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THE ALL-IRELAND CLUB camogie final is coming at a good time for Eoghan Rua forward, and Irish hockey international, Katie Mullan.

Eoghan Rua’s Katie Mullan.

If the season had been any longer, she might not have been able to keep committing to both teams. On the day she speaks to the media — one week out from her Derry club’s junior A decider against Clanmaurice of Kerry — she’s in the middle of a training camp with the Ireland hockey team.

The Green Army has a hectic few months ahead as they prepare for the women’s hockey world cup in July.

It’s a tight operation, no doubt, but Mullan is blessed to have the support of her colleagues in both squads to keep all the plates spinning.

“I’m sitting in a changing room on Irish camp right now,” she explains.

“I’m playing pretty full on hockey at the minute. We’re in camp now for three days and we were away in France two weeks ago. We were flying to France the day after the Ulster final, so it’s pretty tough to manage but it’s been good too.

“I just manage it very well with my club coach. The good thing is that the girls in my club team are very understanding, so the main thing for me is to get out on the wall ball with camogie. I go to training and do a lot more of the skill based stuff because I’m getting my physical training in with the hockey.

“So it’s just a real understanding and collaboration, which again, for to support any athlete or any kid playing multiple sports, you need that collaboration between coaches which I’ve had a fantastic experience of the last couple of months.”

Up until the end of last year, hockey was Mullan’s one and only sport. She played camogie as a youngster, and combined it with hockey for a time. But as she grew up and the opportunity to be a dual athlete became less accessible to her, she could only focus on one.

Sticking with hockey proved to be a fruitful one. Mullan captained her country through an amazing World Cup campaign in 2018 which turned hockey into a household favourite for a short spell. Ireland went into that tournament as the second-lowest ranked side, but emerged as silver medalists after reaching the final.

The following year, Mullan’s Ireland qualified for the Olympics for the first time after a dramatic qualifier against Canada in Donnybrook.

But last October, while attending the Derry intermediate camogie county final where her Eoghan Rua side defeated Newbridge, she felt something stir in her.

“I just really got an itch to be back playing camogie,” Mullan recalls about resuming her playing career with Eoghan Rua who were back-to-back All-Ireland intermediate champions in 2010 and 2011.

“So that was when the wee seed was planted, and it’s been quite a good year and quite a good run. It’s in the last month that it’s sort of really clashed for me, but with an understanding coach, with it being an All-Ireland, he’s been very supportive in that.

“I think if it was going on for much longer, I’m not sure I could have managed it but, yeah, very understanding.

“It’s been quite an intense few years with hockey and going away and speaking to my coach about that, I sort of asked if I could go back and play a bit of camogie. A lot of the girls I had played with 10, 11 years ago are still there playing for that team. A lot of them are my close friends so he was quite supportive of me doing that from a mental perspective.

“But also, I suppose, after the Olympics and sort of the comedown from the Olympics, and a break in our Irish hockey training programme after the qualifier in October, I was quite keen to do something different.”

Katie Mullan with her silver medal after the World Cup.

Source: Morgan Treacy/INPHO

In the time that Mullan has been away from the sport, she has noticed some changes in the way camogie is played. The endurance levels have increased and the game has become more physical.

Tactically, it’s a different sport to her now too.

“I think camogie players are a lot less stuck in positions, so you’re covering an awful lot more ground and you’re not necessarily in a little 10×10 yard zone, which was maybe the case the last time I played.

“And I know from a skills perspective, I was a huge one for dropping the hurl and getting the handpass away from my right hand. So, I’ve been blown up a few times for that just because it sort of happens instinctively.

“The girls are having to give out to me a bit for that, but it’s loads of fun and even just bringing across a small number of ideas from the game of hockey into the world of camogie, the girls have been super receptive, and I’ve enjoyed that too.

“There’s so much crossover [between hockey and camogie] from things within a team culture and high performance environment that don’t even relate to the specific skills of the game, that I think can be transferred to many different sports.

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“It’s fantastic and the most important thing is that I’m getting to play with girls I grew up in the club with, and I’m getting to pull on the club jersey with them again, which is very special to me.”

Eoghan Rua have just the week to prepare for the All-Ireland final. Their semi-final meeting with Roscommon’s Athleague was originally scheduled for 19 February, but the inclement weather forced a postponement until last Saturday.

It was a tough arm wrestle for much of the contest, with Eoghan Rua leading by just two points in the 15th minute of the second half. But the Ulster club managed to pull away and sign off with a 1-12 to 0-6 win to send them through to the decider.

The team are in good shape after that battle, and explains that travelling the short distance to Letterkenny for the Athleague game has improved their recovery time before meeting Clanmaurice this weekend.

Mullan has said in the past that she always wanted to go back to play camogie at some point, but she believed that it would be after she finished up with playing hockey for Ireland.

Taking the decision to make an earlier return to the sport could result in another All-Ireland crown for Eoghan Rua.

“I never thought it would be something I could do while still playing international hockey.

“It very much just happened naturally and I’m so grateful that it has. And just the way the season has unfolded, a lot of the camógs maybe don’t enjoy winter camogie, and it’s not their first choice. But for me, I’m really enjoying it so I’m very grateful.”

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President Donald Trump seemed to have very different things to say about Covid-19 when he spoke in public — at press conferences and TV appearances — than when he spoke to journalist Bob Woodward one-on-one.

In public comments, Trump took a tone that downplayed the coronavirus — making it seem like the virus would go away quickly, and emphasizing the need to reopen the country to try to get the economy going again.

With Woodward, Trump warned about the risks of the virus in frank and scary terms, calling it “the plague,” acknowledging it’s deadlier than the flu, and saying it could spread by air.

This was, apparently, deliberate. As Trump also told Woodward on March 19, “I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Of course, this is not how viruses work. While Trump tried to downplay the risks, Covid-19 continued to spread across America. As of September 16, the nation has reported more than 6.6 million confirmed cases and nearly 200,000 deaths. It still reports the most daily new coronavirus deaths out of any developed country.

“There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, previously told me. “From the very beginning, that minimization … set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus.”

In other words, Trump’s deception left America unprepared for the virus. The president claimed it was intentional, part of an attempt to keep the country upbeat. But we now know we were misled — to deadly results.

“Deadly stuff” versus “It’s going to disappear”

In February, Trump told Woodward that the virus was “deadly stuff,” more dangerous than the flu and potentially transmitting through the air. (CNN has audio recordings of Trump’s comments.)

February 7, to Woodward: “It goes through air, Bob. That’s always tougher than the touch. You know, the touch, you don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air, and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one, that’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than your — you know, your, even your strenuous flus. … This is more deadly. This is five per — you know, this is five percent versus one percent and less than one percent. You know? So this is deadly stuff.”

Yet in public, Trump took a very different tone. He consistently suggested that the virus was under control, soon to disappear “like a miracle.” In early March, Trump totally contradicted his comments to Woodward by suggesting the coronavirus was less deadly than the flu.

January 30, in a speech: “We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five. And those people are all recuperating successfully.”

February 26, at a press conference: “When you have 15 people [infected by the coronavirus in the US], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

February 27, at a White House meeting: “It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

March 9, on Twitter: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

Acknowledging the risks to the young — but cheering for packed churches

Later in March, Trump acknowledged to Woodward that the coronavirus could affect not just old people but young people, too. But he added that he prefers to downplay the threat.

March 19, to Woodward: “Now it’s turning out it’s not just old people, Bob. Just today and yesterday, some startling facts came out. It’s not just old, older. Young people too — plenty of young people. … I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

In public, Trump soon started suggesting the economy should take priority over dealing with Covid-19, continuing to suggest that the virus wasn’t a major threat to the US. He even said that the recently initiated lockdowns and stay-at-home orders could end by Easter (on April 12).

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March 22, on Twitter: “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

March 24, on Fox News: “Easter’s a very special day for me. … You’ll have packed churches all over our country. … I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

“This thing is a killer” vs. “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!”

In April, Trump described the coronavirus in terrifying terms to Woodward.

April 13, to Woodward: “This thing is a killer if it gets you. If you’re the wrong person, you don’t have a chance. … So this rips you apart. … It is the plague.”

That was quite different from what Trump was saying in public at the time, indicating that the virus was already well on its way to defeat in the US. He soon after sent his “LIBERATE” tweets, demanding that states reopen their economies.

April 10, on Twitter: “The Invisible Enemy will soon be in full retreat!”

April 17, on Twitter: “LIBERATE MINNESOTA! … LIBERATE MICHIGAN! … LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd amendment. It is under siege!”

The one consistency: Avoiding the blame

There’s one thing Trump was consistent about: Whether in public comments or his interviews with Woodward, he never took responsibility for the virus spreading out of control in the US.

July 21, to Woodward: “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault. … China let the damn virus out.”

August 14, to Woodward: “Nothing more could have been done. Nothing more could have been done. I acted early. I acted early.”

Trump took a similar stance when asked, in press conferences and interviews, about the US’s failures to build up testing and prevent the deaths of more than 1,000 Americans a day to Covid-19.

March 13, at a press conference, when asked about tests: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

July 28, in a televised interview, referring to 1,000 deaths a day: “It is what it is.”

Trump failed, and more people have died as a result

This is not just something that makes Trump look bad or exposes the bullshitter that he is. During a major crisis, particularly a pandemic, clear and transparent communication is one of the most important things leaders can do to keep the public and other officials not only informed but also ready to act. By consistently downplaying the threat of the virus, Trump worked to disarm one of the country’s biggest weapons — public action — against a major disease.

As Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me in the early days of the pandemic, “You really need very strong leadership from the top.”

Trump’s downplaying of the virus extended not just to his public comments, but the actions taken by him and his administration, too. He’s called for less testing, arguing that more tests make the US look bad by revealing more cases — and his task force successfully pushed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to, in effect, recommend less testing. His staff has simultaneously pushed the CDC to change scientific reports and studies because they might make Trump look bad by contradicting his evidence-less claims about Covid-19. He pushed the CDC out of a public leadership role after an official there made grim — but correct — comments about what to expect under the coronavirus.

Trump has even contradicted his own administration’s recommendations to push a rosy image of the country’s fight against Covid-19, demanding that states reopen quickly, before they met his administration’s recommendations, and getting parts of the public to think (wrongly) that masking is unhelpful or unnecessary, as his administration recommends public use of masks.

Now America is doing quite badly in its fight against Covid-19. The US hasn’t seen the most coronavirus deaths of all wealthy nations, but it’s in the bottom 20 percent for deaths since the pandemic began, and reports seven times the deaths as the median developed country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, 115,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

Overall, Covid-19 cases in the US are now declining after the country’s recent surge. But that’s in large part because people have ignored much of what Trump has said: The public, as well as many cities, counties, and states, have embraced social distancing, particularly indoors, and masking — likely driving down new infections.

At the same time, the US’s number of cases and deaths remains unacceptably high; over the past week, nearly 900 Americans have died each day, on average, from Covid-19. Some US outbreaks continue to pop up as well, with states in the Midwest and South recently hit hard.

This is the reality Trump tried to downplay. And we’re stuck with those consequences — those infections, those deaths — no matter how the president tries to spin the pandemic.

