The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid

by Lawrence Wright

The researchers estimate that the Biogen outbreak may have been responsible for more than 300,000 cases worldwide.

The infection rate of the disease on the Diamond Princess was eventually put at 19.2 percent; on some vessels, it reached 60 percent.

All through February, the country remained unaware of the spread of the infection because of the faulty CDC test.

Political leaders all over the world were facing a quandary. Was it wiser to let the disease roll through society, extracting its deadly toll, mainly of the elderly, the vulnerable, and a higher rate of minorities; or shutter the windows and try to keep the contagion at a manageable level?

A doom loop is a term in modern economics that means a cycle of negative feedback.

He turned out to have “long-haul” Covid symptoms, which persist in about 30 percent of people shown to have the disease.

Every hour, day and night, the hallways resounded with emergency codes—Airway team to ICU!—summons after summons to the bedside of yet another doomed patient.

The White House had turned aid to states and hospitals into a form of patronage.

The information portrayed a country that was experiencing wildly different pandemics. For every 10,000 Americans, there were 38 coronavirus cases; however, for whites, the number was 23; for Blacks, it was 62; and for Hispanics, it was 73.

Nationwide, Blacks and Latinos contracted the virus at a rate three times greater than whites.

After years of studying markets, Strongin has learned that “the secret for success is to stop doing things that are not working. Everything you do that doesn’t work prevents you from doing something that might. It’s the core of the capitalist economic system: we don’t prop up failures.”

Children at the top of their third-grade math class were the most likely to become inventors—but only if they also came from a high-income family.

By rejecting the CDC guidance and refusing to wear a mask, the president was making a powerful statement, far more dangerous than his idle speculation about injecting disinfectant.

“Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks,” Dr. Fauci said on March 8.

a peptide called bradykinin that regulates blood pressure was wildly out of balance in Covid-19 patients, causing leaky blood vessels.

The figure that will haunt America is that the U.S. accounts for about 20 percent of all the Covid fatalities in the world, despite having only 4 percent of the population.

In the long siege of the coronavirus, the absence of a sense of collective loss was a failure few remarked, but it was costly to the spirit.