the best people are in key posts at the Centers for Disease Control and other government agencies, who can bring their vast knowledge and abilities to bear on this threat [which now may do great damage in Alabama, by the way].
Trump’s 29 year old former college football player and ‘body man’ — the ‘acting’ director of epidemiology — and a 27 year old former lingerie model and Fox News talking head — the ‘acting’ head of the CDC emergency response team — will be sure to get right on it.
After all, expertise is not only highly overrated, it’s highly suspect. Particularly where science is concerned.
2
Trump tried to defund the CDC and gutted the pandemic response team. This is a test of the GOP.
10
Why is Douthat worried when we have a 'very stable genius' in the White House?
“A lot of people think that (the virus) goes away in April with the heat, as the heat comes in. Typically that will go away with April,” Trump declared. “I had a long talk with [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping] … He feels very confident. He feels that, again, as I mentioned, by April or during the month of April, the heat, generally speaking, kills this kind of virus.
3
On related topic, how does the “decadence theory” hold up in the face of climate change? If we can’t get our heads out of our devices and fantasy worlds to mobilize against a potential pandemic, will we be able to do it in time to prevent global climate catastrophe? I totally buy the “decadence” idea but I’m not sure the Goths are 400 years away. They may be at the door.
2
Mr. Douthat, I am frequently perplexed by how often you dip your uninformed toes into areas you don’t understand and then proceed to politicize them in a left vs. right polemic. This is a global health problem the complexity of which is challenging the public health and scientific communities, as well as civil authorities worldwide facing difficult choices to protect their people (and that includes protecting their economies). I have greater trust in the experts at CDC and WHO than you.
You reveal your ignorance of the problem when you mention at the end of your piece your handy-dandy sanitizer in your pocket. Sorry, but that won’t protect you or others. Infectious disease epidemiologists have frequently spoken publicly about how hand sanitizers, which are usually 70% isopropyl alcohol, are relatively ineffective against viruses, and the best protection is frequent hand-washing with soap and water (minimum of 20 seconds). So instead of sitting in the airport rubbing a liquid sanitizer on your hands, jump up, go to the bathroom, and wash your hands. Do yourself and others a favor.
1
Americans are still more likely to die from gun violence than coronavirus. How about a hair-on-fire column about guns?
6
America is the place most prepared on earth to deal with any disease, sooner than later American scientists will discover a vaccine for this disease too.
Just curious... Why do you think we Americans are less vulnerable to dying? Being American doesn’t bestow immunity or make our scientists smarter.
1
"God Willing"?!
Exactly which God allowed this virus to cross specie barriers, and which one created viruses to begin with?!
Oh, and let's add "Created the tse-tse fly." just for good measure.
Finally. It’s about time someone writes the truth. I’ve been livid and sickened by all the dancing around the truth- that SARS-COV-2 is serious. From WHO insisting on naming the “disease” something that won’t frighten people to the CDC sending out botched tests for the few tests even given in our country, everywhere I look there is incompetence, idiocy, and insanity. What is with the “Do NOT scare the Americans?” and “America and our stock market are invulnerable.” No. We are human. We can die. This coronavirus is serious. We might possibly die in droves. Sars-Cov-2 is likely here already. We should be socially isolating NOW to try to get ahead of this. I don’t mean lockdown or quarantine. I mean we stop going to festivals, movies, etc. The videos being leaked from China are terrifying. Why do we have to be stupid and insist on acting as if SARS-COV-2 can’t possibly touch us? If it’s because we fear we’ll be inconvenienced and our economy will take a hit... How exactly do folks think things will be when we’re having to dig mass graves to keep up with the bodies and people aren’t allowed to leave their houses except twice a week to get groceries? We NEED to plan for how our economy can weather this. We NEED to plan to be possibly stuck in our homes for weeks or even months. We need to be making changes now that keep us away from crowds, washing our hands, etc. We need to be afraid. We also need to think about other people. Don’t go to work sick. We’re in this together.
3
Trump says that the coronavirus is going to go away.
I hope it does and I hope Trump goes with it.
3
What we share with China is a leadership that is very unhappy to receive bad news so the lesser, local authorities cover up and punish those who tell the unpopular truth.
We are now seeing in this country an administration that has loyalty to the Dear Leader and not competence as the criteria for keeping your job.
A leader that has absolutely no knowledge of science and if presented with facts that are contrary to his misbeliefs fires the bearer of the truth.
This administration has muzzled its scientists and cut their budgets.
Do I have any faith that the inevitable spread of the Coronavirus here will be handled effectively? No.
6
Earth to Ross. If the virus broke out here you cannot assume we would have reacted better. Scientifically it takes time to figure out the basics of an infection.
But more importantly don’t ever forget your Republican party hero Ronald Reagan never even mentioned the word AIDS until thousands of Americans died( more than have died in China from this virus)!
3
I trust candidates who are running on healthcare to help solve this and prevent future outbreaks. Trump will just mangle its name and try to ridicule it to make it go away. This is a faceless adversary he's very much unprepared for.
2
Very very true - such a placid response in the US compared with the anxiety and measures taken for H1N1 Swine flu in 2009 ! Lack of preparation will mean many more deaths :(
3
Hysteria isn't the national default, it's stoicism. The mass of men/women don't tweet out their quiet lives of desperation, they deal with the world as it is, and they understand the virus. It's a primal threat and it's heading our way and we will deal with it.
1
I don’t think we are prepared. I think people don’t want to be inconvenienced or worried in their daily lives so they insist we’ll be fine here... usually stories with those themes don’t end well.
Due to the danger presented by the coronavirus, I am hereby suspending all elections. I'll let you know when it is safe to vote again. No one loves democracy more than me. Believe me.
5
I agree. It’s a concern that Trump might take advantage of this situation. I’ve quietly wondered the same thing. If we were confronting this coronavirus head-on as a community, we could find ways for campaigning to be done online etc... I fear our ludicrous insistence that we mighty Americans are invulnerable to SARS-COV-2 will pave the way for the election process to be in shambles.
You had me at deglobalization! What a silver lining that would be. I don't want to keep buying cheap and poorly-made everything from China, and I certainly don't want to touch anything they ship over these days. As far as I'm concerned they should manufacture for their corner of the world and we for ours. Why are we dependent on a medieval, autocratic society where there is not even basic hygiene or normal eating habits?
1
Ramp up awareness of coronavirus? Why, that might harm my stock and business outlooks. Let's give everyone capacious sand buckets so we can all thrust our dim heads into them and pretend this ailment will go away...
3
I like the thesis of your new book. It is something I have thought about for nearly 20 years after realizing the US seemed to be following the trajectory of the Roman Empire. We definitely have become a “bread and circuses” culture.