President Donald Trump on Wednesday suggested that if you excluded blue states, America’s high number of Covid-19 deaths wouldn’t look bad compared to other countries. “If you take the blue states out, we’re at a level that I don’t think anybody in the world would be at,” he said at a White House press conference.

There are plenty of problems with this. It implies that the deaths of Americans who live in blue states don’t matter as much to Trump. It suggests that he doesn’t take any responsibility for deaths in the states that have a different political party in charge. And it’s generally absurd for Trump to act as though he’s not the president of the whole country.

But it’s also flatly false: When dividing states based on their 2016 votes for president, 11 of the top 20 states for Covid-19 deaths went for Trump. Overall, blue states fare worse with a death rate of 74 per 100,000 people, but red states still have a relatively high death rate, by global standards, of 49 per 100,000.

To put it another way: If you somehow “take the blue states out” and red states were their own country, they’d still be in the top 20 for Covid-19 deaths worldwide. Blue states would rank in the top five. Among only developed countries, blue states would be in the top five and red states would be in the top 10.

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As a whole, the US is currently 11th worldwide and fifth among developed nations for Covid-19 deaths.

Individual states look even worse. If Republican-run Mississippi, with its Covid-19 death rate of 93 per 100,000, was a country, it would be in the top three globally, after San Marino and Peru. Democratic-run New Jersey and New York, with death rates of 181 and 168, respectively, would lead the entire world.

America’s coronavirus epidemic hit blue states particularly hard at first, especially in the Northeast. New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts are still the top three states for Covid-19 deaths per 100,000 people. (Massachusetts has a Republican governor.)

But the recent resurgence of Covid-19 hit red states hard too, unfortunately working to balance the scales in this grim statistic.

Trump’s comments are just another way that he’s tried to shirk responsibility for America’s Covid-19 epidemic as the national death toll nears 200,000, effectively shifting the blame to Democratic leaders. Previously, Trump told journalist Bob Woodward, “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault. … China let the damn virus out.” Trump later told Woodward, “Nothing more could have been done.”

The reality is much more could have been done, but the president blundered at every step of the way. As cases climbed in the US, Trump abdicated problems with testing to local, state, and private actors; pushed states to reopen way too early to supposedly “LIBERATE” their economies; spoke negatively about masks while refusing to wear one himself; and backed unproven and even dangerous approaches to treating Covid-19, including injecting bleach. Each of these failures compounded and led to the current US death toll — and local and state governments, as hard as some tried, simply don’t have the resources to fight a pandemic on their own as the federal government flails.

The result: While the US hasn’t seen the most coronavirus deaths of all wealthy nations, it’s in the bottom 20 percent for deaths among them since the pandemic began, and reports seven times the deaths as the median developed country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, 115,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

That’s on Trump, no matter how much he tries to shift the blame to blue states, China, and everyone else.

Correction: The Covid-19 death rates for both red and blue states in this article were originally underestimated. They’ve been fixed.

Pauline Binam, a 30-year-old former detainee at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia, had been in custody for about two years when she started having irregular menstrual bleeding. She feared that confinement was taking its toll on her body.

Binam, who came to the US from Cameroon when she was 2 years old, was being held at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center while awaiting deportation.

According to her attorney, Van Huynh, she consulted with medical staff at the facility who told her that the condition could be treated by a minor surgical procedure in which a doctor dilates the cervix and scrapes off the lining of the uterus.

Instead, the doctor informed her that he had also removed one of her fallopian tubes and that she could expect to have difficulty conceiving if she wanted to have more children.

Binam is now at the center of a congressional inquiry into allegations of a pattern of nonconsensual gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, performed on detainees at Irwin in recent years. ICE ordered her deported on Wednesday morning, but she narrowly avoided deportation only after two Congress members got involved in her case.

“I’m often not surprised by things in the world of immigration nowadays,” Huynh said. “I was shocked and appalled, hearing Nurse [Dawn] Wooten confirming what Pauline had been telling me all through 2019.”

Binam says she had invasive surgery with no opportunity to consent

Before her procedure in August 2019, Binam gave verbal consent, indicating that she understood the course of treatment. But she was not given the opportunity to consent to the much more invasive and life-altering surgery she received while under anesthesia. She later expressed to a psychiatrist that she was “bothered” that she had one of her fallopian tubes removed when she was expecting a different procedure, according to medical records from August 2019, which Huynh shared with Vox.

“She was adamant that she did not give consent for them to do anything to her fallopian tubes,” Huynh said. “Had she been informed of what was being done with regard to her fallopian tubes, she would have been able to respond fairly to that.”

To this day, Binam, who has a US-citizen daughter, doesn’t know whether she’ll be able to conceive again, or whether it was medically necessary that her fallopian tube be removed.

Wooten, a nurse at the facility, was the first to raise concerns about the hysterectomies, which were performed by a gynecologist described as “the uterus collector” in a whistleblower complaint filed Monday.

Multiple attorneys have since come forward alleging that their clients had been subjected to hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, vice chair of the House immigration subcommittee, said that, based on conversations with three of those attorneys, it appears that at least 17 detainees had such procedures.

Mahendra Amin, a gynecologist associated with Coffee Regional Medical Center and Irwin County Hospital in Georgia, allegedly performed at least some of the gynecological procedures, including hysterectomies, that were described in the whistleblower complaint and by the detainees’ attorneys. (His attorney has “vigorously” denied the allegations.)

It’s not clear whether he alone performed the procedure on Binam or cooperated with other doctors, but he is listed as the “ordering” doctor on a pathology report relating to her surgery.

The House Committee on Homeland Security is investigating the allegations in the complaint, and more than 170 members of Congress have called for a separate investigation from the Homeland Security inspector general’s office.

Testimony from Binam and other detainees at Irwin will likely be critical to those inquiries.

Binam was almost deported — just as she came forward with the allegations

Binam came to the US when she was 2 years old from Cameroon. She might have been eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Program, which has allowed more than 700,000 unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children to live and work in the country legally, if it weren’t for a shoplifting conviction from when she was 17. She paid a resulting fine without understanding the consequences: She was essentially admitting guilt to the charges against her.

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A couple of years later, she was charged with larceny in a separate case from the first shoplifting incident and was offered a plea deal. She took the deal, again admitting her guilt, which qualified as a second strike on her record. Immigration officials consequently launched deportation proceedings against her and detained her at Irwin starting in October 2017.

Though a mother of a US citizen who had lived in the US for decades would typically be able to apply for deportation relief, Binam’s conviction and plea deal made her ineligible. In immigration court, she claimed that she feared returning to Cameroon, a place that she has never called home, and where there is ongoing conflict between the state and anglophone separatists. She was nevertheless ordered deported in an immigration court ruling that she is now appealing before the 11th Circuit.

Even though her appeal is still pending, ICE could have deported her at any moment. But it was only on Wednesday — in the wake of the whistleblower complaint’s publication and after Huynh sought an emergency pause on her deportation, identifying her as a victim of a nonconsensual gynecological procedure — that ICE finally tried to put her on a 9:30 am deportation flight out of Chicago.

“We were just shocked to find out that — just as we were learning about all these things that were coming out from Nurse Wooten — they wanted to put her on a flight and try to deport her as soon as possible,” Huynh said.

A petition that garnered more than 1,800 signatures overnight also sought to halt her deportation. But it wasn’t until Jayapal and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) intervened that she was finally pulled off the plane at the last moment and sent to another immigration detention center, the Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas.

“There’s so much about immigration detention that takes away from a person’s life,” Huynh said. “It robbed her and her future because of what we’re learning today.”

VIENNA — “I have never seen an emergency room so crowded with very, very sick patients,” recalls Annalisa Malara, a doctor at Codogno Hospital in Lombardy, Italy. “We were literally overwhelmed by the number.”

That was late February, when Malara diagnosed Italy’s first case of locally transmitted Covid-19. An emotionally wrenching marathon of hospital shifts followed. Malara felt like she was constantly scrambling — to get enough oxygen to keep patients alive, to arrange transfers to other hospitals, to try and sleep so she could keep going. “We had to watch patients die,” she said. “It’s something that I think I can’t forget — I will never forget.”

More recently, Codogno Hospital has been Covid-19-free. But with case counts rising across the country and the continent again, Malara worries about a return to tragedy. Last week, she spent hours on the phone with colleagues to check on the status of their intensive care units. The situation was stable — though no one was sure how long that would last. “Everyone is very scared,” she confessed.

Only six months after Italy’s coronavirus crisis became a warning to the West about how quickly the virus could strain even the best-resourced health systems in the world, the World Health Organization warned Thursday of a “very serious situation” unfolding again across the agency’s European region, as weekly cases surpassed those reported during the first peak of the pandemic in March. This “should serve as a wake-up call for all of us,” Dr. Hans Kluge, the WHO regional director for Europe, said.

At the country level, the situation is no more reassuring. Italian officials are once again reporting around 1,500 new infections each day. That’s not yet anywhere near the last peak of 6,500 — but it’s a significant rise from 200 in early July. France and Spain, currently the hardest-hit countries in the region, are tracking an onslaught of cases even worse than their springtime peaks. On September 7, Spain became the first European country to count half a million total cases — more than 100,000 of them diagnosed in the two weeks prior. Days later, France recorded a jump of 10,000 new cases in one day. In Austria, between late April and mid-June, cases stayed below 100 for weeks, then gradually rose, with 768 reported on September 16.

Even Germany, an oft-cited example of coronavirus response excellence in Europe, has slowly seen its daily case count edge up, with nearly 2,000 infections — a doubling from August 1.

Yet one can almost forget there’s a pandemic going on in many parts of the continent.

Here in Vienna, where Covid-19 infections are rising so fast Germany just declared the city a high-risk hot spot, restaurants in my neighborhood are full of maskless people practically sitting elbow-to-elbow, kids are back in school and on the playgrounds, and opera season has reopened.

This disjuncture — between the rapidly rising case counts and relatively relaxed social life — has left some confused, and others complacent. When I showed up at a small garden brunch on Saturday, the hosts said they’d wondered whether they should cancel — worrying what their neighbors would think of the gathering — after they heard the news that morning that Austria had just recorded more than 800 new daily infections. Meanwhile, a 20-something university student told me that the coronavirus now feels like old news to her peers.

Part of the confusion has to do with the fact that the current phase in Europe — despite how bad it looks according to case numbers alone — has a different dynamic from the first. And that’s not only because Covid-19-related hospitalizations and deaths aren’t rising nearly as quickly as they did in the spring. This new dynamic is hard to see when you consider case counts or even hospitalizations alone.

“Even more than in March and April, we need to use [all the data] to paint a picture that’s complex and balanced,” said Edouard Mathieu, the Paris-based data manager of Oxford University’s Our World in Data project. Indeed, Europe’s latest coronavirus chapter is a much more nuanced story than the previous one — but it ultimately ends in the same place: a looming and very real risk of exponentially growing cases, leading to thousands of unnecessary deaths and the threat of new lockdowns.

