ModeShift

Seen from the screen of an electron microscope, coronaviruses are a single strand of RNA surrounded by a fatty outer envelope and contained in a crown of spiky hazard. Like Velcro, they are perfectly designed to latch onto host cells and inject genetic instructions that so confuse the cells that they produce more virus to infect more cells to produce more virus. Typically the consequence of a corona virus attack is an illness familiar to …

Three days ago, March 23, President Trump signaled his intent to relax guidelines on self-quarantining, saying “the cure can’t be worse than the disease.” Health authorities and citizens all over the country (including me) reacted with profound dismay at such a precipitous and apparently dangerous decision. But across a separate civic and political landscape — call it The Great Divide — the president’s decision to open the economy and tilt away from public safety is …

SOMERSET, KY — On Tuesday, February 25, when there were just 14 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the United States, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases , a unit of the Centers for Disease Control, participated in a news conference during which she delivered an accurate and disturbing projection about what was occurring. The consequences of the virus’s spread, she said, “may seem overwhelming and disruption to everyday …

SOMERSET, KY — An editor in New York who is a good friend and one of the great newsroom leaders of our time remarked to me four days ago, “Honestly, I think this is going to be far bigger than 9/11 in its impact on Americans’ lives.” In a brief sentence he tied together the two national catastrophes of this century, and projected the COVID-19 pandemic will be worse. There is one more way the …

SOMERSET, KY — On February 29, 2020, a day after President Trump headlined one of his cult rallies in South Carolina and called the coronavirus the Democrats’ “new hoax,” I was in New York City with my wife, Gabrielle Gray, celebrating my mother’s 90th birthday. The timeline, as you’ll see, is crucial to understanding the dimensions of an emergency that has unfolded in New York and the United States in the 15 days since, and …