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As one of my characters put it, “Trump was a comorbidity.”
A group called the Nuclear Threat Initiative partnered with Johns Hopkins and The Economist Intelligence Unit to create what amounted to a preseason college football ranking for one hundred ninety-five countries. The Global Health Security Index, it was called. It was a massive undertaking involving millions of dollars and hundreds of researchers. They created stats and polled the experts. They ranked the United States first. Number 1. (The United Kingdom was Number 2.)
At last count the United States, with a bit more than 4 percent of the world’s population, had a bit more than 20 percent of its COVID-19 deaths. In February 2021, The Lancet published a long critique of the U.S. pandemic performance. By then 450,000 Americans had died. The Lancet pointed out that if the COVID death rate in the United States had simply tracked the average of the other six G7 nations, 180,000 of those people would still be alive.
“All science is modeling. In all science you are abstracting from nature. The question is: is it a useful abstraction.” Useful, to Bob Glass, meant: Does it help solve a problem?
In federal databases, he discovered that the majority of Americans employed by state and local government were employed in education, and he thought, No wonder those unions are so powerful.
There were seventy thousand buses in the entire U.S. public transportation system, but five hundred thousand school buses. On an average day, school buses carried twice as many people as the entire U.S. public transportation system.
Look at the way kids stand at the bus stop. When adults stand at a bus stop, they give each other space.
They’re so different. They’re not little adults. They have a different sense of space.
“There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
To avoid war with Germany, Chamberlain had caved to Hitler’s demand for a chunk of what was then Czechoslovakia. He’d then returned home to a temporarily grateful British public and, to a cheering crowd, had delivered remarks in which he said that Great Britain had achieved “peace with honour.” Churchill had issued his own statement in response, to less fanfare. “You were given the choice between war and dishonour,” he said. “You chose dishonour and you will have war.”
Everyone has a story they tell themselves about themselves. Even if they don’t explicitly acknowledge it, their minds are at work retelling or editing or updating a narrative that explains or excuses why they have spent their time on earth as they have.
And not just in California. The two other states that moved most quickly to shut down, Ohio and Maryland, had also paid close attention to Carter’s analysis.