Why cases alone can’t tell us about Europe’s new Covid-19 surge

There are a few important caveats to keep in mind when examining Europe’s surging coronavirus case count. The biggest one: You can’t “take the numbers today and place them on top of the earlier curve and assume it’s the same thing,” Flavia Riccardo, a researcher at the Italian National Institute of Health, told Vox.

Official case numbers are always an artifact of how testing is being done — and how testing is done has changed dramatically over the course of the pandemic. “Most cases we were seeing at the beginning were clearly symptomatic, because the indication was to test only symptomatic people,” Riccardo said. “Generally people were asked to stay home until they had more severe symptoms. That’s the opposite of what’s happening now.”

That broadening of the testing criteria for the coronavirus, along with an increased capacity to swab, has meant many more tests are being done, and more cases documented. In mid-March, German officials performed roughly 20,000 tests per day, according to Our World in Data. Now the number is a staggering 150,000. By the end of May, France and Spain were doing 37,000 and 44,000 daily tests, respectively; France now does 144,000 tests per day and Spain, 89,000.

This suggests two things: During the first wave of the pandemic, health officials only captured a fraction of the coronavirus infections in the population, so the real peak in the spring was much higher than the official graphs suggested. “We probably measured something like less than 10 percent of what happened,” Mathieu said. Second, the recent surge looks relatively large compared to the spring spike — but in reality, it’s probably smaller.

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Still, the expansion in testing alone can’t fully explain the current case uptick, at least not in every country. That’s where another metric — test per case — becomes useful.

The test-per-case ratio tracks exactly what it sounds like: the number of tests being done divided by the confirmed cases. When the number drops too low it means an epidemic is likely out of control, since officials can no longer keep up with the demand for testing and see where new pockets of disease are spreading.

That’s what’s happening now in Europe — most notably Spain, Italy, and France — where cases are rising faster than can be explained by the increase in testing alone.

For example, back in June, Spanish officials did 130 tests for every confirmed case. As of September 12, that number had dropped to only nine tests per case. In Austria, the number of tests per confirmed case has fallen from 250 in early June to 20. A similar decline in the UK is proving to be worrisome. There, reports of an explosion in testing wait times and delays in people getting notified of positive results have sparked rumors of another lockdown.

Hospitalizations and deaths in Europe are rising — just at a slower rate than before

But there’s another aspect to the data we have to consider in order to understand the trends in Europe: how quickly infections, hospitalizations, and deaths are rising. Today, they are generally increasing at a much slower rate than in the spring (you can see that more clearly when you plot the data on a logarithmic scale). While this is good news, the trends are still worrisome.

Let’s focus on hospitalizations for a moment to understand why. Hospitalizations are often an intermediate step between rising cases and increased mortality. They can also signal the extent to which a health care system is strained and, when they start rising, provide a warning that more resources need to be marshaled quickly.

Earlier in the pandemic, there was a two-week lag between an uptick in cases and a rise in hospitalizations, said Maria DeJoseph Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s Covid-19 technical lead. And when hospitals became crowded with Covid-19 patients, that was followed by an increase in Covid-19 deaths.

Yet, for most of the summer, the surging Covid-19 caseload in European countries wasn’t accompanied by that growth in hospitalizations or deaths — a trend many attributed to the shift in transmission from mainly older to younger groups.

“Across Europe, there were a number of outbreaks in social settings — nightclubs, restaurants, and social gatherings,” Van Kerkhove told Vox. The median age of cases dropped. So even though cases overall grew, hospitalizations and deaths were down — and that makes sense because younger people are more likely to experience mild or symptom-free infections.

Covid-19 demographics are changing again — shifting back into older populations. In France, for example, 4 percent of tests performed on people age 60 and older are now positive — a doubling from two weeks ago. By September 10, there was a 44 percent increase in the proportion of people over age 75 who have been diagnosed with the virus compared to the previous week.

In Italy, the median age of cases went down from nearly 60 in February to 30 at the end of August. It’s back up to 40 — and Riccardo thinks it’ll rise again as outbreaks move from social settings like nightclubs into households again.

So it has taken time for hospitalizations and deaths to start rising again — but they are now in France and Spain, Van Kerkhove said.

Mathieu walked me through the situation in France, which he’s been tracking. In July, cases started increasing in a way that couldn’t be explained by testing alone — albeit slowly, doubling every two weeks instead of every 3.5 days, like in March. A rise in hospitalizations didn’t follow immediately.

It’s become clear that was because younger people were catching the virus. By mid-August, “the virus started to affect older people, and then a few weeks later, hospitalizations have started to increase,” said Mathieu. By September 10, the French public health ministry reported that new Covid-19 hospitalizations were growing in all but one region of the country.

“Now we are starting to see deaths increase,” Mathieu added. In late July, there were 10 Covid-19 deaths per day. Now, there are 30. “This whole process took almost two months instead of [several] weeks.”

The exact same trend is playing out now in Spain, he added. “In March, the number of deaths was doubling every two to three days in Spain,” he said. “The current rate is much slower — deaths are doubling on average every two weeks.” But they’re still doubling.

Even if it’s happening more slowly this time, it’s still exponential growth that could require more lockdowns

There’s one last factor to consider in the slowing Covid-19 death rate — and it’s good news. Doctors are better at diagnosing and treating the disease than they were at the start of the pandemic, so patients are more likely to survive.

“Governments like to congratulate themselves because they are not seeing the level of hospitalizations and deaths as we saw at peak — and the reason for that is not because Covid isn’t still burning in the same way,” said Lawrence Gostin, a Georgetown University global expert. “We’re catching it earlier and treating it better. So you see lower death rates because of earlier detection, better treatment, and elderly and vulnerable were either exposed and died or they learned the lesson and are staying away.”

These treatments include cheap and readily available drugs like dexamethasone and hydrocortisone, which can cut the risk of dying in very sick patients by a third.

While that’s certainly comforting, when cases start to rise and resources to deal with patients — drugs, personal protective equipment, beds, staff — don’t grow fast enough to meet demand, “your fatality rate will increase again,” Devi Sridhar, professor and chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, warned.

And that’s when the specter of lockdowns starts reappearing. “If you see hospitals filling up and ICU beds full, [politicians will] have no choice but to implement some kind of lockdown unless you want your health system to collapse,” Sridhar added. “You can’t have people dying in hospital doorways because they can’t get access to oxygen.”

Sridhar wasn’t at all surprised that Israel just imposed a new lockdown, or that Madrid — where doctors are calling the situation “March in slow motion” — is also resorting to lockdown measures. She also predicts there will be more to come for Europe — that we’ll “pay for summer holidays with winter lockdowns.”

“Every country was under pressure to lift restrictions as soon as possible,” she said. “What’s happened is a muddling of economic and health objectives — we’re not doing either properly.”

Mathieu finds this frustrating since it was so predictable. It’s “exactly what happened the first time: People failed to think in terms of exponential growth.”

During phase one of the pandemic, coronavirus outbreaks proliferated exponentially, meaning an uptick in cases that appeared slow at first rapidly accelerated, outstripping countries’ abilities to manage them. Governments were forced to use the only instrument they had to deal with unchecked Covid-19 spread — one that didn’t require an exponential increase in doctors or hospital beds, Mathieu pointed out: the lockdown.

This time, the growth is happening even more slowly — we have an even better warning. Yet, Mathieu said, “There’s a weird benchmark thing going on where some people think there’s a threshold of terribleness and as long as we’re under that threshold, we shouldn’t worry about it” — even though it’s still exponential growth.

Take France, for example. While the country’s death rate is nowhere near the last peak, when 1,000 people were dying each day from Covid-19, “30 could soon be 50 or 100. And that’s dangerous for a mathematical reason … exponential growth.”

If hospitalizations in France keep increasing exponentially at the current rate of 30 percent per week, for example, it’ll take only eight weeks to reach April levels again. “For now, every line is going up exponentially in France — hospitalizations, ICU admissions, death — even though for now the absolute numbers are still very low.”

“We need to strike a balance,” he added, “between telling people it’s not the same thing [as the first coronavirus peak], it’s not as bad, it’s slower — but we should do something about it.”

Oliver Johnson, a professor of information theory and the director of the Institute for Statistical Science at the University of Bristol, is also worried that people have already forgotten about exponential growth. “Two, three weeks ago, [people were saying] it’s just cases. Now, people are saying it’s just hospitalizations. And it’s like okay, well — what’s the next stage after that?”

Now we’re heading into winter, when social distancing is more challenging and people are more likely to gather indoors, where the virus has a much better chance of spreading. “We have reason to believe these kinds of viruses spread better when it’s cold. And if you start counting even to Christmas, it starts to look quite scary,” Johnson added. “My worry is that it’s a long winter.”

As America, and even his own administration, woke up to the threat of Covid-19, President Donald Trump still didn’t seem to get it. Within weeks of suggesting that people social distance in mid-March, the president went on national TV to argue that the US could reopen by Easter Sunday in April. “You’ll have packed churches all over our country,” Trump said in March. “I think it’ll be a beautiful time.”

The US wasn’t able to fully and safely reopen in April. It isn’t able to fully and safely reopen in September.

The virus rages on, affecting every aspect of American life, from the economy to education to entertainment. More than 200,000 Americans are confirmed dead. Many schools are closing down again after botched attempts to reopen — with outbreaks in universities and K-12 settings. America now has one of the worst ongoing epidemics in the world, with the second most daily new Covid-19 deaths among developed nations, surpassed only by Spain.

America does not have the most Covid-19 deaths per capita of any rich country, but it’s doing worse than most. The US reports about seven times the Covid-19 deaths as the median developed country, ranking in the bottom 20 percent for coronavirus deaths among wealthy nations. Tens of thousands of lives have been needlessly lost as a result: If America had the same death rate as, for example, Canada, about 120,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.

The Easter episode, experts said, exemplified the magical thinking that has animated Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic before and after the novel coronavirus reached the US. It’s a problem that’s continued through September — with Trump and those under him flat-out denying the existence of a resurgence in Covid-19, falsely claiming rising cases were a result of more tests. With every day, week, and month that the Trump administration has tried to spin a positive story, it’s also resisted stronger action, allowing the epidemic to drag on.

A pandemic was always likely to be a challenge for the US, given the country’s large size, fragmented federalist system, and libertarian streak. The public health system was already underfunded and underprepared for a major disease outbreak before Trump.

Yet many other developed countries dealt with these kinds of problems too. Public health systems are notoriously underfunded worldwide. Australia, Canada, and Germany, among others, also have federalist systems of government, individualistic societies, or both — and they’ve all fared much better.

Instead, experts said, it’s Trump’s leadership, or lack thereof, that really sets the US apart. Before Covid-19, Trump and his administration undermined preparedness — eliminating a White House office set up by the previous administration to combat pandemics, making cuts across other key parts of the federal government, and proposing further cuts.

Once the coronavirus arrived, Trump downplayed the threat, suggesting that it would soon disappear “like a miracle.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took weeks to fix botched tests, and the administration actively abdicated control of issues to local, state, and private actors.

“There was a failure to realize what an efficiently spreading respiratory virus for which we have no vaccine and no antiviral meant,” Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me. “From the very beginning, that minimization … set a tone that reverberated from the highest levels of government to what the average person believes about the virus.”

