BY JACK CROWE May 18, 2020
MUCH OF THE RESPONSE TO COVID at the state and the federal level has been characterized by a failure to quickly adapt to changing circumstances. State policymakers failed to understand that preserving hospital capacity, the primary concern when the outbreak began, should have taken a back seat to preventing deadly clusters in nursing homes once it became clear that hospitals would not be overwhelmed in the way early models suggested. It took state policymakers weeks to understand the dynamic and their insistence that nursing homes accept known Covid carriers back in to their care cost lives in the meantime.
It now appears that this inflexibility will also plague the public’s response going forward. Many of the hardest-hit states have finally achieved adequate testing capacity — but the tests are going unused. “We now have more testing capacity than New Yorkers are using,” New York governor Andrew Cuomo wrote on Twitter on Sunday. “We need to use our full testing capacity as we reopen. If you have COVID symptoms or have been in contact with someone with COVID — get a test.” The same dynamic persists in California, which has the capacity to test 100,000 people per day but is averaging roughly 40,000 tests daily. Public health experts speculated in comments to the Washington Post that people with mild symptoms have proven unwilling to get tested because they are still heeding the weeks-old advice of public health officials who stressed the importance of saving all available tests for frontline workers and those with severe symptoms.
There is also an obvious role for policymakers in messaging to the changing circumstances. Cuomo was quick to announce New York’s testing surplus but some governors have been hesitant to make a similar announcement due to fears that an unexpected second peak could again test their capacity.
“A lot of states put in very, very restrictive testing policies . . . because they didn’t have any tests. And they’ve either not relaxed those, or the word is not getting out,” Ashish Jha, who directs the Harvard Global Health Institute, told the Washington Post. “We want to be at a point where everybody who has mild symptoms is tested. That is critical. That is still not happening in a lot of places.”
Harvard researchers have estimated that the U.S. must test around 900,000 people daily, or roughly eight percent of the population per month, to safely reopen. But the country is currently testing just 330,000 people daily, according to the Covid Tracking Project. As blanket lockdowns give way to more targeted solutions, the efficacy of the public health response will come to depend to a greater degree on the public’s ability to respond to the latest phase of the recovery and to resist the one-size-fits-all approach that was called for when the outbreak first began. 
Fed Chair Warns Economy May Not Fully Rebound Until End of 2021, Could Require a Vaccine Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell warned in an interview released on Sunday that U.S. economy may not fully recover from the damage wrought by the coronavirus response until 2021.
Powell described the sudden slowdown as the “biggest shock that the economy’s had in living memory” during the interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes.
“This economy will recover; it may take a while,” Powell said. “It may take a period of time, it could stretch through the end of next year, we really don’t know.”
Powell also said that a full economic recovery may depend on the availability of a coronavirus vaccine.
“Assuming that there’s not a second wave of the coronavirus, I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year,” he said. “For the economy to fully recover, people will have to be fully confident, and that may have to await the arrival of a vaccine.” 
‘Grossly Incompetent’: Trump Attacks Obama in Response to Criticism of His Handling of Pandemic President Trump on Sunday hit back at criticism from former president Barack Obama over the handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
"Look, he was an incompetent president," Trump said of Obama. "That’s all I can say. Grossly incompetent."
In a speech to graduates of historically black colleges on Saturday, Obama leveled a thinly veiled criticism at his successor.
"This pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing," Obama said. The comments came after Obama termed the administration's coronavirus response "an absolute chaotic disaster" in a call with former staffers. 
Eight Covid Vaccines Now in Human Trials Eight prospective coronavirus vaccines have already started human trials, as the White House continues “Operation Warp Speed” with the goal of making 300 million vaccine doses available to Americans by the start of 2021.
Researchers at Oxford University and drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna are among those already conducting human trials of potential vaccines, as part of an expedited timeline to deliver an emergency-use vaccine by the fall. Other pharmaceutical giants, including Johnson & Johnson, have begun building up vaccine production capacity to fast-track millions of doses to the public.
President Trump said earlier this month that he was “very confident” the U.S. will discover a coronavirus vaccine by the end of the year, with his administration combining public- and private-sector efforts to enhance research. (WSJ) 
Sanders Says ‘Vast Majority’ of Supporters Will Back Biden, Despite Polling Concerns Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) promised that the “vast majority” of his primary supporters “will be voting for Joe Biden” in the general election, contradicting a former top aide, who warned last week that Biden was facing an uphill battle to win over Sanders supporters.
Asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos about the situation on Sunday, Sanders pushed back on the characterization of his supporters’ intentions, saying they understood that President Trump is the “most dangerous president in modern history.”
“What Joe is going to have to do and he’s beginning to move in that direction, is to say that those working-class people, say to those young people, say to those minorities, ‘Listen, I understand your situation,’” Sanders said. “ . . . I think they are going to reach out to our supporters and come up with an agenda that speaks to the needs of working families, of young families, of minority communities.” (ABC)
ALPHARETTA, Ga. — The sky was blue, the sun was rising, and as the death toll from the coronavirus continued to soar across much of America, the fountains switched on in Avalon, a development of restaurants and shops in a wealthy corner of suburban Atlanta. It was time for life to resume, Georgia’s governor had decided, so a masked worker swept the threshold of Chanel. A clerk brushed off windows at Fab’rik that had been gathering dust. A gardener fluffed pink roses in planters along the sidewalks, where signs on doors said what so many had been waiting to hear.
“Open,” read one.
“Welcome back!” read another.
“Yay!!” read another, as a great American experiment got underway in a place promising “the luxury of the modern South” with none of the death.
New York Times: Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True? He has delivered revelatory reporting on some of the defining stories of our time. But a close examination reveals the weaknesses in what may be called an era of resistance journalism.
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