3
Sometimes don’t you feel as an American you are a sitting duck? Anyone calling for controlling flights from China is labeled racist. Our medical system and ridiculous for profit health insurance has left millions without adequate medical care. We depend on other countries to supply most of our cheap consumer goods and much of our food. Our media is overtaken by hate, instilling fear of the political enemy and mudslinging political banter. What has happened to common sense?
There is no way the virus is not here as we move about the world. The question is how will our local and federal government handle it. My expectations are not very high.
5
How deliciously ironic that a President and GOP who decry free public healthcare and are right now trying to dismember Obamacare, might soon lose power because if there is an epidemic, millions will be unable to pay for their medical care and thousands may well die. In most all of the countries so far affected, healthcare is free, including, for the most part, in China.
Trump can spout ridiculous propaganda platitudes to “keep calm and carry on”, because he and his cronies all have top notch healthcare but the masses don’t and he may well see a huge revolt against the selfish brand of politics for the rich called Republicanism.
2
Douthat thinks it's a test of modern society but maybe it's a trial run by Nature testing our weak spots.
2
I have zero hope that Trump and his administration can handle anything of substance. Trump’s worst nightmare come true: germs.
5
Americans are preparing for the coming attack from the contagious Coronavirus.
One of our leading pharmaceutical giant, Gilead Science (GILD), is leading the tasks to find cure to the Coronavirus in China and worldwide. Chinese government just yesterday approved GILD's several patents in China. Its leading virus medication is being tested in the field to most heavily infected patients in Wuhan hospitals, the epicenter of Coronavirus. This test will show the result in Early April according to the Hong Kong news.
Gilead is just one of our effort to combat Coronavirus. One of the Chinese leading anti-virus scientist, Dr. Zhong Yi-Shan, and his group had a visual conference with leading scientists from Harvard University recently. The result was very encouraging.
WHO health experts including US scientists just completed a 9-day trip in China visiting many cities including Wuhan, the epicenter, to evaluate the virus situation. After their their trip in their final press conference, they expressed exceedingly satisfaction towards the methods and procedures to contain and stop the spreading of virus by the Chinese government. They are also impressed by the medication and care given to the patients. I am pretty sure our experts will bring this useful information back. We are preparing.
A quarantine due to the virus at Mar-A-Lago, Trump Hotel Washington, or any other Trump branded property would show the universe has a sense of humor.
Should Federal troops not be stationed there to protect these national treasures?
Would some in the faith community say ''God's Judgement"?
More likely "Hillary Clinton,burn the witch, Hillary Clinton, burn the witch".
2
I’m sure we have no real idea of how many people are infected. Think about North Korea. China is almost the only place they can travel to. There are likely many in the population with suppressed immune systems from poor nutrition. We have not heard a si glen word about this.
We would be better off channeling some of this hysteria about contagion into encouraging more people to get flu shots.
Erase this column and replace it with a simple truth that has nothing to do with the ridiculous partisan spin that Douthat tries to impose on it. Trump fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. (And of course, no Douthat column would be complete without deploying the "decadent" card.)
We've got some science involved in this problem. We used to have some smart people who knew both from experience and from more of that science stuff, what to do. Now? Just like during the Ebola outbreak, know nothing conservatives continue to know nothing but say it all very loudly. Douthat fits that mold.
3
Revenge of the animals on the meat eaters ?
Animals don’t seek revenge, it’s Karma at work though.
Douthat's clueless speculations about liberals' position on the coronavirus epidemic reveals more about him than those he smears with his baseless maunderings. Perhaps the rest of our nation has been relatively silent because Trump and his congressional bullies stifle dissent and ignore the advice of anyone who's not a card-carrying member of the GOP. Don't believe me? Just this morning, Trump didn't tweet about the epidemic -- he tried to intimidate the two liberal women justices on the Supreme Court. Conservatives have created the suffocating climate in this country, and when a catastrophe occurs, they will own the results.
2
" But these incentives have so far been outweighed by liberalism’s ideological bias toward global openness, its anxiety about saying or doing anything that might give aid and comfort to anti-globalization forces,"
How did this man get a platform in the most important newspaper in America? This is crazy talk because it is entirely formulated out of Douthat's head.
Where is the supportive evidence of some omnipotent liberal cabal that has organized behind a specific strategy concerning reporting about this virus? That they are controlling the entire messaging of media coverage to this narrow incentive?
2
Nothing in this piece mentions the actual darker motivations for our inaction: Americans don't view Chinese citizens as equals - probably not even people because they are commies, living too close to the animals. Then you have American glee that China is hurting. Then you have additional outbreaks - we still don't care because no one is like us. We are special. Everyone else should expect to suffer for not being an American. Eventually the corona virus will come to America, people still won't take action because it will just be something that happens to big city freaks, shady business consultants and people so poor they have to leave their homes to get things done.
The geo political organizations and Trump are just symptomatic of our complete American disgust for the Earth and everyone on it.
4
How about a court ruling? We could outlaw it and go to the Supreme Court with it and win. Because covid is biased against humans.
The most important thing is for people to avoid air travel and cruise ships. Long periods of enforced closeness with people from anywhere.
Ross Douthat in the airport is likely to become Typhoid Mary.
1
And the March Madness that is about to begin, big crowd gathering together, celebrating the gods of basket ball.
This fringes on the bizarre. Leftist globalist? Did I miss something? Who was rioting at world trade organization? I thought they were the Portland progressive crowd? I, being a progressive, kept thinking about Jurassic park’s ending. Life has a way. I know viruses aren’t technically alive. But they do have a way. Now it’s coming to Merica. I’m a little anxious being in the main age group of trumps base. I just hope if I die, it leads to a blue wave. /s
Another test: Can the CDC provide leadership in the face of a pandemic when Trump has gutted that leadership?
4
It must be exhausting to be a public intellectual/writer on the right where everything, and I mean everything, is filtered through cultural lenses. There's no resolution of cultural conflicts. So there you are, spinning and angry all the time.
3
Aw c’mon Ross, as Freud said, “…sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Sometimes the problem with extremely intelligent people is that they can be too intelligent. This disease, as was with SARS, is the absence of responsibility. China is now a world player, interacting with every nation, culture and sub-culture in the world. They have become a technological superforce and they have a large part of the population—including their intelligent people and leaders still believing in hocus pocus (or as one Chinese health official called it “jimba”)—the idea that certain reptiles, intestines, and the excrement of vermin has magical powers.
China, with its massive authoritarian government simply needs to establish an FDA and ban certain things from the Chinese diet—including swill-fed hogs and carnivores that are likely to feed on bats.
China needs to become more responsible as it takes its place as a world leader.
The only test this new epidemic is, is that even the US needs to empower its own FDA.