Several developed countries — including Belgium, France, Italy, and Spain — were caught off-guard by the pandemic and were hit hard early, suffering massive early outbreaks with enormous death tolls. But most developed countries took these crises seriously: adopting lengthy and strict lockdowns, widespread testing and contact tracing, masking mandates, and consistent public messaging about the virus. (Though parts of Europe are now seeing second waves, seemingly because they prematurely relaxed social distancing measures.)

America did not take the steps necessary, even after an outbreak spiraled out of control in New York. So the US suffered a wave of huge cases over the summer that other developed nations generally avoided, leading to new and continued surges in both cases and deaths. And while other developed countries have seen spikes in cases as fall neared, America also has seen cases start to rise once again.

“If George W. Bush had been president, if John McCain had been president, if Mitt Romney had been president, this would have looked very different,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me, emphasizing the failure to act after Covid-19 hit the US hard was a phenomenon driven by Trump.

Experts worry that things will again get worse: Colder weather is coming, forcing people back into risky indoor environments. So are holiday celebrations, when families and friends will gather from across the country. Another flu season looms. And Trump, experts lamented, is still not ready to do much, if anything, about it.

The White House disputes the criticisms. Spokesperson Sarah Matthews claimed Trump “has led an historic, whole-of-America coronavirus response” that followed experts’ advice, boosted testing rates, delivered equipment to health care workers, and remains focused on expediting a vaccine.

She added, “This strong leadership will continue.”

The US wasn’t prepared for a pandemic — and Trump made it worse

During the 2014 Ebola outbreak, President Barack Obama’s administration realized that the US wasn’t prepared for a pandemic. Jeremy Konyndyk, who served in the Obama administration’s Ebola response, said he “came away from that experience just completely horrified at how unready we would be for something more dangerous than Ebola,” which has a high fatality rate but did not spread easily in the US and other developed nations.

The Obama administration responded by setting up the White House National Security Council’s Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, which was meant to coordinate the many agencies, from the CDC to the Department of Health and Human Services to the Pentagon, involved in contagion response.

But when John Bolton became Trump’s national security adviser in 2018, he moved to disband the office. In April 2018, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, then the homeland security adviser, who, the Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.” Then in May, Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and dismantled his global health security team. Bolton claimed that the cuts were needed to streamline the National Security Council, and the team was never replaced.

In the months before the coronavirus arrived, the Trump administration also cut a public health position meant to detect outbreaks in China and another program, called Predict, that tracked emerging pathogens around the globe, including coronaviruses. And Trump has repeatedly called for further cuts to the CDC and National Institutes of Health, both on the front lines of the federal response to disease outbreaks; the administration stood by the proposed cuts after the pandemic began, though Congress has largely rejected the proposals.

The Trump administration pushed for the cuts despite multiple, clear warnings that the US was not prepared for a pandemic. A 2019 ranking of countries’ disaster preparedness from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and Nuclear Threat Initiative had the US at the top of the list, but still warned that “no country is fully prepared for epidemics or pandemics.”

A federal simulation prior to the Covid-19 pandemic also predicted problems the US eventually faced, from a collapse in coordination and communication to shortages in personal protective equipment for health care workers.

Bill Gates, who’s dedicated much of his Microsoft fortune to fighting infectious diseases, warned in 2017, “The impact of a huge epidemic, like a flu epidemic, would be phenomenal because all the supply chains would break down. There’d be a lot of panic. Many of our systems would be overloaded.”

Gates told the Washington Post in 2018 he had raised his concerns in meetings with Trump. But the president, it’s now clear, didn’t listen.

There are limitations to better preparedness, too. “If you take what assets the United States had and you use them poorly the way we did, it doesn’t matter what the report says,” Adalja said, referring to the 2019 ranking. “If you don’t have the leadership to execute, then it makes no difference.”

As Covid-19 spread, Trump downplayed the threat

On February 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters that Americans should prepare for community spread of the coronavirus, social distancing, and the possibility that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.”

Six months later, Messonnier’s comments seem prescient. But soon after the briefing, she was pushed out of the spotlight — though she’s still on the job, her press appearances have been limited — reportedly because her negative outlook angered Trump. (Messonnier didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The CDC as a whole has been pushed to the sidelines with her. The agency is supposed to play a leading role in America’s fight against pandemics, but it’s invisible in press briefings led by Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, advisers, and health officials like Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx who are not part of the organization. CDC Director Robert Redfield acknowledged as much: “You may see [the CDC] as invisible on the nightly news, but it’s sure not invisible in terms of operationalizing this response.”

University of Michigan medical historian Howard Markel put it in blunter terms, telling me the US has “benched one of the greatest fighting forces against infectious diseases ever created.”

Meanwhile, the president downplayed the virus. The day after Messonnier’s warning, Trump said that “you have 15 people [with the coronavirus], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” This type of magical thinking appears to have driven Trump’s response to Covid-19 from the start, from his conviction that cases would disappear to his proclamation that the country would reopen by Easter.

This was deliberate. As Trump later acknowledged in recorded interviews with journalist Bob Woodward, he knew that the coronavirus was “deadly stuff,” airborne, more dangerous than the flu, and could afflict both the young and old. Yet he deliberately downplayed the threat: “I wanted to always play it down,” he told Woodward on March 19. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Trump has long said he believes in the power of positive thinking. “I’ve been given a lot of credit for positive thinking,” he told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan during a wide-ranging discussion about Covid-19 in July. “But I also think about downside, because only a fool doesn’t.” Pressed further, he added, “I think you have to have a positive outlook. Otherwise, you have nothing.”

The concern, experts said, is the signal this messaging sends. It tells the staffers under Trump that this issue isn’t a priority, and things are fine as they are. And it suggests to the public that the virus is under control, so they don’t have to make annoying, uncomfortable changes to their lives, from physical distancing to wearing masks.

It creates the perfect conditions for a slow and inadequate response.

The CDC botched the initial test kits it sent out, and it took weeks to fix the errors. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) also took weeks to approve other tests from private labs. As supply problems came up with testing kits, swabs, reagents, machines, and more, the Trump administration resisted taking significant action — claiming it’s up to local, state, and private actors to solve the problems and that the federal government is merely a “supplier of last resort.”

South Korea, which has been widely praised for its response to coronavirus, tested more than 66,000 people within a week of the first community transmission within its borders. By comparison, the US took roughly three weeks to complete that many tests — in a country with more than six times the population.

Asked about testing problems in March, Trump responded, “I don’t take responsibility at all.” In June, Trump claimed that “testing is a double-edged sword,” adding that “when you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people — you’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”

The testing shortfall was a problem few thought possible in the wealthiest, most powerful nation on earth. “We all kind of knew if a biological event hit during this administration, it wasn’t going to be good,” Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease epidemiologist, told me. “But I don’t think anyone ever anticipated it could be this bad.”

Trump also consistently undermined the advice of experts, including those in his administration. When the CDC released reopening guidelines, Trump effectively told states to ignore the guidance and reopen prematurely — to “LIBERATE” their economies. When the CDC recommended masks for public use, Trump described masking as a personal choice, refused to wear one in public for months, and even suggested that people wear masks to spite him. While federal agencies and researchers work diligently to find effective treatments for Covid-19, Trump has promoted unproven and even dangerous approaches, at one point advocating for injecting bleach. Trump’s allies have even held up CDC studies that could contradict the president’s overly optimistic outlook.

The most aggressive steps Trump took to halt the virus — travel restrictions on China and Europe imposed in February and March, respectively — were likely too limited and too late. And to the extent these measures bought time, it wasn’t properly used.

The federal government is the only entity that can solve many of the problems the country is facing. If testing supply shortfalls in Maine are slowing down testing in Arizona or Florida, the federal government has the resources and the legal jurisdiction to quickly act. Local or state offices looking for advice on how to react to a national crisis will typically turn to the federal government for guidance.

But the inaction, contradictions, and counterproductive messaging created a vacuum in federal leadership.

In the months after Trump’s prediction that coronavirus cases would go down to zero, confirmed cases in the US grew to more than 160,000. As of September 22, they stand at more than 6.8 million.

Months into the pandemic, Trump has continued to flail

After the initial wave of coronavirus cases began to subside in April, the White House stopped its daily press briefings on the topic. By June, Trump’s tweets and public appearances focused on Black Lives Matter protests and the 2020 election — part of what Politico reporter Dan Diamond described, based on discussions with administration officials, as an “apparent eagerness to change the subject.”

Then another wave of coronavirus infections hit beginning in June, peaking with more than 70,000 daily new cases, a new high, and more than 1,000 daily deaths.

America’s response to the initial rise of infections was slow and inadequate. But other developed countries also struggled with the sudden arrival of a disease brand new to humans. The second surge, experts said, was when the scope of Trump’s failure became more apparent.

By pushing states to open prematurely, failing to set up national infrastructure for testing and tracing, and downplaying masks, Trump put many states under enormous pressure to reopen before the virus was under control nationwide. Many quickly did — and over time suffered the consequences.

Rather than create a new strategy, Trump and his administration returned to magical thinking. Pence, head of the White House’s coronavirus task force, wrote an op-ed titled “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave’” in mid-June, as cases started to increase again. Internally, some of Trump’s experts seemed to believe this; Birx, once a widely respected infectious disease expert, reportedly told the president and White House staff that the US was likely following the path of Italy: Cases hit a huge high but would steadily decline.

Trump trotted out optimistic, but misleading, claims and statistics. He told Axios reporter Jonathan Swan in July that the US was doing well because it had few deaths relative to the number of cases. When Swan, clearly baffled, clarified he was asking about deaths as a proportion of population — a standard metric for an epidemic’s deadliness — Trump said, “You can’t do that.” He gave no further explanation.

Seemingly believing its coronavirus mission accomplished, the Trump administration, the New York Times reported, moved to relinquish responsibility for the pandemic and leave the response to the states — in what the Times called “perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.”

“The biggest problem in the US response is there is not a US response,” Konyndyk, now a senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, told me. “There is a New York response. There’s a Florida response. There’s a Montana response. There’s a California response. There’s a Michigan response. There’s a Georgia response. But there is not a US response.”

When the coronavirus first hit the US, the country struggled with testing enough people, contact tracing, getting the public to follow recommendations such as physical distancing and masking, delivering enough equipment for health care workers, and hospital capacity. In the second wave, these problems have by and large repeated themselves.

Consider testing: It has significantly improved, but some parts of the country have reported weeks-long delays in getting test results, and the percentage of tests coming back positive has risen above the recommended 5 percent in most states — a sign of insufficient testing. The system once again appeared to collapse under the weight of too much demand, while the federal government failed to solve continuing problems with supply chains. Months after Congress approved billions of dollars in spending to deal with testing problems, the Trump administration has not spent much of it.

Some of Trump’s people seemed to listen to his calls to slow down testing: On August 24, the CDC updated its guidelines to suggest people exposed to others with Covid-19 don’t necessarily have to get tested — a move for effectively less testing that experts described as “dangerous” and “irresponsible.” Only after weeks of criticism did the CDC back down and, on September 18, once again call for testing people without symptoms.

