Events

The number of new Covid-19 cases per day may have peaked in Illinois, but that still means we have new cases every day. We have over 10,000 infected in the state, with the doubling period now at 12 days (from 2 days back mid-March). This coincides with unpleasant news from around the world: Covid-19 has become the second-leading cause of death in the United States, accounting for 12,400 deaths per week, just behind heart disease which kills about 12,600. More than 5 million people filed for unemployment...

I mentioned this morning that the President has ordered a halt to payments to the WHO to shift the blame from his own failures. That explains part of the story; Graeme Wood explains the rest: Defunding the WHO (or at least threatening to do so) is yet another instance of Trump’s signature move, one that I described just weeks ago, when he insisted on calling SARS-CoV-2 “the Chinese virus,” and for a few days journalists and social-media scolds obediently modified their criticisms to fit his latest...

Today's Covid-19 news roundup highlights how no one in the White House should go anywhere near this crisis response effort: President Trump ordered a halt to payments to the World Health Organization as part of his effort to blame them for his botched response to the pandemic. He also delayed sending relief checks to tens of millions of people because he wants his name to appear on them. Kellyanne Conway, while criticizing the WHO for not knowing anything about Covid-19, demonstrates she doesn't know...

Chicago might have been breeding lilacs out of the dead land yesterday, but today we woke up to this: Because so few people are going in to the office these days, the expressways have almost no traffic. So people drive faster. Which led to this earlier this morning: About 60 vehicles were involved in a massive pile-up on an ice-slickened Kennedy Expressway near North Avenue early Wednesday, sending 14 people to hospitals as 45 others were evaluated on the scene, according to the Chicago Fire Department....

It's official: I mean, we all knew this was coming, especially after Bernie Sanders endorsed Biden yesterday. Because, I mean, he had to. Lookit: Yesterday the president went so far off the rails at his daily press briefing it's hard to say there's still a train. Or rails. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) may actually be starting to see the downside to being the president's chief lickspittle. Spikes in deaths at home in several cities suggest Covid-19 numbers need some revision....

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease director Dr Anthony Fauci, while never rude nor inappropriate, nevertheless persists in not letting the president get away with bullshit about Covid-19. James Fallows has some thoughts about why: Anthony fauci is different from any other prominent official Donald Trump has dealt with in his time as president. The difference is that Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is not afraid. To put it in terms Trump...

We all know President Trump's pathologies pretty well by now. Between the malignant narcissism and his natural distrust for anyone who knows more than he does on a particular subject, plus his well-documented habit of believing things he wants to believe instead of the black-and-white reality right in front of him, it doesn't take an Oliver Sacks to guess how he has reacted to everyone telling him he can't simply restart the economy on May 1st. And, sadly, he does not disappoint: Over the weekend, the...

Fitbit reported earlier this month that, following shelter-in-place orders, people go to sleep later but sleep more: Based on our review of aggregated and anonymized data, we saw that in locations with shelter-in-place mandates, bedtime and bedtime consistency shifted.  For the most part, people are going to bed later but getting more sleep, as well as more quality rest. For those whose quality of sleep has improved, they have been spending more time in deep and REM sleep. Even though sleep duration has...

Illinois' doubling time for Covid-19 cases has increased from 2.1 days to 7.9 days, as of yesterday. In other news: The Times has a complete timeline of how the White House missed all the warnings about the disease until it became too big to lie about. George Conway places the blame for Wisconsin's voting fiasco last Tuesday on the state legislature, not on the courts. Thirsty? How about a Covid-19–themed drink? NPR interviews a psychiatrist about how single people are coping with quarantine. Food &...

Retired US Army Colonel Jeff McCausland rings an alarm about the president's politicization of our apolitical armed forces: Officers are taught from the beginning of their military careers that the profession is apolitical. The oath they swear is not to the president, despite the fact that he is the commander-in-chief. Rather it is to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” This forms the basis of civil-military relations, and it has served...