The Week USA - 27.03.2020

16 NEWS Talking points

Grant Hindsley/The New York Time/Redux, Francine Orr/ Los Angeles Times

QResearchers at Johns

Hopkins University are

hoping to use the blood of

patients who’ve recovered

from the coronavirus to

treat severe infections.

They hope “convalescent

serum” containing anti-

bodies harvested from the

recovered patients’ blood

might be used to slow or

treat the disease. Doctors

using similar transfusions

during the Spanish flu epi-

demic of 1918 reported a

50 percent drop in deaths.

NBCNews.com

QA passenger who

boarded a JetBlue flight

while awaiting results from

a coronavirus test—which

came back positive—has

been banned for life by the

airline. The unnamed pas-

senger flew from New York

City to West Palm Beach,

Fla., learned via text during

the flight that he’d tested

positive, and informed the

crew, setting off a dash

to clean the plane, gates,

security checkpoints, and

check-in counters he’d

passed through.

CNN.com

QGun and ammunition

sales are surging in states

hard hit by the new corona-

virus. Major supplies are

out of stock, and custom-

ers have been lining up

outside gun shops.

Los Angeles Times

QImmigration and Cus-

toms Enforcement has

3.3 million illegal migrants

on its “nondetained

docket,” meaning people

who have been appre-

hended and released in

the U.S. while awaiting the

disposition of their cases.

The number has risen from

2.4 million in 2017, after a

surge in border crossings.

WashingtonTimes.com

America’s shutdown: Civic life goes dark

America’s “coronavirus

ground zero” has become

“a ghost town,” said Ruairí

Arrieta-Kenna in Politico

.com. Seattle and the sur-

rounding King County, where

the first American died of

coronavirus on Feb. 29, has

reported nearly 500 cases

and at least 43 deaths, and

has all but “shut down.”

Grocery store shelves are

barren, tech industry employees are working at

home, and downtown areas are “eerily silent.”

That’s now true nationwide, said Annie Gowen

in WashingtonPost.com. “America has changed

virtually overnight.” Tens of millions of workers,

hundreds of thousands of college students, and

millions of schoolkids are stuck at home. Even

churches are shut. “Fear and anxiety” compete

with boredom, and “there is a sudden vacuum”

of activities—live entertainment, movies, dating,

dining out—that would provide much-needed

diversion from this “unnerving” new reality.

Even sports isn’t offering its usual escape, said

Jason Gay in The Wall Street Journal. March

is usually one of the best months on the sports

calendar, with NBA and NHL playoffs near-

ing, college basketball entering March Madness,

golfers preparing for the Masters, and baseball

gearing up for opening day. Instead, “it’s the

Great Sports Shutdown of

2020,” with every major

sport postponing or cancel-

ing its events until further

notice. That’s unprecedented,

said Will Leitch in NYMag

.com. Sports endured “in the

aftermath of every national

tragedy” from World War II

to 9/11, offering escape, sol-

ace, and tribal togetherness.

But amid a deadly pandemic,

games in which groups of sweaty athletes bang

into one another in front of large, closely packed

crowds are “a luxury we cannot afford.”

Given the stakes, that’s a small sacrifice to make,

said Sarah Jones in NYMag.com. I have a medical

condition that makes it more dangerous for me

to contract coronavirus, so I was chagrined that

government officials were too slow to order bars

and businesses to close and people to stay home.

Every time a healthy young person goes out, he

or she risks accelerating the spread of coronavi-

rus to the elderly and the immunocompromised.

We’ve been “conditioned to think of ourselves as

individual consumers first and as interconnected

members of society second.” But this pandemic

marks “an inflection point,” and we’ll emerge

from this ordeal either even more “atomized and

callous” or realizing we’re all “small parts of a

bigger organism.”

Noted

“Afraid of coronavirus?” asked Giovanni

Russonello in The New York Times. “That might

say something about your politics.” Two national

polls now show that Democrats are far more

likely to view its spread as a “dire threat” than

Republicans are. One, from Quinnipiac Uni-

versity, found 60 percent of Republicans “were

not especially concerned,” while two-thirds of

Democrats said the opposite. The other, from

The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, found

almost 80 percent of Democrats think the worst

is ahead, while just 40 percent of Republicans

feel that way. It’s “not surprising,” said Zeesham

Aleem in Vox.com. President Trump, his congres-

sional allies, and conservative media outlets have

been downplaying the crisis “since day one.”

Fox News’ Sean Hannity echoed Trump’s claim

that the coronavirus was like the flu, while Rush

Limbaugh called the virus “the common cold”

and a “ploy to stop Trump rallies.” All this while

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National

Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, was

warning that if Americans don’t practice “social

distancing,” we’ll face a catastrophe.

Actually, it’s the Democrats who’ve been “lying

their heads off” about Trump’s crisis management,

said Nick Arama in RedState.com. The presi-

dent made a timely and decisive decision back

in January to restrict travel from China, which

at the time was the virus’ epicenter. Rather than

acknowledge the wisdom of this decision, Demo-

crats cried racism and xenophobia. They also

falsely claimed that Trump “muzzled scientists,”

when Fauci has been speaking publicly every day.

Democrats have been “hyping panic.”

Fox News might end up with blood on its hands,

said Justin Peters in Slate.com. By repeatedly

comparing the new coronavirus to the flu, and

echoing Trump’s claim that he was doing “a great

job” controlling its spread, the network has per-

suaded its aging viewers to ignore “the hysteria”

and go about their lives as if nothing has changed.

These lies are even more perverse when one con-

siders that the network’s elderly demographic is

among those most at risk for death if they become

infected, with the Centers for Disease Control

reporting mortality rates at 8 percent for those

between 70 and 79 and almost 15 percent for

those over 80. That’s compared with less than 1

percent for the same age group for the flu. This

“may well be a new low for Fox News”—and

that’s “really saying something.”

Fox News: Why Republicans don’t fear the virus

Downtown Seattle: Ghost town