2
"But these incentives have so far been outweighed by liberalism’s ideological bias toward global openness, its anxiety about saying or doing anything that might give aid and comfort to anti-globalization forces,"
Go on... please tell us more about this Liberal cabal that controls the messaging of media to enforce the powers of and image of globalization. Where are the meetings taking place? Where is the strategy being devised? Who specifically is involved?
Is the NY Times part of this group? If so why are they providing a platform to expose this conspiracy of media messaging?
Some conspiracy theories are true, but how are we to know without supportive evidence?
1
I think you nailed this one, Ross.
I agree with much of what you are saying here Ross. However I think some of your arguments are specious. I have not heard a single liberal say “racism against the Chinese is the real problem here.”
For those Americans who believe they’re number one on the current regime leader’s “most concerned about” list - here’s a hot news flash: You’re not even number two.
Again, watch what he does, not what he says...and that goes for his unqualified quislings and their role playing as health experts.
The real experts have long since been banished for speaking the truth in public.
Not unlike what has happened in China.
5
After Trump and Trumpism—whatever that is—have spent years targeting globalism, in part to weaken, and eliminate, it, your spin is that the coronavirus “is poised to target globalism’s weak points”. Such an outrageous “truth-is-not-truth” “alternative fact” is akin to Rush Limbaugh suggesting that the disease is nothing more than the “common cold” being “weaponized against Trump”. The only thing we have to fear is such right-wing reactionary nonsense and poppycock, which is, in part, rendering all of us unprepared. As Chelsea Clinton pointed out, in an analysis on CNN, Trump’s anti-science, anti-expertise, anti-global head-in-the-sand attitudes have left our country woefully ill-equipped to address such potential pandemics and other genuine emergencies. To argue otherwise is as disingenuous as Trump declaring, on the other hand, such faux emergencies as his border wall fantasy, which “prepare” us for the non-existent threats as we ignore the real and actual ones: as in, the coronavirus will “go away in April when it gets warmer”.
6
We will see the convergence of every selfish, misguided, idiotic mistake this nation has ever made in terms of public health and emergency planning.
Stop and think. We have a president who has cut funding to the CDC, WHO, and UN, the front guard of international crises. Now layer in the burgeoning anti-government fanatics and conspiracy theorists who will stir the waters in ways sure to sow chaos. Now add the fatal kicker...a nation, one of the only nations, that does not provide national healthcare.
Mandatory quarantines? Who, exactly, is paying for the weeks of missed work? And if there is not a concrete plan in place to pay low wage workers every penny, those who live paycheck to paycheck will --surprise, surprise--choose eating and shelter over staying home. Those will be the very workers serving food, stocking food on shelves, caring for the elderly and children, and coming into daily contact with legions.
Now consider that the vast majority of Americans do not have, according to a recent study, more than $400 saved. How are they paying for those two weeks, plus medicine, plus masks* and food no longer stocked on shelves when that line of workers falls?
This is a catastrophe in the making. One of our very own making.
----
*Condemn the people exploiting this tragedy. I just checked Amazon prices for the recommended masks. Wow. Pretty steep, I thought, as I saw $80-100 price tags for 20 masks. Then I clicked the button. Uh, add $120 ...for shipping. Disgusting.
3
A global pandemic means the end of globalism.
...and riddance to it, with its cultural blandness and endless exploitation of labor...
Coronavirus is a Chinese test to see how they can dominate the world with a chemical war.
Sure, engage in the usual "both sides" nonsense, while ignoring the fact that we have a Republican "president" whose joke of an administration is not prepared and not interested in preparing for what could be a very serious situation. Of course, this was destined to happen. He has flubbed and blundered for three years and now a real crisis will expose the fraud of Trump and his goons.
2
There is another virus going around: no journalist can write anything without taking a shot at the president. Globalism's evolved weak point is not the product of this presidency. If it's complacent you want to address, look no further than China to begin with.
The subhead on Ross Douthat's coronavirus column today might not be his, but it's a beaut: "The disease is poised to target globalism’s weak points and to exploit American misgovernment and mistrust." Nothing stirs fears like a dose of anthropomorphism." That wicked virus! Plotting in its secret hideaway to undo us and bring down our government!
1
Coronavirus will expose worldwide biological scientific ignorance and stupidity.
Particularly among journalists, politicians, preachers and pundits.
The smartest and wisest evolutionary fit viruses frequently infect the most people without killing the most healthy aka common cold, flu. herpes, etc.
4
No mention of the Trump White House hollowing out of the CDC.
2
Re "Thus the liberal instinct toward minimization: It’s not much worse than the flu, panicking makes things only worse, don’t spread conspiracy theories about its origins, racism toward Chinese people is the real danger here...."
I, a liberal who has become more "conservative" (whatever that even means) on certain "woke" issues in recent years, would like to note that of Douthat's above list, only the last assertion is dubious. The others make perfect sense.
1) The WHO estimates that influenza kills some 650,000 people a year around the world. The mortality rate of flu is .05 percent to .1 percent, that of the Wuhan corona virus estimated at 3-4 percent — but the flu is, for now, considered much more contagious than corona virus.
2) Panicking *does* make things worse, virtually 100 percent of the time.
3) Spreading conspiracy theories about anything is a bad idea.
4) While I've heard this sort of thing reported in the media, only dimwits and mindless xenophobes will turn this into anti-Chinese racism. I do acknowledge that there are more dimwits than I'd like to think: A couple weeks ago a local TV news station in Colorado felt the need to report a "story" pointing out that corona virus has nothing to do with the Corona brand of Mexican beer, presumably because the issue was being raised in some quarter, somewhere, by dimwits.
1
As usual don’t understand what are you trying to say? You found a nice subject to berate liberalism when it’s their progressive science which will get us out of this rut and not your evangelical beliefs.
2
How many of us dying is “not too many deaths,” Ross?
1
Does anyone trust that our president will tell us the truth about the Coronavirus? Whatever he says will be full of lies and exaggerations.
Yes, let’s all wait till it gets warmer and poof the virus will disappear according to Trump. He is the worst leader to handle this serious global problem because he has no credibility.
2
Russ,
We'll make you deal. If you allow the rest of us to use government resources coupled with elite medical knowledge to try to solve this problem, we'll let your God to help out.
2
We exported much of production and manufacturing to China because it was cheaper.....Capitalism, right?
Chasing dollars has been the American way for 40 years. In a country of over a billion people where "wet" markets are still very prevalent it seems like this kind of thing can happen very easily.
Lack of regulation can often times be more expensive than regulation.
"And the fact that Rush Limbaugh spent yesterday declaring that the coronavirus is no worse than the common cold, and that it’s “being weaponized” by the press “to bring down Donald Trump” — well, that doesn’t instill confidence that pressure from the right will force Trump to take the outbreak seriously."