Mask-wearing also remains polarized. While surveys show that the vast majority of Americans have worn masks in the past week, there’s a strong partisan divide. According to Gallup’s surveys, 99 percent of Democrats say they’ve gone out with a mask in the previous week, compared to 80 percent of Republicans. Leveraging surveys on mask use, the New York Times estimated that the percentage of people using masks in public can fall to as low as 20, 10, or the single digits — even in some communities that have been hit hard. Anti-mask protests have popped up around the country.

Testing and mask-wearing are two of the strongest weapons against Covid-19. Testing, paired with contact tracing, lets officials track the scale of an outbreak, isolate those who are sick, quarantine their contacts, and deploy community-wide efforts as necessary to contain the disease — as successfully demonstrated in Germany, New Zealand, and South Korea, among others. There’s also growing scientific evidence supporting widespread and even mandated mask use, with experts citing it as crucial to the success of nations like Japan and Slovakia in containing the virus.

It’s not that other developed nations did everything perfectly. New Zealand has contained Covid-19 without widespread masking, and Japan has done so without widespread testing. But both took at least one aggressive action the US hasn’t. “While there’s variation across many countries, the thing that distinguishes the countries doing well is they took something seriously,” Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, an epidemiologist at the University of California San Francisco, told me.

One explanation for the shortfalls in the US response is Trump’s obsession with getting America, particularly the economy, back to normal in the short term, seemingly before Election Day this November. It’s why he’s called on governors to “LIBERATE” states. It’s why he’s repeatedly said that “the Cure can’t be worse than the problem itself.” It’s one reason, perhaps, he resisted embracing even very minor lifestyle changes such as wearing a mask.

The reality is that life will only get closer to normal once the virus is suppressed. That’s what’s working for other countries that are more earnestly reopening, from Taiwan to Germany. It’s what a preliminary study on the 1918 flu found, as US cities that emerged economically stronger back then took more aggressive action that hindered economies in the short term but better kept infections and deaths down overall.

“Dead people don’t shop,” Jade Pagkas-Bather, an infectious diseases expert and doctor at the University of Chicago, told me. “They can’t stimulate economies.”

The window to avert further catastrophe may be closing

As cases and deaths climbed over the summer, and as the November election neared, Trump at times appeared to spring back into action — bringing back coronavirus press conferences and briefly changing his tone on masks (before going back to mocking them).

But Trump still seems resistant to focusing too much on the issue. He’s tried to change the subject to former Vice President Joe Biden’s supposed plans to destroy the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” He’s continued to downplay the crisis, saying on July 28, as daily Covid-19 deaths once again topped 1,000, “It is what it is.” His Republican convention continued to diminish the risks of Covid-19 and exaggerate Trump’s successes in fighting the virus. At a campaign rally in Ohio on September 21, Trump claimed the virus “affects virtually nobody.”

So while combating Covid-19 aligns with Trump’s political incentives (it remains Americans’ top priority), he and his administration continue to flounder. And White House officials stand by their response so far, continually pushing blame to local and state governments.

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“There’s no national plan to combat the worst pandemic that we’ve seen in a century,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me.

The summer surge of Covid-19 has calmed now, although cases across the US flattened out at a much higher level than they were in the spring, likely a result of cities, counties, states, and the public taking action as the federal government didn’t. Still, cases have started to pick back up again.

Experts now worry that the country could be setting itself up for another wave of Covid-19. Schools reopening across the country could create new vectors of transmission. The winter will force many Americans indoors to avoid the cold, while being outdoors in the open air can hinder the spread of the disease. Families and friends will come together from across the country to celebrate the holidays, creating new possibilities for superspreading events. And in the background, another flu season looms — which could limit health care capacity further just as Covid-19 cases spike.

“The virus spreads when a large number of people gather indoors,” Jha said. “That’s going to happen more in December than it did in July — and July was a pretty awful month.”

There are reasons to believe it might not get so bad. Since so many people in the US have gotten sick, that could offer some element of population immunity in some places as long as people continue social distancing and masking. After seeing two large waves of the coronavirus across the country, the public could act cautiously and slow the disease, even if local, state, and federal governments don’t. Social distancing due to Covid-19 could keep the spread of the flu down too (which seemed to happen in the Southern Hemisphere).

But the federal government could do much more to push the nation in the right direction. Experts have urged the federal government to provide clear, consistent guidance and deploy stronger policies, encouraging people to take Covid-19 as a serious threat — now, not later.

“I’m really concerned that the window might be closing,” Kates said.

Without that federal action, the US could remain stuck in a cycle of ups and downs with Covid-19, forcing the public to double down on social distancing and other measures with each new wave. As cases and deaths continue to climb, America will become even more of an outlier as much of the developed world inches back to normal. And the “beautiful time” Trump imagined for Easter will remain out of reach.

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.

Several books on the Green New Deal have been released in the past year or two, but none boasts a more illustrious set of authors than Climate Crisis and the Green New Deal, out Tuesday from Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky.

Pollin teaches economics and co-directs the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He has been writing about climate economics and green growth for years, as well as consulting with various nonprofits and governments (he advised Obama’s Energy Department for a few years) on policy and poverty reduction.

Chomsky, of course, has been a notable intellectual presence on the left since the mid-20th century. He’s an analytic philosopher, one of the founders of cognitive science, and a giant in the field of linguistics, alongside his notable contributions as a historian, essayist, and social critic. The author of more than 100 books, he is known as one of the most cited authors alive.

The book is structured around a series of questions, prompts, and discussion points from political scientist C.J. Polychroniou (credited as a co-author), and despite its compact length, it is a sweeping inquiry into the nature of climate change, its relationship to capitalism, what a global Green New Deal might look like, and the effects it may have on politics.

I reached Pollin and Chomsky by Skype to chat about some of the book’s themes, including capitalism, green investment, and the prospects for social solidarity in the face of rising chaos.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

David Roberts

Naomi Klein’s climate book This Changes Everything famously argued that consumer capitalism and climate change are effectively one and the same, that the one is the inevitable consequence of the other. Is that something unique to capitalism, or is it just human nature to be shortsighted?

Noam Chomsky

We should recognize that if global warming is an automatic consequence of capitalism, we might as well say goodbye to each other. I would like to overcome capitalism, but it’s not in the relevant time scale. Global warming basically has to be taken care of within the framework of existing institutions, modifying them as necessary. That’s the problem we face.

When we turn to human nature, the first thing to remember is that we know essentially nothing about it. It’s what I work on all the time. There’s a few small areas where there’s some understanding of cognitive human nature and very little about the rest. It’s all surmise.

If it is true that human nature is incapable of dealing with problems developing over a longer term, if that’s a fact about the way humans are structured and organized, we can, again, say goodbye to one another. So let’s assume it’s not the case.

Then we work within a set of parameters. The fundamental institutions are not going to change in time. Human nature allows the possibility of thinking about what’s going to happen in a couple of decades, even centuries. Assume all that.

Then we turn to solutions. And there are solutions within that set of assumptions. So let’s proceed and work on them. If those assumptions happen to be wrong, tough for the human species. It’s what we have.

David Roberts

What historical analogues demonstrate the ability of capitalism’s institutions to reform themselves with the sort of speed and scale we’re talking about to limit climate change? I know we always go back to World War II, but there are obvious disanalogies — for one thing, there’s no enemy with a face. What prompts your optimism that the logic and momentum of capitalism are subject to change this big and fast?

Noam Chomsky

The analogue to World War II says that we easily have the resources to deal with this within existing institutions. Then comes the question of, is there an analogue in human history to facing a problem of destruction of the species within several generations? Answer: no. We’re in a new situation.

Actually, we’ve been in a new situation for 75 years. As soon as the nuclear age began, it was evident that humans had reached the intelligence and capacity to effectively destroy human life on Earth. That’s what we’ve been living with for 75 years. What wasn’t known at the time, but is now understood, is that it was also the beginning of what the World Geological Organization calls the Anthropocene, a period in which human activity is having very significant and deleterious effects on the environment.

So for 75 years, we’ve been living with a unique situation in human history. We have the means to destroy organized human life on Earth. That’s never been true before.

We also have the means to overcome that. World War II showed that with existing institutions, it was possible to amass resources on a scale well beyond what is required today. Bob’s work shows that very effectively. So let’s use what’s available. And let’s make the assumption that human beings are capable of looking beyond tomorrow.

David Roberts

A naive view of history might say that as the fruits of science become clear, there’s a sort of inevitability to greater democratic organization and complexity. But the last decade has seen a white revanchist backlash across the developed world, lots of places reverting to crude nationalism and authoritarianism. It certainly seems to throw a wrench in the notion that we’re on a one-way road to greater enlightenment.

Noam Chomsky

What history teaches us is that we have no idea. There are all kinds of lessons. Just take Germany. In the 1920s, Germany was the peak of Western civilization, in the sciences and the arts. And if you look at political science literature in the 1920s, the Weimar Republic was regarded as the peak of democratic achievement. Ten years later, it was the worst place in human history. And years after that, getting back to where it was.

Those are the lessons of history, namely, we don’t know.

Now, if you want to ask what’s happening now, I think we’ve been hit by an assault, the neoliberal assault, which has been devastating. Its basic design leads to high concentrations of wealth and power in unaccountable hands and massive growth of basically predatory institutions, most of them financial. That’s led to feelings across much of the world of anger, resentment, and distrust in institutions, which has some justification. And it’s fertile territory for demagogues; we’ve seen them arise.

But it’s also an opportunity to counter, and we’re seeing that too, everywhere from the streets of America to mutual aid groups in Brazil. Humans are capable of lots of things.

David Roberts

On the left these days, there’s a push for more public ownership in energy. But across the world, it seems like energy markets are already some of the least capitalist. What’s the right level of public involvement in the sector?

Robert Pollin

Globally, 90 percent of fossil fuel assets are publicly owned. So if we say the problem of climate change is private ownership of fossil fuel assets, and we need to transition to public ownership, well, we’re 90 percent of the way there! So that clearly is not a solution.

The cost of generating a unit of energy from solar power, wind power, and geothermal power is now fully competitive, at parity. Trump’s own Energy Department statistics show that, for a kilowatt of electricity, solar is 6.3 cents. Onshore wind is 6.0 cents, geothermal 4.7 cents. Now, coal with carbon capture is 13 cents. Nuclear is 9.3 cents. This is from the Trump administration.

The issue is, how do we mobilize investments adequately to transition into these already affordable energy-generating processes, and energy efficiency? As Noam mentioned, yes, we have a massive challenge, but it is not on the scale of World War II, at least not yet. My own estimate on a global model, we are looking at something like 2.5 to 3 percent of GDP per year, investing in renewable energy, transitioning to electricity, energy efficiency, and reforestation.

As Noam said, we don’t have time to totally overturn capitalism. We have to get to net zero emissions in no less than 30 years, and capitalism is still going to be around then. So we have to think about ways through which we can incentivize this transition that will also be egalitarian, in the sense that it will open up opportunities for small-scale enterprises. It’s going to generate jobs, and we have to make sure those are good jobs, union jobs. There will be jobs lost in the fossil fuel sector, so we have to create a just transition. But that’s all within the institutions of capitalism.

