Thread by @michaelluo

Earlier this year, I read @lawrence_wright’s new thriller about a global pandemic, “The End of October,” and was dumbfounded at its prescience. Now he’s out with the definitive account of Covid-19,
taking up most of this week’s @newyorker. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…

From the "lost February": "Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available within two days."

"By contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal public insurance and lessons learned from a 2015 outbreak of mers, provided free, rapid testing and invested heavily in contact tracing, which was instrumental in shutting down chains of infection."

"The country has recorded some fifty thousand cases of covid. The U.S. now reports more than four times that number per day."

Mid-March conference call with governors: Governor Inslee, of Washington, was flabbergasted when he realized that Trump didn’t intend to mobilize the federal government.

Inslee told him, “That would be equivalent to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on December 8, 1941, saying, ‘Good luck, Connecticut, you go build the battleships.’ ”
Trump responded, “We’re just the backup.”

Jennifer Feist, sister of Lorne Breen, the 49-yo ER doctor who killed herself: “She got crushed because she was trying to help other people. She got crushed by a nation that was not ready for this. We should have been prepared for this. We should have had some sort of plan.”

On the George Floyd protests: “We tested thousands of people,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, at the University of Minnesota, said. “We saw no appreciable impact.”

One study found lower rates of infection among marchers than in their surrounding communities. Epidemiologists concluded that mask wearing and being outdoors protected the protesters. Moreover, demonstrators were on the move.

Osterholm said that people in stationary crowds are more likely to become infected. In other words, joining a protest march is inherently less dangerous than attending a political rally.

Dr. Barney S. Graham, the chief architect of the first authorized COVID vaccines when he got the news the Pfizer vaccine was effective: “It was just hard to imagine,” he told me. He walked into the kitchen to share the news with his wife.

“I told Cynthia, ‘It’s working.’ I could barely get the words out. Then I just had to go back into my study, because I had this major relief. All that had been built up over those 10 months just came out.”

He sat at his desk and wept. His family gathered around him. He hadn’t cried that hard since his father died.

"Trump, by his words and his example, became not a leader but a saboteur. He subverted his health agencies by installing political operatives who meddled with the science and suppressed the truth. His crowded, unmasked political rallies were reckless acts of effrontery."

"In his Tulsa speech, he said that he’d asked his health officials to “slow the testing down”—impeding data collection just to make his Administration look better. When the inevitable happened, and he contracted the disease, he almost certainly spread it."

"Every guest at the Barrett reception tested negative for the virus before entering. Trump may well have been the superspreader at the Rose Garden event."

Infections often rose in counties where Trump held a rally. The surge in infections and deaths mocked his assertions that we were “rounding the turn.” The disease stalked him; it encircled him.

On October 25th, Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, declared, “We are not going to control the pandemic.” The Administration had given up.

Voting is a simple act, and an act of faith. It is a pledge of allegiance to the future of the country.

Across America, people waited in long lines to vote—despite the disease, despite attempts to discredit or invalidate their vote, despite postal delays, despite Russian or Iranian meddling, despite warnings from the White House that the President would not go quietly if he lost."

They voted as if their country depended on it.

TOC of this week's @newyorker. All of "departments" and the entirety of "the well"––the heart of the magazine traditionally devoted to its four "fact" pieces––devoted to @lawrence_wright's masterpiece. Only a few times in our history this has happened. newyorker.com/magazine/2021/…