I don't trust one person in this cesspool of an administration to do one thing correctly to halt the spread of this pandemic. Additionally, the fact that millions of Americans won't go to the doctor because they lack insurance means the virus will spread quickly.
However, right wing Trumpists are so poisoned by their ideology of ignorance that they will be telling us to ignore the evidence, lying about the number of cases, and just generally being completely ineffective. Elect an incompetent, lying, racist clown, expect a deadly circus.
4
The decadent values upon which Mr. Douthat will opine in his book are first and foremost his own. If Trump is a “nationalist Republican” and a “populist president,” then Caligula was a “moderate” and a “centrist.”
2
https://www.businessinsider.com.au/korean-air-flight-attendant-tests-positive-for-coronavirus-2020-2?r=US&IR=T
I have been told by Korean Airlines crew members that she "returned" from the USA on a flight. Cabin crew normally spend at least 24 hours in the USA on layover, sometimes up to 72 hours. She would have infected a lot of folks in that time. I bet KAL have not told the US about this.
1
ah, politicizing an epidemic. So much for progressives taking the high road.
So, if the extremely infectious disease spread, which is likely, it is "Trump's fault"? Got it. Let the blame game begin!
1
If anyone still has questions about what the price is of an ignorant narcissistic President, a dark money elected Congress that exists to take marching orders from the plutocrats that own them, and a judicial system put in place to approve the process, this potential public health nightmare is one large resounding answer.
3
Hopefully, Wall Street collapses, Hollywood caves in, Big Pharma goes bankrupt. Big oil goes belly up. Im pinning too much hope on the virus. All I know, the crony capitalism of the USA, the latrine culture , her music and movies, her kitschy empire , it has to end.
1
AIDS was the 'test." And the people you admired (Reagan/Bush) did nothing but let people die. Read "And the Band Played On" by Randy Shilts.
Where were you then?
2
Hand sanitizer? I hope you were being sarcastic! Hand sanitizer is anti-bacterial- NOT anti-viral...... but surely you knew that?
How reassuring to know that a few talking heads have characterized this potential national crisis as a partisan conspiracy. Ron White quips that "you can't fight stupid." Washington is wholly unprepared for prevention or containment of the coronavirus.
What a country!
Donald Trump is more than a disease. He's a test.
It's yet another opportunity for global governments to use a significant common enemy event to forge closer relationships.
Unfortunately, our larger governments are mostly weak and focused on the wrong items of importance.
2
Ross is right on target. Coronavirus may finally provide the "shock" Trump supporters need to wake them out of their mesmerized stupor. That their paragon of looting has no clue how to manage a society nor any interest in trying. By this time in any administration since Grover Cleveland, the President would be leading the nation towards preparedness and offering global assistance for humanitarian purposes as well as to protect America.
Instead, Trump focuses on his erstwhile campaign where he spreads more lies about what he hasn't accomplished and how he plans to dismember what remains of our democracy.
Rural America has been decimated by hospital closures. Emergency room clinics will be quickly overwhelmed if corona strikes with ferocity. When the poorest Americans get hit the hardest because of their abysmal health care, perhaps they'll understand Bernie's message about universal health care.
4
Let’s face the facts – Coronavirus/COVID has become a worldwide pandemic.
All the signs are in place for a global economic downturn triggered by the Coronavirus pandemic.
The Stock Market went down 3% yesterday. That’s the beginning, not the end.
The crash may not happen this month, but it will come soon.
Such a crash will have major political implications. The high Stock Market seems to be Trump’s primary indicator of economic success.
158
@AKJersey: Inflation has been minimal because the money created by quantitative easing mostly went into stocks, not consumption.
11
@AKJersey Unfortunately the lag time following market collapse to the rest of the economy is too lengthy to make a difference for November.
1
@AKJersey Larry Kudlow and the POTUS himself were suggesting that a down market is a time to buy. You know, the more people die, the better the opportunity, in their view.
25
I hope that soon they will find a cure, and everything will be fine
50
@Hanna There are few "cures" for viruses. And even if they found one, few would be able to afford the price.
22
@David Henry
You are quite correct. People think that antibiotics fight viruses and bacteria but they only are effective for the latter.
We have very few antiviral agents and most need to be given very early after a person becomes infected often before most people are symptomatic and are aware of this.
The best way to manage viruses is with vaccines.
16
@Steve
I should have added one other thing. The problem with vaccines is that even when they are available, even people with a high risk for becoming infected with the viruses they are meant to fight, don't bother to get them.
We could markedly reduce the number of people who are infected by and die from the yearly flu if everyone was vaccinated. But, of course, that's not as sexy as Coronavirus, so who cares.
10
The spread of the virus shows the importance of a more global environment. Nations must work together to contain it. The present form of globalization lacks that cooperation. It has been run by large corporations for large corporations. In the search for cheaper labor America companies became foreign companies. No law forces American companies to set up factories in other countries. They do it for cheaper labor. Trump’s America first attempt with the pulling out of a number global treaties will not help in improving the economic or environmental issues of today’s world. Yes the supply chain is spread around the world but is not returning to the U.S.. The economics of the future is countries learn to work together and not force economic policies that only benefit each individual country.
1
It's not that the the threat of a pandemic is being minimized. It's that we Americans have trust that our CDC and other health agencies are preparing for and are up to the task at hand. However, it seems that trump policies have hollowed out our health experts and their capability to act and weakened our confidence in science and facts. Add in the republican effort to reduce health care coverage and the real threat becomes apparent.
As for a test for globalism, only those who fear the rest of the world or are incapable of dealing with it see it that way.
8
An excellent, well-researched column; a comprehensive look at what we think we know so far. But clearly, this pandemic calls for leadership from our great country and the employment of its ample resources.
Now seriously, after 3+ years of Trump's nonsense, does anyone really believe he's capable of the kind of leadership called for here?
No one person could possibly handle the complexity required to face this global threat. That's why true leaders understand the importance of marshalling the necessary forces and human expertise required to combat such massive problems. Yet ours is a "leader" who doesn't want to hear bad news and furthermore, requires loyalty oaths before he'll even speak to anyone.
Douthat is right. This virus is a test. Our current administration doesn't like tests so...we'll see what happens.
416
Let Jared take care of it... he seems to be given every other project...
37
@LoisS . it does not help that one in right wing media
describes the virus as a "common cold" that is being "weaponized" to bring down Trump.
This, from one who recently received the Medal of Freedom.
This, from one who has 15 million who listen daily.
69
@Lois: Don't expect any drug company to maintain a laboratory for fast development of vaccines that may not even be used before an epidemic runs its natural course.