David Roberts

One longstanding political debate is over how to pay for things, or whether to pay for them. A lot of progressives these days are pushing the idea that the only limit on federal spending is inflation. Where do you come down on that question?

Robert Pollin

You’re talking about modern money theory — I don’t know if Noam has any interest in this question. [laughs]

My own financing model does make use of printing money, just not 100 percent, all the time. I had a piece in the American Prospect last December called “How to pay for zero emissions economy,” and I combined revenue sources. I have a carbon tax; 75 percent of the carbon tax is rebated back to the lower half of the income distribution, so it’s egalitarian. We take money out of the military budget. And then the rest, yeah, I say the Fed can print the money — just like right now they’re printing $4 trillion, minimum, at the drop of a hat. And I’m talking about maybe $50 billion. It’s a minuscule amount.

When this article was published, one of the main proponents of MMT, Randall Wray, somebody I’ve known for a long time, attacked my articles. “How dare you talk about paying, even $1!”

I said, I have 50 percent of the public money coming out of this pool called debt monetization, but there’s limits to that. If we’re going to pay for the green New Deal 100 percent by printing money, and on top of that Medicare-for-all, and on top of that everything else that gets us to full employment, we’re talking about a very dangerous policy tool. When do we know, exactly, we’re going to get to high inflation? And once we get there, all of a sudden, are we supposed to flip a switch and go from zero tax revenue to $4 trillion?

The proposal Noam and I have in the book relies significantly on the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank printing money — just not 100 percent.

David Roberts

Environmental justice has moved to the center of the climate discussion. What’s your degree of hope that, in the face of fear and anxiety and panic, we’re going to transition compassionately, in an egalitarian way?

Noam Chomsky

I don’t see any contradiction. I’m old enough to remember when the Black maids all disappeared from the middle-class households and got good jobs in factories for military production. That had an egalitarian effect. It wasn’t the purpose of it, but it had that consequence. Now we can make it the purpose of things like, say, developing efficient mass transportation, instead of jamming up highways with cars. That contributes to justice and makes people’s lives better, especially poor people.

The effect of pollution is radically oriented toward harming the poor and deprived. When the Trump administration removes pollution controls from factories, who does that hurt? It’s people living near the polluting factories because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. If we end that, we’re helping them. So there’s just a lot of [egalitarian] things that happen almost automatically as the result of the Green New Deal policy, and it can be modified to make it more so.

One of the major issues of climate justice is dealing with the global South — the people who didn’t really contribute to the problem but are now suffering more from it than anyone else. That’s been discussed since the Paris negotiations, but the Republican Party has refused to provide even minimal aid that would be necessary in poor countries.

In India, the temperatures are going extremely high. Well, you need air conditioners. There are cheap, highly polluting air conditioners and there are slightly more expensive, efficient, non-polluting ones. The amount of money that would be required from the rich countries to provide Indian people with decent air conditioners would be almost undetectable. A tiny sum would make enormous difference in people’s lives. There are things like that all over the place.

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David Roberts

What do you think about the degrowth movement, the idea that the only way to stabilize the climate in the long term is to cut back on consumption?

Robert Pollin

I’ve been in debates with these people — I have a lot of respect for them and fundamentally share their values. I’m sure I myself could live much more modestly than I do.

But affluent people in rich countries living a high lifestyle do not represent the standard of living for 95 percent of the world’s population. So when we say we have to live more simply, I don’t think it’s fair to apply that to everybody on planet Earth. In addition to that, people are going to keep consuming energy, and we should be in favor of delivering more energy, affordably, so that people can get around and have electricity and have a better standard of living.

The fact of the matter is, degrowth is not a solution, just in terms of simple mathematics. Right now the globe generates about 33 billion tons of CO2 emissions. Let’s say we cut global GDP by 10 percent, which would be a bigger depression than the 1930s. What happens? We cut emissions by 10 percent, from 33 billion tons to 30 billion tons. It’s no solution at all.

David Roberts

It’s not difficult to imagine the right responding to the undeniable reality of climate change with increased nationalism and hostility to immigration. How confident are you that climate change won’t spark a global wave of “green fascism”?

Noam Chomsky

I think the number of people who would think like that is so small that they really don’t matter. If they want to build themselves a gated community up in the Rockies, it’s not going to change much. It’s not gonna hurt the situation. It’s the general population that has to be reached.

Take a look at polls. Turns out that among Republicans, about 20 percent think that climate change is an urgent problem. That’s where the problem is, not with a group of reactionaries who think, I’ll save myself somehow, I’ll take a spaceship and live on Mars. The problem is the great mass of the population who are being deluded by constant propaganda. That’s a problem that can be solved by education, by organization, by reasonable forms of activism. That’s the way big changes have taken place in the world.

Just take our own country. We’re a very different country from what we were, say, 50 or 60 years ago. You go back to the 1960s, the United States had anti-miscegenation laws that were so extreme the Nazis refused to adopt them. We had federal laws in place that required that federal housing be effectively denied to African Americans. Women were not legally considered equal peers until 1975. Things that were considered normal at that time would be considered so outlandish now, you can barely even talk about them.

It didn’t happen by a miracle. And it didn’t mean convincing a couple of white supremacist reactionaries. It meant changing the nature of consciousness in the country. The Black Lives Matter protests created the biggest social movement in history, quickly, because the background had already been established. The same kind of background made it imaginable for the New York Times to publish the 1619 series. …

Awareness and consciousness can change, pretty fast, and that can happen on this too. It better happen, or we’re all in for it.

Imagine a dog. She spends her entire life in an iron crate so small that she cannot turn around. Her tail has been cut off so that other dogs in cages jammed up against hers won’t chew it off in distress. When she has puppies, the males are castrated without painkillers. They are left close enough for her to nurse, but too far away for her to show them any affection.

Fortunately, this dog is a fictional creation. We have laws preventing people from treating pets this way.

Unfortunately, we are doing this to animals that are very similar to dogs. This is an all-too-real description of how we treat some of the millions and millions of pigs we raise for meat on factory farms.

So why do we treat the animals we eat in ways we would never, ever treat our pets?

For the third season of the Vox Media Podcast Network series Future Perfect, we delve into how the meat we eat affects all of us. In this episode, we speak with Lori Marino, a neuroscientist who studies animal behavior and intelligence, to try to understand this paradox on our plates.

Marino makes it clear that pigs — and even chickens — are intelligent, emotional beings worthy of our moral consideration. She also helps us understand why we don’t consider them morally worthy.

You can subscribe to Future Perfect on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Further reading:

• Lori Marino has written in-depth roundups of the existing research on both chicken cognition and pig cognition.
• You might enjoy this study tracking how students’ attitudes toward chickens changed after taking a class in chicken training.
• This podcast episode uses clips from a BBC Earth segment on how pig intelligence compares to toddler intelligence, as well as from a Compassion in World Farming piece on pigs and video games.
• Dylan Matthews here at Vox has written in depth about unnecessarily painful pig castration. He’s also written explained the practice of mass culling male chicks.
• Watch the first-ever video of pigs using tools with no human prompting.
• For more on what labels such as “wild caught,” “organic,” and “grass-fed” actually mean for the food you eat, Rachel Krantz wrote this useful guide. We also have more information on what it means for eggs to be “cage-free.”

This podcast was made possible thanks to support from Animal Charity Evaluators, a nonprofit that researches and promotes the most effective ways to help animals.

Sign up for the Future Perfect newsletter. Twice a week, you’ll get a roundup of ideas and solutions for tackling our biggest challenges: improving public health, decreasing human and animal suffering, easing catastrophic risks, and — to put it simply — getting better at doing good.

ntribute today from as little as $3.

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The Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, which was first identified in China in December, has had sweeping effects in the public health, business, and travel sectors, among others. And while the repercussions for the entertainment industry may seem to pale in comparison to the clear threat the virus poses to human life, the ripple effects do have implications for the people around the world who make a living producing and distributing movies, music, and more.

The immense and lucrative Chinese film industry was hit almost immediately as movie theaters across the country were closed and major releases were delayed. Hollywood soon began to feel the effects, too, and as time passes, the impacts of the coronavirus on the global film and entertainment industries continue to be vast.

Consequences of the pandemic on these industries could range from lowered attendance at film festivals and disruptions in film distribution to delayed or canceled movie releases and concert dates to curtailed on-location film shoots. Financial ramifications will likely be felt by studios, filmmakers, theater owners, and more for months or even years.

Here are the biggest and most significant developments in the entertainment industry in response to the pandemic. Most recently, Disney announced more delays to several of its biggest films slated for 2020, including West Side Story and Black Widow.

Major entertainment festival cancellations and postponements

K-pop concerts canceled, including BTS shows: On February 28, the hugely popular K-pop group BTS canceled a series of concerts in Seoul. The shows were scheduled for April 11 and 12 and April 18 and 19 at Seoul’s Olympic Stadium. The group’s management agency said the decision was made due to the impossibility of predicting the scale of the outbreak in South Korea come April and cited the health and safety of the musicians themselves, workers, and concertgoers. Two hundred thousand fans were expected to attend.

Days earlier, BTS had asked fans to avoid a series of TV appearances scheduled to promote their newest album, Map of the Soul: 7, which had originally been planned to include studio audiences. The group also appealed to fans via a streamed press conference. “Health is always on our minds these days, and our messages of facing your inner self and loving yourself are ultimately only possible when you’re healthy, especially since it is very risky outside these days,” one of the singers, Jimin, said. ”I hope you take care of yourself.”

The entire Korean entertainment sector has been affected by the outbreak, and K-pop has been hit particularly hard, with groups including GOT7, Winner, Sechs Kies, (G) I-DLE, and others canceling scheduled tour dates. Variety reported that box office revenue in South Korea was down 30 to 40 percent in January 2020 compared to previous years.

SXSW canceled: On March 6, the city of Austin, Texas, declared a state of disaster, requiring the cancellation of public gatherings and events for the near future. The most notable of those is the cancellation of South by Southwest, the annual music, film, TV, and technology festival that serves as a significant financial powerhouse for the city.

The announcement came after a week full of major companies — including Netflix, Apple, Amazon, WarnerMedia, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Mashable, Intel, and more — dropping out of the well-attended event, canceling panels, premieres, and other appearances. Days later, SXSW organizers announced that they had laid off one-third of the festival’s employees in what they called “a necessary, but heartbreaking, step.”

Emerald City Comic Con delayed: The organizing body behind Emerald City Comic Con, the largest convention of its kind in Seattle, Washington, announced on March 6 that it will postpone the event until sometime this summer. The event was scheduled to run from March 12 to 16.

“We did everything that we could to run the event as planned, but ultimately, we are following the guidance of the local public health officials indicating that conventions should now be postponed,” convention organizers Reedpop said in a statement published on the Emerald City Comic Con website.

Cannes Film Festival delayed: Initially, the 2020 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, arguably the most prestigious film festival in the world, was left in limbo following an announcement from the festival’s organizers on March 19 that the gathering could be delayed until “late June or early July,” or another time. (The festival had been slated to take place May 12 to 23 and draws thousands of industries and press from around the globe each year.) The festival first issued a statement on February 28 after the first case of coronavirus in nearby Nice, France, was confirmed by the city’s mayor, saying that organizers were monitoring the situation but planned for the festival to go forward. (Cannes is a seaside resort town located on the French Riviera, about 30 km from Nice.)

