The Economist 04Apr2020

The EconomistApril 4th 2020 3

1 Contents continues overleaf

Contents

The world this week

5 A summary of political

and business news

Leaders

7 Covid-

A grim calculus

8 Corporate bail-outs

Bottomless Pit, Inc

9 The technology industry

Don’t waste a good crisis

9 Mozambique

Gas, guns and guerrillas

10 Oil and geopolitics

The Rosneft riddle

Letters

12 On covid-19, Bolivia,

sports, rivers, lichen

Briefing

14 Pandemic trade-offs

Hard choices

18 Medical ethical

dilemmas

Triage under trial

Britain

19 Virus-driven innovation

20 Back to the 1950s

21 What’s gone wrong with

testing?

21 Policing a lockdown

22 Social distance in the army

22 How covid-19 has helped

the homeless

23 The steel industry’s woes

23 Call centres’ nightmare

24 BagehotDoes covid-

vote Labour?

Europe

25 France at war

26 Farmhands needed

27 Sweden stays open

28 Bavaria’s Markus Söder

28 Kosovo in crisis

29 Charlemagne Viktor

Orban’s power-grab

United States

30 Uniting the states

31 Movement Republicans

32 Peak unemployment

32 A mess in Wisconsin

33 Joe Biden

34 The marines go back to sea

35 LexingtonRon DeSantis

The Americas

36 Nicolás Maduro indicted

37 Cuban doctors abroad

38 BelloLeadership in

pandemic times

Middle East & Africa

39 Mayhem in Mozambique

40 Chocolate in Congo

41 Stay home or be whipped

41 Saudi Arabia’s lost year

42 Israel’s ultra-Orthodox

and the virus

CharlemagneHow

Hungary’s leader gets

away with it, page 29

On the cover

Covid-19 presents stark
choices between life, death
and the economy. They will
probably get harder: leader,
page 7. The models that inform
difficult decisions, page 14.
When the concept of
trade-offs becomes all too
real, page 18. How will a
decentralised country like
America fight covid-19? Page 30.
The right and wrong uses of an
anti-body test,page 68

• The best way to do bail-outs
  Rescues will be inevitable—and
  toxic. They must be designed to
  limit taxpayers’ losses and
  preserve dynamism: leader,
  page 8 and analysis, page 55


• Exit unicorns, pursued by
  bearsThe pandemic rams home
  what markets already felt:
  technology unicorns are headed
  for a fall. The consequences will
  not all be bad: briefing,page 60

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• Mayhem in Mozambique
  The government’s response to a
  jihadist revolt is cruel and
  ineffective: leader,page 9. A little
  known and poorly understood
  conflict is intensifying, page 39