4
The more you outsource the more you are at the mercy of what happens in other countries.
That's why almost all countries do not outsource food production.
Industrial production is no different - what is critical needs to stay here.
5
Ross, this virus would be spreading even in the absence of economic "globalism" as the world is so interconnected anyway with travel, air flight, over population and areas of extreme poverty that a pandemic has been inevitable for sometime.
12
How a country responds to a pandemic reflects the quality of its medical system. I dread the idea that a pandemic should again attack the US(think 1917 flu). However it would test the thesis that we have the best system in the world especially with the marked discrepancy with the quality of care for the poor and everyone else. In an infectious epidemic we are all in the same situation and fancy hospital settings are no better than ghetto ones. All people exposed are susceptible to getting a virus, although once infected those who are well to do would get better supportive care.
8
Why do conservative writers always pull out the " liberal globalist" card when discussing global events, as if liberals alone were responsible for the forces that unleashed COVID-19?
If anyone is responsible for the integration of our world, it's corporations and their push to cut labor costs. This blame game is getting on my nerves. Why don't we look at the facts?
China, with its open air animal markets, has already been the source of animal to human transmission of viruses. Everything I've read, says we should have expected this outbreak.
The virus is less a test of globalism than it is of national leaders. China gets a failing grade for the secretive way it dealt with the outbreak from day 1.
In the US, we're looking at a defunded CDC and general government distrust of science driven by a mercurial leader who over-simplifies threats and exaggerates US competence.
COVID-19 is a health crisis, not proof that one political system is better than another.
853
@ChristineMcM Douthat wasn’t blaming either party as much as observing that the issues that define both parties get in the way of what should be a non-partisan response to a non-partisan crisis
18
@ChristineMcM, Bill Clinton might be one reason liberals get blamed for globalism, given his facilitation of NAFTA (a treaty originally criticized by the left for its corrosive effects on labor and environment). The real irony is that Trump now claims to be undoing this damage, when in fact Trump and Clinton have displayed similar propensities for corporate deregulation.
11
@Shepherd Globalism has been supported by both sides of American politics for decades. NAFTA originated with Reagan. It was ratified and expanded under Bush 1... Clinton's signature was on it only Bush ran out of time getting it passed... You're right though, it's not Republican or Democrat policy as much as corporate deregulation that has been and continues to be the underlying motivator.
37
Hmmm, Republicans want to cut the CDC, fight against expanding or universal healthcare, resist mandating paid sick leave, oppose funding the UN (including the WHO), etc., etc.
If the virus breaks out in the US, expect it to rage through the precarious class and affect everyone connected to them, including the wealthy.
The precarious class can’t afford to take a day off from their job making salads or lattes or changing bedsheets in a hospital or hotel for any reason, never mind a head cold that will probably go away in a day or two, right?
The precarious class can’t afford to see a doctor to test whether they have COVID or are just sick and exhausted with the flu.
The precarious class certainly can’t afford a hospital stay, with devastating surprise bills sure to pop up immediately afterward- “Do no harm” apparently doesn’t apply to bank accounts.
This certainly is a test- a test of whether our disinclination toward building a decent and healthy society is about to bite us in the hindquarters, hard.
Perhaps we will dodge the bullet this time... but there will surely be a next time.
Ponder that while complaining that universal healthcare is too expensive.
1083
@Objectively Subjective
Well said.
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@Objectively Subjective
Precisely. Douthat consistently has it wrong, but the level of cognitive dissonance here is just surreal. This is actually profoundly disturbing. In essence, Douthat is using a global health crisis to score not just cheap, but false, political points.
I think it's time the NYTs considered carefully the ideas this journal tacitly endorses.
54
@Objectively Subjective
According to Laurie Garrett, Trump destroyed the infrastructure for dealing with emerging diseases.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/01/31/coronavirus-china-trump-united-states-public-health-emergency-response/
Trump Has Sabotaged America’s Coronavirus Response
As it improvises its way through a public health crisis, the United States has never been less prepared for a pandemic.
By Laurie Garrett
Foreign Policy
January 31, 2020
"... In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government’s entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure."
64
Trump requested emergency funding to fight the coronavirus...only after it impacted the stock market. That's the only part of the economy that he cares about.
In the mean time he's proposed budget cuts to the CDC every year, seeks a 50% reduction to WHO funding in FY2021, and has left the NSC Director of Global Health position vacant for 2 years.
41
Good points and great article. The headline got me thinking that Coronavirus is a quiz compared to Climate change which is the real test. We have bombed that test. Coronavirus fallout is just a preview of what's to come.
375
@Chad A true pandemic would be the answer to the bonus question; What to do about overpopulation? Like it or not a geometrical population explosion is driving man made climate change.
21
@Chad I do not see blaming liberals for the slow response as a "good point." Trump has made it absolutely clear that he runs the country. Our response, or lack thereof, is all on him.
17
@Chad : We bombed the midterm. The final is next November.
4
I'm sure that the absence of free universal health care and the resulting fact that tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured people are reluctant to go to the doctor when they are sick for fear of the costs won't have any adverse effects on our ability to respond effectively to a global pandemic.
Likewise, the gutting of the budget of the CDC.
The choice before us is not liberalism or conservatism. Neither is is globalism or populism.
The choice before us is socialism or barbarism.
730
@Christopher My point has always been "more" socialism. Anti socialists confuse socialism with communism and dictatorships; we live in an infrastructure of socialism and love it! Transportation, education, medicine, etc. are all the result of collective spending. My circle of conservative "anti socialism" friends choke when I flail these facts at them with the vigor they deserve. More needs to be made of "socialism" on the national stage before the public will accept it as an American ideal.
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@P.H.L.
That is the argument I was making to several people the other day who are nice hardworking "Christians" who are afraid of any form of socialism. They ignore how important it is in all our lives, from public roads to fire departments, police, public schools, etc. I remember the sad story of a few years back in a southern state where the local fire department stood by and watched a guys house burn down because he had "forgotten" to pay the bill for fire protection. When it is in your taxes and communal, it is one thing you can't overlook and is important to all. Health care should be the same. I love my Medicare!
36
@Christopher
Socialism relies on the ability and good will of those in power. Why would anyone want to give the government more responsibility over their lives? Is it not deterrence enough to witness how badly they bungle the things for which they are currently responsible?
Have you ever tried to pull a permit? Have you ever dealt with the IRS or been to the DMV? The service is typically extremely slow and a majority of their employees don't seem very concerned with customer satisfaction. If people could post yelp reviews and had alternative options, these institutions would surely be out of business. Currently the is very little recourse and people are rarely held accountable.