By late spring, the organizers announced that the 2020 edition would be canceled. All films that would have played in the official and sidebar programs at the festival will bear the official Cannes seal when released in theaters or potentially at partner festivals in the fall, such as those that take place in Venice and Toronto. They announced these selections on June 3.

Coachella delayed, then canceled: Goldenvoice, the organizers of Coachella — one of the largest annual music festivals in the US — announced on March 10 that the festival would be postponed due to concerns about Covid-19. Another Goldenvoice festival, the country-music-oriented Stagecoach, was also delayed.

The Indio, California-based event was originally set to run for two weekends (April 10-12 and April 17-19), with the same talent lineup performing both weekends. The postponement moved Coachella to October 9-11 and October 16-18; Stagecoach 2020 was pushed back from April to October 23-25.

But on June 10, both events were canceled by an order from the public health officer of Riverside County, California.

Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) canceled: The 2020 Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) — the single biggest trade show in the video game industry — has been canceled. The Entertainment Software Association, which organizes the event, announced that it would not go forward with the annual event due to coronavirus fears in California, where E3 takes place. The event was scheduled for June 9 to 11.

The organization said it will contact exhibitors and attendees about receiving full refunds for passes, and that it is considering ways to “coordinate an online experience” in lieu of the in-person event. It also maintains that E3 will return next year as planned.

The NBA suspended basketball games: A player on the Utah Jazz tested positive for coronavirus on March 11, leading NBA officials to call off that night’s Jazz game just before tip-off. As a further precautionary measure, the league issued a statement that it would suspend the basketball season “until further notice.”

Prior to putting an early pause on the rest of the season, the NBA made other efforts to protect players and fans. The league barred media from locker rooms and publicly considered having teams play to empty arenas before ultimately stopping play altogether.

Games resumed on July 30.

2020 Tokyo Olympics delayed: On March 24, following pressure from athletes and multiple nations’ Olympic committees, the International Olympic Committee and Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe announced that the 2020 Summer Olympics would be postponed, possibly until 2021; on March 30, the dates were set for July 23-August 8, 2021.

San Diego Comic-Con 2020 canceled: On April 17, the organizers of San Diego Comic-Con announced that the yearly fan convention will not go on as planned in 2020. The event will resume once again in July 2021 at the San Diego Convention Center. The cancellation marks the first time in Comic-Con’s 50-year history that the event, the largest convention of its kind in the US, will not take place.

Major film release dates postponed or canceled

Warner Bros. changes release plans: On April 20, Warner Bros. announced changes to its slate. The Batman, starring Robert Pattinson, shifted from a release date of June 25, 2021, to October 1, 2021. The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to The Sopranos, was delayed from September 25, 2020, to March 12, 2021. King Richard, a biopic about Venus and Serena Williams’ father starring Will Smith, shifted from November 25, 2020, to November 19, 2021. An untitled Elvis movie moved from October 1, 2021 to November 5, 2021.

Two DC titles also shifted dates: Shazam! 2 is delayed from April 1, 2022 to November 4, 2022, and The Flash moved from July 1, 2022, to June 3, 2022.

On April 21, the studio announced that the big-screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights, originally set for June 26, 2020, would move to June 18, 2021, because of pandemic-related post-production delays. Malignant, a thriller from Aquaman director James Wan that had originally been scheduled for August 14 was pulled from the release schedule.

On June 12, the studio announced that Christopher Nolan’s Tenet, previously slated for release on July 17, would move to July 31. Wonder Woman 1984, which was set for August 14, moved to October 2. (Wonder Woman 1984 previously shifted from June to August.)

On July 20, with case numbers rising around the US and most theaters remaining closed, Warner Bros. announced that Tenet’s release would be delayed indefinitely. A week later, the studio announced that the film would be released on a staggered schedule: on August 26 in 70 international territories and then in select US theaters beginning September 3.

On September 11, the studio announced that it had delayed Wonder Woman 1984 again, reportedly until Christmas.

Newest Pixar film delayed: On April 13, Disney announced that Pixar’s latest release, Soul, would open on November 20, 2020. The film was previously set to open on June 19.

Disney makes sweeping changes to release calendar: On April 3, Disney made huge changes to its release calendar, setting dates for movies it had previously pulled without a date and moving others. Mulan was set to open on July 24, 2020, while Jungle Cruise, which had been set to release that day, moved to July 30, 2021. An untitled Indiana Jones film moved from July 9, 2021, to July 29, 2022.

Changes in the MCU calendar also set off a domino effect. Black Widow was newly set for November 6, 2020, while the previous release on that date, Shang-Chi, shifted to May 7, 2021. Originally, Doctor Strange 2 was set to release on that date; it’s now set to open November 5, 2021, displacing Thor: Love and Thunder until February 28, 2022. Black Panther 2 is still currently set for May 6, 2022, and Captain Marvel 2 moved from July 22 to July 8, 2022.

Disney also owns 20th Century Films and Searchlight Films, which had a number of changes. The Ryan Reynolds film Free Guy moved from July 3 to December 11, 2020. West Side Story is still set for December 18 and Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel for Christmas Day.

On July 23, however, Disney announced a series of sweeping scheduling changes once again. Mulan was pulled off the release calendar, indefinitely delaying its debut. Disney also took Wes Anderson’s newest film, The French Dispatch, off the calendar indefinitely, after it had initially moved from July 24 to October 16, 2020. Disney moved its upcoming trio of Star Wars movies forward by one year; they’re now slated to release in 2023, 2025, and 2027. And James Cameron’s Avatar sequels were moved back by a year as well, with the first set to premiere in December 2022.

The August 28 date for Disney’s The New Mutants remains August 28, for now; it was originally slated for April 3. And a release date for The Woman in the Window (originally slated for May 15) has not been set yet.

On August 4, Disney announced that Mulan would be released on its Disney+ streaming service. Subscribers will pay an additional $29.99 to rent the movie, available September 4. In territories where Disney+ is not available, Mulan will open in theaters that same day. (Notably, Disney+ is not available in China.)

On September 23, Disney announced more sweeping changes to its release schedule. Black Widow, originally set for November 6, is now slated to open on May 7, 2021. That delay shifted release dates for several other movies in the MCU, including Eternals (from February 12, 2021, to November 5, 2021) and Shang-Chi (from May 7, 2021, to July 9, 2021).

West Side Story, which had been set to release in the prime awards-season slot of December 18, 2020, will now open a full year later on December 10, 2021. The King’s Man — which had initially been set to open in September 2020, then delayed into 2021 — now has a release date of February 16, 2021. And Deep Water, starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, moved from November 13, 2020, to August 13, 2021.

A number of Disney’s films — among them Soul, the latest from Pixar — are still set for 2020 release. Soul has retained its November 20 date, at least for now. Death on the Nile shifted from October 23 to December 18. And the horror film The Empty Man is now set to open on October 23 rather than December 4.

Sony delays nearly all its movies until 2021: On March 30, Sony announced that nearly all of its summer tentpole films would be delayed until late 2020 or early 2021. Delayed movies include Kevin Hart’s Fatherhood, Jared Leto’s Morbius, Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Uncharted, and the previously delayed Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway. The only film that appeared unaffected was the Spider-Man: Far From Home sequel, which is still set for theatrical release on July 16, 2020.

NBCUniversal to release major films digitally: In an unprecedented move, NBCUniversal announced on March 16 that it would make some movies available digitally the same day they are released in movie theaters that remain open, including Trolls World Tour, which is set to hit theaters on April 10. Movies currently in theatrical release will also be available on-demand, including The Hunt, The Invisible Man, and Emma. Movies are available for a 48-hour rental period for $19.99 in the US and an equivalent price abroad.

No Time to Die: On February 16, MGM announced that it would cancel the Chinese premiere and publicity tour planned for the new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, which was scheduled for April. On March 4, the studio announced that it had delayed the film’s release until November 25, making the film the first major tentpole release to be delayed worldwide. The film’s release date moved again on June 12, from November 25 to November 20.

Paramount changes release dates: On March 12, John Krasinski, director of Paramount’s A Quiet Place Part II, announced via Twitter that the movie’s March 19 release date would be delayed. “One of the things I’m most proud of is that people have said our movie is one you have to see all together. Well due to the ever-changing circumstances of what’s going on in the world around us, now is clearly not the right time to do that,” he wrote. “As insanely excited as we are for all of you to see this movie … I’m gonna wait to release the film till we CAN see it all together! So here’s to our group movie date! See you soon!”

On July 23, Paramount announced that the Quiet Place sequel would be pushed to April 23, 2021. Top Gun Maverick was also delayed from December 23, 2020 to July 2, 2021. And that bumped Jackass, previously scheduled for July 2, 2021, to September 3, 2021.

Fast and Furious 9: On March 12, Universal Pictures announced that it would delay the release date of the ninth installment in the Fast and Furious franchise by 11 months, from May 22 to April 2, 2021.

Chinese movies scrapped theatrical release and premiere online: The biggest films of China’s year are usually scheduled to release during the Lunar New Year holiday, near the end of January, but mounting fears of the coronavirus and public reticence to be in crowded spaces caused distributors to voluntarily cancel or postpone several film releases. Huanxi, distributor of the Chinese blockbuster Lost in Russia, announced on January 22 that the film would premiere online for free. Promotional materials encouraged audiences to “stay safely at home and watch Lost in Russia with your mom.” On January 31, Enter the Fat Dragon became the second major Chinese film to premiere online, as theaters are closed by order of the government.

Film and TV productions halted, altered, or shut down

Saturday Night Live aired remotely produced content: On April 9, the producers of Saturday Night Live, which had been on hiatus since mid-March, announced that new, remotely produced material would air on NBC in the show’s usual Saturday night slot, 11:30 pm on April 11, including a “Weekend Update” segment.

The coronavirus has touched Saturday Night Live in at least two ways. The show’s long-time music supervisor, Hal Willner, passed away on April 7 at the age of 64; he was not formally diagnosed with the virus but had consistent symptoms. And Michael Che, one of the show’s co-head writers and co-anchor with Colin Jost of “Weekend Update,” announced via social media on April 6 that his grandmother had passed away from coronavirus complications.

The show joined other late-night comedy shows, such as NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon and Late Night with Seth Meyers, CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, in creating comedy content remotely.

Eurovision canceled: On March 18, the organizers of the Eurovision Song Contest announced via Twitter that the 2020 edition of the event was canceled. The event had been planned for May.

TV shows suspend production: Hundreds of shows have delayed or suspended production, including Apple’s The Morning Show and Little America; Netflix shows including Russian Doll; the CW’s Riverdale; NBC shows including the Chicago dramas and The Kelly Clarkson Show; CBS shows including the NCIS dramas, The Amazing Race, and Survivor; and many more.

Late-night shows suspend production or tape without a studio audience: Originally, on March 11, producers of shows including NBC’s The Tonight Show (hosted by Jimmy Fallon) and Late Night With Seth Meyers, CBS’s Late Show With Stephen Colbert, TBS’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and Comedy Central’s Daily Show (hosted by Trevor Noah) all announced they would begin taping without a live studio audience on March 16.

