Historian Anne Applebaum, in an article titled The Coronavirus Called America’s Bluff, writes that the US and China share similarities in the way they deliberately shut their eyes in the early stages of the epidemic. She also goes on to say that the ineptness of the US’s response exposes the illusions that many Americans have that the US does things much better than other nations. She says that the problem is structural, embedded in the way that the system does not allow for the continuity in key personnel in government that enables the creation of institutional memories. Hence each crisis sees the government scrambling to find ways to deal with it, and that this particular crisis “disproves everything the country believes about itself”.
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One might think that with a global pandemic, thoughts of war might fade into the background. But as Murtaza Hussain reports, that is not the case in the US-Iran conflict.

On Wednesday, the birthday of assassinated Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, a barrage of rockets slammed into the Camp Taji airbase north of the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. The attack killed two Americans and a Briton, while wounding 14 others. A day later, U.S. forces in Iraq hit back, carrying out airstrikes against Kata’ib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia that it blamed for the attack. It is a safe bet that the violence between the United States and Iran will not stop there. Already on Saturday morning, reports emerged of another attack at the same base that wounded three more U.S. service members.
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If you want to see how the number coronavirus is growing in various countries, researchers at Johns Hopkins provide the data. Kevin Drum has used this data to create graphs of the growth of cases for some western countries. All of them show an initial exponential growth that then flattens out into linear, but still steep, growth.
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At a time when the world needs to come together to fight the pandemic, Donald Trump lets loose his racism yet again.

Trump also called the coronavirus “the China virus” at the press conference and argued it wasn’t a racist term. When a reporter noted that dozens of Chinese Americans have faced racist attacks because of the virus in recent weeks, the president doubled down.

“It’s not racist at all, no. Not at all,” Trump said. “It comes from China.”

One senator, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has vowed to “punish” China for the virus. “We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world,” he said last week.

Asked Wednesday if he agreed with Cotton, Trump said, “I don’t know if you’d say China is to blame. Certainly we didn’t get an early run on it. It would’ve been helpful if we knew about it earlier.”

As the press conference came to an end, one reporter asked about a tweet from CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang, who wrote on Tuesday, “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.”

Trump sidestepped the question about whether he thought the remark was appropriate, and doubled down on his earlier comments, saying again, “It comes from China.”

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Starting at midnight last night, the ‘shelter in place’ order has been extended to Monterey county where I live due to two cases of Covid-19 being detected here. Since I have been voluntarily doing it already, this will not cause any change for me but it is going to be disruptive and costly for workers who lose their jobs and wages, parents with young children, businesses, and a whole host of others for whom the impact is not yet clear.

As I wrote before, there is something strange about this crisis because even though it is serious on a large scale, for most people things in their immediate surroundings seem so normal. This can cause people to minimize the danger and think it is overblown and thus ignore the recommendations. That would be very unwise. One woman, who describes herself as a “healthy 48 year old with no underlying conditions”, came down with the disease and had to be treated in the emergency room said that after her recovery, she was so irritated by all the comments that she read on various sites dismissing the threat that she decided to describe her “brutal” ordeal in order to let others know what it is really like and warn them not to take things lightly.
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There will be a debate today between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden starting at 8:00pm ET and moderated by CNN. It will be held in a studio in Washington DC without an audience instead of the original location in Phoenix in a large auditorium. One thing that you can be sure of is that the coronavirus is going to be the main topic of discussion. Both Sanders and Biden will deservedly blast Donald Trump for his administration’s catastrophically bad response. Another thing that you can be sure is that Sanders will hammer home the undeniable fact, now increasingly being realized, that the single-payer health care system like Medicare For All that he has been pushing for and which Biden has dismissed, would have been far better placed to respond to this pandemic that the rotten system that we now have in the US. I do not expect Biden to have a coherent response despite all the time he has had to prepare one.
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We have been fortunate not to have experienced a global pandemic before in our lifetimes. The previous global epidemics that threatened to become one, (SARS, MERS, swine flu (aka H1N1), and bird flu) did not pan out (Ha!) so it is hard to know what would constitute a normal state of events during one. So I am not surprised to find that things seem to me to feel a little strange.

I went to the supermarket today to buy a couple of potatoes for a recipe but there were no potatoes. It is a very large supermarket so at first I thought that they had moved it to another location, something they do from time to time but no, they were out of potatoes, something that had never happened before. I then realized that there had been a run on potatoes because people were stocking up on food. Why potatoes? I don’t know. I was about to leave when I thought I would wander around a few aisles to see what else was gone. The shelves were mostly full and by no means bare, unlike in the Latvian town where Andreas Avester lives, but some shelf sections were empty, especially those that should have had cleaning products. [Update: See correction from Andreas.] This article describes what people are NOT buying, as evidenced by the things still on the shelves of denuded grocery stores: pasta made from chick peas, chocolate hummus, Dasani brand bottled water while all other brands are gone, pork, kidney beans, vegan food, and obscure canned vegetables.
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