Either you told them or they told you, but maybe this was the year that you watched a young child come to the realization that there’s no Easter Bunny (our kids learned early, the year we ran out of time and didn’t boil the Sharpie-decorated eggs we used for the hunt). These moments are temporarily bittersweet, but they quickly merge into an exciting rite of passage; a period of intellectual growth when we each peel away layers of childish, magical thinking, and we’re gradually initiated into a world of reality, facts, and adulthood. But what if that transition never happened? What if a child grew up physically, outwardly, visibly; but if on the inside they still believed the silly myths that most of us could see through by the time our age hit double digits? And what if that person held the most powerful and important position in the world? It would make for a turbulent segue from sweet, children’s fables to a full-on horror show. Which brings us to the NYT’s detailed look at what transpired as scientists urgently worked to move a president to action at the most important moment of his tenure—and of our lives. He Could Have Seen What Was Coming: Behind Trump’s Failure on the Virus. (He saw. He just couldn’t or wouldn’t believe.)

+ “Life-saving medical equipment was not stockpiled. Travel largely continued unabated. Vital public health data from China was not provided or was deemed untrustworthy. A White House riven by rivalries and turnover was slow to act. Urgent warnings were ignored by a president consumed by his impeachment trial and intent on protecting a robust economy that he viewed as central to his reelection chances.” AP: Signs missed and steps slowed in Trump’s pandemic response.

+ During this critical period of inaction, Anthony Fauci probably felt like he was repeatedly using defibrillator paddles on a manequin. His take on all the criticism: “I mean, obviously you could logically say that if you had a process that was ongoing and you started mitigation earlier, you could have saved lives. Obviously, no one is going to deny that.” (Tony knows science. But I know politics. Someone’s going to deny that. And you know exactly who that someone is…)