The answer is not socialism, it is to properly preform the duties with which government has already been assigned. The service and protection of the citizens from large and disproportionately powerful groups. To regulate monopolies, protect citizens and employees from predatory business practices and prevent excessive corporate political influence.
This answer is to fix the broken system, to discover what went wrong and why. The lack of term limits, corporate lobbying, campaign finance & career politicians are a few main causes of corruption. Why anyone wants to give these people more power and responsibility I will never understand. Someone who becomes a multimillionaire while in public service is no public servant.
The road to barbarism is often paved with the best intentions.
10
On the question of flu, the CDC has (easily found) statistics for the last several years. Numbers vary year to year but to give a rough idea of scale: in a year, 30 million in the US show symptoms, 600 thousand go to hospital, 50 thousand die.
Two points to consider: this spread is within a population which is vaccinated, and the mortality rate is about 0.1%.
So, work from that. If the new “flu” hits America, it is likely to infect most of the population. Imagine how much work will get done while that happens. That is 10x the flu, which would mean 6 million going to hospital if it was only as aggressive as the flu, which it is not, it is worse. Do we have that many empty hospital beds? The current, low, estimates of mortality is about 2-3% which would mean 6 to 9 million deaths.
Buy mortuary stock now, you will make a killing (too soon?).
Panic is futile, but reason might help.
9
You forgot to mention that Limbaugh was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom. That qualifies him to diagnose a global contagion and disseminate his diagnosis across publicly licensed airwaves where millions of his followers will believe him, rather than the Deep State CDC.
One wonders where the legal limits of free speech actually are anymore.
70
Maybe if, God forbid, hundreds of thousands Americans start dying while Limbaugh, Breitbart, Fox and their ilk continue to spin their lies and sing the praises of Dear Leader Donald, it will finally be enough to open the eyes of Republicans to what the Right Wing propaganda mill is all about. I don’t know what else will, and if it isn’t brought down soon, I don’t see how American democracy survives.
The coronavirus and modern civilization?
It's interesting to me how modern civilization has run roughshod over aspects of existence and how these aspects of existence neither extinct nor of overwhelming challenge all fall under the designation of terrorism with respect to civilization. Civilization brings law and order with respect to people, tamps down war, the remnant is terrorism. Any behavior, thought of people on computer on other hand is termed viral. Viruses and nature itself in turn challenging civilization are treated as terrorist outbreaks, something which must be kept from becoming total war between man and particular threat or nature.
It appears modern civilization has this paradigm with respect to any number of things from humans themselves to diseases to nature: that either they are a threat to point of war or that they are never entirely extinct and an insidious low level challenge designated terrorism. It appears there is never really peace after war for humans in modern civilization but something in its way worse than war: A constant suspicion, a constant watch for what has gone underground, is insidious, even more evil than when demonstrated in war because of being more subtle, silent, which is to say ironically in times of peace the creep of evil seems even more dangerous than before, can be viral outbreak in disease or computer form, serial killer, mass murderer, actual terrorism, subtle lie, deception, maze within maze, an unreliable, dangerous source.
3
I’d say this and future pandemics are the result of the ease of world wide travel due to more people having disposable income and it being relatively inexpensive. The issue is amplified with immigration and the Internet. One has trips home to see family and the other has people traveling to complete bucket lists and/or get the same photo that has been take millions of time just to say they were physically there (but not mentally).
Immigration and the Internet are not bad, but are the new reality.
1
I wonder what Ross thinks should have been done. If the virus has a long incubation period and a decent percentage of infected but symptomless people, then how would you prevent people from getting infected and moving around the globe before the virus is discovered, it's contagion and lethality known? Infection rates at the beginning of a problem are hard to calculate because the rate is number of cases at time 1 divided by number of cases at time 0. At time 0, few people know of the disease, so they don't diagnose it. It takes time for knowledge, tests and diagnostic criteria to disseminate.
If you quarantine anyone from a region with a possible new disease until its lethality and contagion rate are known and tests available, you have constant disruptions in people's lives over nothing.
The only real tools are strong health systems and good, trusted relationships with other governments. Trump has been undermining both.
20
Trump is playing down the pandemic because it's negatively affecting the economy. He couldn't manage an epidemic in the U.S. if Jonas Salk came back from the dead to show him how.
But since when is globalism a liberal construct? Last I heard, major corporations, whose CEOs surely include Republicans, took American jobs overseas because health and safety standards, wages, and manufacturing were cheaper. Working children isn't a "liberal-globalist" idea.
126
I’m tired of everything being defined in terms of left and right. Can we instead talk about good and bad results?
73
@EW agreed!
3
To paraphrase that line from the godfather...we have become a careless nation---careless of truth, careless of thoughtfulness, careless of preparation, careless of respect, careless of expertise...We have or maybe had the resources, culture, the organization to be careless, but those attributes are running on empty...In fact with Trump, our red light gas gauge has been on for a while. Yes, we may muddle through this crisis, but four more years of carelessness???
38
I was adding up the numbers in out small county. With 180,000 people in the county there is a possibility of 3,600 people who could die. That is a lot of people for a small county. As far as I am concerned there is no way to stop it now so it will be here. There are also going to be a lot of fairly sick people to deal with overloading our medical system. Yet I hear really nothing about this from our Federal, State or local government?
16
@scott t
I hate to say it but I think it's the trump effect- become visible, speak the truth and get your career lopped off.
Who want to be the next target at one of trump's many rallies?
3
Globalism and the treatment of China like it is just another trading partner have led to many of our generic medications being manufactured in China. How many of us think this is a good thing?
After shortages of critical materiel and foodstuffs during WW2, the United States put rules into effect to prevent shortages and disruptions in the supply chain. It's clear that the US needs similar rules for pharmaceuticals. Is any Democrat advocating this? Shouldn't someone start?
18
@Middleman MD
And many are made in India which doesn't have the best sanitation! (When I went there for a month in 2013 I was the only one in my group that didn't become ill!)
Then there is the shortage of IV fluids which to a large extent come from Puerto Rico, that part of the US that Trump considers so unimportant that the funding for hurricane recovery has been slowed to a crawl.
Man, so many loose ends that Mr Douthat tries to tie together around ... coronavirus?
Not certain that Mr Douthat has the knowledge or the experience or the skill set to determine that the US is not well prepared to cope with the virus. Nothing in his opinion expressed today indicates that anyone should pay attention to his warning. So let's just set that aside for the moment.
The issue of global supply chains is a real one and if the coronavirus outbreak causes business leaders to reconsider their supply chain structures, that's part of business. There is nothing of real value to product innovation or engineering that is being done in China that cannot be done in the US. Nothing.
The only aspect of the business model that China is performing for global companies is largely unskilled labor and that has been losing its edge to SE Asia for some time. Much of that unskilled labor will be replaced by AI controlled robots and once again, logistics will play a more consequential role than cheap labor in mfg business models.