A day later, NBC announced that The Tonight Show and Late Night would suspend production beginning the week of March 16; Stephen Colbert also announced that the Late Show would suspend production. All three shows were already scheduled to go into hiatus on March 23. On March 13, Jimmy Kimmel Live also suspended production. Most shows eventually began producing remotely, often with hosts and guests working from home studios.

Disney suspends live-action production: On March 13, Disney announced that production on its live-action movies would suspend production. Affected films include The Little Mermaid, a Home Alone reboot, and Peter Pan. Earlier in the day, production on Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings had been suspended due to director Destin Daniel Cretton’s decision to self-isolate upon advice of a doctor. (Marvel is owned by Disney.)

Jia Zhangke project delayed: At the Berlin Film Festival in February, famed Chinese director Jia Zhangke (Ash Is Purest White, A Touch of Sin) told Indiewire that production on his new film, which was slated to begin in April, was delayed indefinitely. Jia spoke with Indiewire at the Berlin Film Festival, where his documentary Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue premiered. But he said that before he left, he’d feared his flight to Berlin would be canceled, and that some of his collaborators chose not to make the trip. Regarding his next film, he said:

For some film companies and studios involved in pre-production, a lot of costs are going down the drain, and those that already started production have to be somehow cut short or suspended. Some of them are already in the process of distributing films and they’ve paid for a lot of promotion and PR costs. The economy is now taking a huge hit, and I think the investment side will be hugely impacted as well.

Mission: Impossible production paused: On February 26, Paramount Pictures announced that it had halted a planned three-week shoot in Venice for the seventh installment in the Mission: Impossible franchise. “Out of an abundance of caution for the safety and well-being of our cast and crew, and efforts of the local Venetian government to halt public gatherings in response to the threat of coronavirus, we are altering the production plan for our three-week shoot in Venice, the scheduled first leg of an extensive production for Mission: Impossible 7,” a Paramount spokesperson told the Hollywood Reporter. “During this hiatus we want to be mindful of the concerns of the crew and are allowing them to return home until production starts. We will continue to monitor this situation, and work alongside health and government officials as it evolves.”

Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune tape without a studio audience: Though Sony declined to comment, sources told the Hollywood Reporter on March 9 that scheduled tapings of the shows would go forward without a live studio audience. The measure was taken partly as a precaution for the health of Jeopardy host Alex Trebek, who has stage 4 pancreatic cancer.

Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announce they’ve contracted the virus: One of Hollywood’s biggest stars, Tom Hanks, announced that he and his wife Rita Wilson had contracted the coronavirus while shooting Baz Luhrmann’s untitled Elvis Presley film in Australia:

In a message posted publicly on March 11, Hanks was his typical upbeat self:

Well, now. What to do next? The Medical Officials have protocols that must be followed. We Hanks’ will be tested, observed, and isolated for as long as public health and safety requires. Not much more to it than a one-day-at-a-time approach, no?

We’ll keep the world posted and updated.

Take care of yourselves!

Entertainment venues and attractions shut down

All Disney parks shut down: On January 25, Disney shut down its Shanghai Disneyland park over fears of the coronavirus. The park is a major revenue generator, with 11.8 million guests in 2018, 50 percent from outside the Shanghai region, and an estimated $1 billion in annual revenue and $50 million in operating profit. A day after Shanghai Disneyland’s closure, Hong Kong Disneyland shut down. Both Disney parks in Japan closed on February 29 and Disney announced on March 11 that they will remain closed through at least the end of April.

Late in the day on March 12, Disneyland in California announced it would close the following day; by that evening, the company announced that all of its parks would close, including those in Florida and Disneyland Paris (where three staff had previously tested positive for coronavirus).

In July, Disney World reopened amid a spike in Florida coronavirus cases.

North American movie theaters shut down: On March 13, a number of theaters and theater chains, including AMC Theatres, and the Canadian chain Cineplex, announced that they would be reducing the number of tickets sold to screenings by as much as 50 percent in order to enable patrons to sit further apart as part of “social distancing” measures.

On March 15, theaters in New York and Los Angeles were shut down by order of their respective mayors. On March 16, Regal announced it would shut down all of its 543 US theaters indefinitely; later in the day, AMC followed suit.

New York City cultural sites closed: On March 12, major cultural sites in New York City began to close, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Other institutions canceled programming for the month of March, such as the New York Public Library and Carnegie Hall.

Within days, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced that it anticipated staying closed through July and laying off much of its staff. On March 19, the Metropolitan Opera laid off all of its union employees, including musicians and chorus.

Broadway shows closed: On March 12, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that beginning at 5:00 pm, Broadway would be closed, part of a ban on gatherings of more than 500 people. On April 8, the Broadway League announced that theaters would remain closed through June, and probably longer. On June 29, the League extended the shutdown through January 3, 2021.

West End closes: On March 16, London’s West End shut down, following Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s speech urging Britons to avoid public spaces. The theaters, including the Royal Opera House, will stay closed indefinitely. As of June, the West End closures remained in effect through at least August 2.

Italian cultural sites closed: In February, a number of major museums in Venice, Milan, Turin, and other northern Italian cities were closed as part of the government’s aggressive attempt to contain the virus, and annual Carnivale celebrations stopped early. By early March, with the country under complete lockdown, cultural sites across Italy were closed, including the Colosseum and Pompeii.

Chinese movie theaters shut down for months, tentatively begin to reopen, then re-close: Hoping to contain the coronavirus outbreak, on January 23 the Chinese government temporarily shut down movie theaters throughout the country until further notice. A total film production shutdown soon followed. Loss of revenue over the Lunar New Year holiday in late January, during which movie theaters typically see an uptick in ticket sales, amounted to a staggering $1 billion, according to analysts.

By March 23, about 500 cinemas had reopened in China, roughly 5 percent of the cinemas in the country that were open before the outbreak. Variety reported that box office earnings remained minimal. But by March 27, they were closed again. Some Chinese movie theaters began to open in late July.

We will continue to update this article as the story develops.

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During the peak of the recent wildfires, cities like Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington, suffered some of the dirtiest air in the world, making breathing the air like smoking a pack of cigarettes in a day.

The smoke from these fires has shrouded millions of people in dirty air, as you can see in this map of air quality from Esri, a geographic information software firm:

But even after the flames are snuffed out, the harm from this dirty air may linger. Evidence is emerging showing that the health effects from wildfire smoke can last for a long time.

How long?

“Well, I guess unfortunately the short answer is potentially for a lifetime,” said Edward Avol, a professor of preventive medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. “In the short term, we have the potential for short-term emergency-room-type events, but in the longer term, we have the development of more chronic disease.”

While evidence continues to mount about the enormous economic, social, and health costs of air pollution, these wildfires show that we may still be underestimating the true scope of the problem. And as wildfires become more dangerous as populations increase in high-risk areas and as the climate changes, these hazards will only grow. That means we need to find ways to reduce exposure to wildfire smoke in the near term while also preparing to cope with the health effects over the long term.

The health impacts of wildfire smoke don’t end when the blazes burn out

When wildfires burn, they emit a blend of gases and particles including ash, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide. And when the smoke reaches urban areas, it can mix with human-produced chemicals, like those from solvents, plastics, and metals.

The immediate effects of this toxic brew can be stark. It can cause coughing and watery eyes, while worsening underlying health problems like heart disease and asthma. Some of the worst effects of smoke come from tiny particles known as PM2.5, particles with a diameter smaller than 2.5 microns. These motes can penetrate deep into the lungs and even cross into the bloodstream.

Air pollution, regardless of the source, is already one of the deadliest public health threats in the world. The World Health Organization estimates that 7 million people a year die from air pollution. Dirty air can also take years of life expectancy away from people.

But a key aspect of wildfire smoke that makes it so dangerous compared to other pollution sources is the sheer amount of hazardous particles and gases it produces.

“One thing that’s quite unique about wildfires is that they can create these very high levels of the particulate matter air pollution that you really don’t typically see on a day-to-day basis with typical urban pollution from trucks or factories,” said Jo Kay Ghosh, the health effects officer for the South Coast Air Quality Management District, whose jurisdiction covers more than 17 million people across Southern California. “In general, the higher [the] levels of pollution, the higher the risks of health effects.”

A recent study published in the journal Toxics looked at what happened to people in the community of Seeley Lake, Montana, after unprecedented late-summer wildfires in 2017 bathed the town in high concentrations of PM2.5 for more than a month.

Researchers examined 95 adults from Seeley Lake one and two years after the fires, measuring their lung functions. They found a significant increase in the number of people with below-normal lung function at these time points.

“The observed changes in lung function,” the researchers wrote, “ … illustrate the potential for long-term adverse health effects following a significant exposure to wildfire smoke. While the event in the present study was singular in its level and duration of smoke exposure, this is not the first, nor will it be the last exposure for these communities, due to the history of wildfires in this region.”

As a caveat, the researchers noted that the sample of people in their study skewed older, with an average age of 63. That means that many may have had preexisting breathing issues. But the results show how vulnerable groups may face an outsize health burden from wildfire smoke.

“When children and adults with potentially compromised health conditions are exposed to the smoke for days or weeks at a time, the concern is that this might convert to longer-lasting effects over their lifetime,” said USC’s Avol, who was not involved in the study.

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This is still an emerging area of research, and scientists are also studying the long-term consequences of other recent major wildfires. With more robust results, in time we may get a better handle on the health burden of wildfires.

More smoky air is likely in store for the West

Fire season still isn’t over for some parts of the West. As autumn winds pick up, a new round of blazes could spark and spread, particularly in Southern California, home of the notorious Santa Ana winds that can gust at 70 mph. More fires could further increase the health risks for people already struggling to get fresh air.

The key way people can protect themselves in these conditions is to limit their time outdoors, and if someone has to leave the home, they should wear a mask rated to filter particles, like an N95 mask. Within their homes, they should seal doors and windows and filter air coming through ventilation systems.

Ghosh emphasized that it’s important for people to check their local air quality since the amounts of smoke can vary a lot, even between nearby neighborhoods. And wildfires aren’t the only thing degrading the air.

“While we are in wildfire season, … we are also in smog season,” Ghosh said. “There are these different types of pollution and it’s important to pay attention to both.”

The South Coast AQMD created an app where Southern California residents can track where the air outside is dangerous to breathe, including wildfire effects as well as urban pollution sources.

However, these regions facing wildfire smoke are also, of course, confronting the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the disease is a respiratory infection that can spread through the air in closed quarters, much of the guidance for reducing exposure to the disease centers on increasing ventilation and exchanging indoor air with outdoor air.

“In a closed space for Covid, what we would say is we don’t want the indoor air concentrations in the confined space to build up, so we want to bring in as much outside air” as possible, said Avol. “In a wildfire situation, we don’t want the outside smoke to get in so we want to reduce the amount of outside air we’re bringing in. So they’re exactly opposite here.”

That’s creating a challenge for officials trying to both mitigate the pandemic and reduce exposure to wildfire smoke. And as the fires continue to rage, the tension will increase.