Fail Whale

“If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot. The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long.” George Packer in The Atlantic: We Are Living in a Failed State: The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

+ “While these countries seem so different, the response to the pandemic in each place has underscored all the other things they have in common: populist or authoritarian-leaning leaders, officials who have flouted the advice of their top scientists while pushing absurd remedies to fight the virus, and enormous swaths of the population with no safety net to help them stay at home.” These Countries Have The Highest COVID-19 Infection Rates.