The promise of a China market has delivered for a few companies and has been a disappointment for most. The Chinese block access to non-Chinese firms for any product or market they wish to keep for state-run Chinese firms. For those who do have access, the price is state-sponsored theft of intellectual property.
The coronavirus may yet prove to inflict consequential harm to people. That is separable from the left-right fight prevailing in the US.
19
I feel people do not get what we're looking at. First, there is no way we can 'contain' the virus, stop it from spreading. Quarantines are valuable in that they give health care systems time to prepare. Second, yes antibiotics do not work against viruses but once people have pneumonia, the become a lifesaver, but... there are not enough antibiotics in the world for everyone who will need them. And pouring antibiotics into people on this scale creates other problems. Then, the unknowns explicated in this article, but there are other unknowns which are more worrisome. Chinese doctors are reporting that they have seen some people who were reinfected and the second time is worse. Second, does the virus cause any physical, long term damage in survivors? There are reports of heart damage in survivors. And why are children (thank heavens!) largely immune? But if you want to grasp the magnitude of the virus's effect, just do the numbers. If it is even a two percent fatality rate, we're looking a more fatalities than... WW2.
11
I'm currently in Italy in the Veneto region and I can tell you firsthand how quickly this virus has spread. There are no masks.or hand sanitizer s to be found, and many grocery stores are out of basic items. Please, take this seriously. Do not rely on government intervention: governments don't act, they react and based on my experience here i can tell you they won't react quickly enough.
54
@davemicus I am already noticing that here in the US. I was trying to remove sprayed insulation from an attic, went to the Home Depot and found most of the masks were gone. It's not a coincidence.
4
The intersection of NeverTrumpers and Liberals is globalism. The former favors markets the latter does not believe in American exceptionalism. Both rationalize the export of American manufacturing to Asia for different reason. The NTs for market efficiency and the latter as a device to liberalize and democractize the world. But the reality of globalization is, we have exported American jobs, key industries beyond defense are now compromised and it has funded the rise of the Chinese dictatorship. That dictatorship not only lied about coronavirus, it routinely suppresses its people but we rationalize that because they provide us cheap iphones and other cool stuff. We don't have to be isolationists to acknowledge we have let this go too far. The Chinese are not are friends, they are not a democracy and the are focused on world domination. We need balance in our economic relationship with China and not whole sale export of our industries. Coronavirus is just the canary in the coal mine.
9
@Mark V - When you say "we" exported American jobs, really that "we" is American corporations. The Chinese made it easy to do so, government policies (written largely by the corporations, and codified thanks to corporate political donations) allowed it all to happen, and bottom-line above social responsibility ethos inexorably drove it. If it can be done by robots that don't need benefits or a wage, it can be done here; if it requires humans, off it goes overseas. If we had single-payer health care, that might alleviate the cost of health care through corporate benefits. A very few individuals, at the top of corporate ladders, have driven this.
26
@Greg. Except “we” always have a choice as consumers. And that choice is almost always the same: we will buy what is cheapest. Corporate decision-making follow this inevitable logic, and the consumers don’t really want to think too hard about what stands behind the product.
Just as buying a steak at a supermarket, no one imagines the cow that was slaughtered and butchered, so too when buying clothes or a cellphone, no one stops to think of the sweatshop conditions behind it.
Similarly, while everyone professes to love their corner bookstore but most will buy the book from Amazon - and have a rational explanation to justify it.
2
Is "globalism" the right word?
I think not.
The correct word is "arbitrage".
Starting with the union busting of Ronald Reagan, companies have sought to find "manufacturing arbitrage" moves to reduce costs and improve profits.
This is an economic matter not a question of liberal political philosophy.
If anything, right wing politicians, have supported big corporations in their efforts to internationalize manufacturing using "labor arbitrage" against workers in the US.
46
A global pandemic is not a critique of liberalism, it's a fact that shows how important global cooperation is to solve common problems. It should be a dose of reality for the populists.
99
Medicine has known for decades that Chinese agriculture is a stewpot of microbial evolution
2
One wonders how disbelief in evolution survives in this miasma of mobile genes.
5
@Jim Norman Your comment assumes that all governments are benevolent, open, cooperative, and motivated by all good things. When the originator of the disease is a dictatorship, controlling all information, and the world looks away from the treatment of its people for the sake of cheap goods, this is not global cooperation: it's global exploitation and it's mutual. We are being exploited (if you will) out of money, being offered the fake panacea of cheap goods which supposedly will raise our standard of living; the Chinese people are being exploited through their cheap labor and their relative disposability/fungability as evidenced by how their government treats them, to wit, camps for Muslims and others who don't toe the line. You dance with the dictator and you are partly to blame. That said, consider our relative condition under a coronavirus scenario if we were governed by anyone running for president, who denies that China is a dictatorship.
4
The media has made the coronavirus into a star. Fact: People get sick from various things all the time. Most survive just fine and some don’t. We don’t put the brakes on the global economy over the flu, so why are we doing it now? The coronavirus will run its course no matter what we do. Some people will die. Most will get no symptoms or mild symptoms and recover just fine. Way more people are going to die for lack of food or treatments for other diseases while scarce resources are diverted to the coronavirus. Let’s get the world back to work!
10
@Marc Beware! One of these days, a flu that spreads as fast as measles and is deadlier will cause major world disruption (see Flu Epidemic of 1918). When there are not enough health care workers healthy enough to care for the sick; when there are not enough meds to treat the infections and pneumonias that often follow; when there are not enough workers to work the factories and stores; when even 1st responders are diminshed by illness, then will you still say "people get sick from various things all the time..Some people will die"?. In our globalized world, it is only a matter of time..
6
@Marc About 2% of those who get this strain of coronavirus die from it.
@Marc Because it's 20 times more deadly than flu, and much more contagious.
2
Nobody knew that Corona Virus could be so difficult to slow down. I’m just waiting for the warm weather to save us.
5
@John Thank you for that dose of laughter amongst these informative but terrifying comments. I, too, am glad we have a top-rate virologist in the Oval Office.
Here’s hoping for Spring!
2
Regardless of how Trump and the boys respond to COVID-19, the CDC is providing this advisory today:
"However, it’s important to note that current global circumstances suggest it is likely that this virus will cause a pandemic."
A pandemic (a worldwide spread of a disease) means that the US will be experiencing widespread exposure to COVID-19. A potential vaccine is, even with the current urgency being shown, not likely until well into next year.
As to its impact, the death rate at its epicenter, China, is now 3.2% while outside of China its been running at 0.8%. For comparison, seasonal flu's death rate is about 0.1%
As to "the tranquilizing effect of virtual entertainments make continued stagnation much more likely than true crisis or collapse." I would only add that, in nature, stability is a special case of the more general instability.
