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China’s brutality leads us to this

WASHINGTON — Want to know why the U.S. economy is in free fall? Why restaurants and bars are closing, putting millions out of work, and why the airline industry is facing possible bankruptcy? Why schools across the nation are shutting down, leaving students to fall behind and parents without safe places to send their children everyday? Why the stock market is plummeting, wiping out the retirement and college savings of millions of Americans? Why the elderly are isolated in nursing homes and tens of millions who don’t have the option of teleworking have no idea how they will pay their ...

Price gouging vs. supply and demand

“We don’t have any...!” Fill in the blank. People are stocking up on things, fearing that we will be stuck in our homes, under quarantine, without essential supplies. Some hoard toilet paper. A popular internet video features someone driving up to what appears to be a drug dealer but is really someone selling toilet paper. When it became hard to find hand sanitizer in New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the state would produce its own, made by prison labor. Yet in-demand items like masks and hand sanitizer can still be found. It’s just that we have to pay an inflated ...

Coronavirus is the ‘Chinese Virus’

This week, President Donald Trump came under fire for his use of the phrase “Chinese virus” to describe the coronavirus, the source of the new pandemic that has led to a global economic shutdown as well as lockdowns of citizens in every major Western country. That media have somehow found time to hone in on the one issue that matters least — the labeling of a Chinese virus as such — in the middle of an unprecedented planetwide freeze demonstrates the utter unseriousness of those objecting. That the term should be controversial at all is nearly beyond belief. The virus did indeed ...

NYC’s ventilator rationing plan

Coronavirus is causing working-age people to worry about missing paychecks, caring for kids home from school, stockpiling groceries and canceling plans. But people in their 50s, 60s or older have bigger worries. Many are lying awake wondering if this is how they’re going to die. At its most severe, coronavirus attacks the lungs, making it impossible to breathe without a ventilator. Landing in the hospital on a ventilator is bad. But worse is being told you can’t have one. After learning that the state’s stockpile of medical equipment had 16,000 fewer ventilators than New ...

An enlightening lesson from nature

WASHINGTON — Today’s ill wind has blown in something good, a renewed interest in a neglected novel by a gifted writer. Albert Camus’ “The Plague” (1947) was allegorical: Europe’s political plague had been Nazism, which Camus had actively resisted in occupied Paris. But he had been born in French Algeria and surely knew of the 1849 cholera epidemic that ravaged the city of Oran, where “The Plague” is set. At the novel’s conclusion, as crowds celebrate the infestation’s end, Camus’ protagonist, Dr. Rieux, “remembered that such joy is always imperiled. He knew ...

Sick with worry isn’t just an expression

WASHINGTON — Two threads of interest have emerged from the coronavirus “crisis:” One is an apparent generational divide related to relative worry; the other is the degree to which the media are contributing to the virus’ propagation. I qualify “crisis” because, though we’ve had a steady rise in confirmed cases — and President Trump declared a national emergency Friday — a crisis seems yet to have occurred. This isn’t to say that a crisis isn’t in our future, but to suggest that the constant barrage of cataclysmic tidings, some of it false or misleading, could ...