5
@GerardM Death rates are not independent of the quality of health care. Death rates will rise if health care sectors become overwhelmed and lack the capacity to care for too many critically ill patients. there will also be negative externalities to those with other health problems who cannot get care as the health care sector is overwhelmed. This is one reason why we need a vastly larger federal government response, beginning a few weeks ago. The $2.5 billion request by Trump is way too small.
29
@GerardM
the outside China rate is likely inaccurate because the population is so newly infected: their outcome is not known.
2
The lesson is that, like domestic capitalism, global capitalism is in dire need of rules and regulations. Income inequality discriminates against those who can’t get treatment for viral infectious diseases like Coronavirus with hopeless consequences. This is not a weak liberal vs. a strong conservative debate issue . It’s a matter of survival. As to why it seems to happen in China? The culture consumes all that flies, except planes and all that runs, except cars. That’s a serious issue. That applies to South Korea as well. And, like the Silk Road during the Middle Ages, human traffic brings disease. Just ask natives of the Americas who got whipped out with measles and other contagious diseases. We should be informed and preventive measures must be taken.
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@Ted "Income inequality discriminates against those who can’t get treatment for viral infectious diseases like Coronavirus with hopeless consequences."
There's no effective treatment. The Chinese doctors gave extremely aggressive care to the 34 year old ophthalmologist before he died, including ECMO - artificial heart lung machine. It didn't work, and there's no way that we in the U.S., given the resources we now have, could provide that treatment to more than a dozen or so people in each major city if it did work.
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There are a lot of reasons to fear the government. One of them is growing incompetence because of reduced capacity.
Will the drug companies ability to develop new drugs, at great profit, be enough to counter a pandemic? Does our government, or others, have the capacity to do the investigations that will produce a vaccine?
Then, we have to wonder if people will be willing to use a vaccine even if it seems to be effective. There are a lot of political reasons for pushing an anti-vaccine agenda. We see it in other countries where healthcare providers are attacked because of suspicions about their motives.
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That’s not fear of government. It’s fear of the lack of government.
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@Heik My take is Betsy meant fear of government incompetence. Not the same thing.
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Besides the obvious ‘subliminal’ message about having a new book coming out(okay Ross, we have our credit cards ready), the author pointedly leaves out the much more important fact that the yearly influenza outbreak, including this year’s, is far more dangerous than the effects of the corona virus ‘pandemic’. But of course, the flu doesn’t make for exciting news at all, so onward goes the hysteria.
I predict that by this time next year, ‘corona virus’ will be an answer in a trivia game.
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Actually, he points out that the current mortality rate for this corona virus is much higher than that for the flu. You can confirm this independently via the magic of the internet.
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@Steven
Quote: "the yearly influenza outbreak, including this year’s, is far more dangerous than the effects of the corona virus ‘pandemic’"
No. Wrong.
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@Steven I don't think I'll be buying a book from someone who conflates populism with xenophobia, nor knows the definitions of thesis and hypothesis.
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Battling this scourge requires coordination among large, effective national governments, and international agencies such as WHO. Conservatives are loath to admit that government is a large part of the solution to any problem, except war. But thousands of Americans may die from this, or hundreds of thousands, as bad as any war.
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"liberal-globalist imagination" embodied by Trump and Rush Limbaugh as Douthat describes in the following paragraph?
Right. This is an example of writing that keeps dicing and dividing us falsely. Reinforcing the false meme of a great chasm between people in this country.
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If the dollar value of yesterday’s stock market losses had been directed by the various governments of the word toward COVID19 when it first reared its head, can you imagine what we’d know now? If the same amount were committed on a regular basis into the future, where would the research take us? We’d probably cure the common cold. Maybe there is a role for big government, after all.
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yes, many of my progressive friends are rooting for the virus so that Bernie wins the election. Win at all costs. ends justify the means, eh. They also are hoping for a sharp economic decline and more unemployment so that we can win. Let's hope.
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@Joe Yoh the people who gave us Trump have no business pointing their finger at anyone else. And I am no Bernie fan.
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Why is it necessary to resort to the "God willing" scenario?
Why are we not hearing more science and explanations of how infected people succumbing when infected and in high level of care facilities? People such as the young doctor in China that appeared to be in such a facility and would be expected to be relatively healthy succumbed. In my experience this would likely be related to multiple system failure.
When are we going to start educating the American public on what to expect if this does become an epidemic in the U.S.? We should start preparing the public now for the cruelty of a true triage scenario in which people (possibly very many) simply will not have the medical care available that we are seeing being delivered to the few now infected.
It will be great if the worst fails happen; however, the process of understanding the problem and education about what to expect if it does should be happening now.
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@Kevin Phillips Not so long ago the various cable news networks would be televising special programs about the virus. Public health specialists would be interviewed, and correct information conveyed to viewers. Poor Sanjay Gupta must be thinking he's a relic. Now it is all politics, all of the time.When news becomes entertainment all bets are off. I'm glad that the NYT and other responsible publications are writing about it.
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This morning it was announced that Iran’s deputy health minister has been infected with coronavirus.
Many minimize all of this ( oh,more people die from the flu) or say it is all exaggerated.
Tell that to those infected and those who die.
Denial is not an effective strategy.
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I am not sure what your trying to say here, globalism’s bad and trump has no clue? First of all globalism is here to stay as long as its cheaper to make things offshore being it a car part, software or a help desk. We need a government that works to make that as seamless as possible and level the playing as much as possible. As for trump and being prepared for any emergency, he never will be and our government degrades every day as he replaces competent people with loyal yes people. His desire to always be right and never admit a mistake, even too himself prevents him from responding. People like Rush Limbaugh on Fox make policy and spread disinformation designed only to make trump look smart and correct.
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@Thomas Renner Globalism is not here to stay, it will die, like all viruses, it will die out, recede. It cannot consume everything, the consumers are moneyless, unemployed, underemployed, on drugs, on drink, killing themselves. The masters of globalization are doing fine, its time they fall, even if that means everyone falls. Some nations wont be hurt.
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@Richard L. Wilson The "socialist" countries, like Denmark, will probably fare the "least worst"
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To only slightly oversimplify, the test is for Americans who love to be at the front of the line to gingerly step to the back of the line (or even not get in line).
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It is a deeper test of our American system, especially in regard to public health. This is especially true not only in public protections to toxic industrial pollutants in our communities, workplaces and our water but in our access to medical care and its costs. The growing Coronavirus epidemic, underscores the necessity of universal access to health care. Without everyone being covered, the poverty of some poses a health risk to all. It is now a national security issue.
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