Inhoudsopgave van April 20, 2020 - TIME Magazine

ON APRIL 8, THE EMBATTLED CITIZENS of Wuhan were finally allowed to leave the central Chinese city after authorities relaxed unprecedented quarantine measures. But it will be a long time before life returns to normal for the 11 million residents of the capital of Hubei province. The government says 2,535 people in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic, died from the virus—three-quarters of China’s total (though much disputed) death toll. Most businesses remain closed, and restrictions on movement persist inside Wuhan. HERO PARIAHS Chinese state media has lauded Wuhan residents as “heroes” for weathering the brunt of the outbreak, but people across China remain fearful that easing travel curbs may seed new infection clusters. Apartment buildings in big cities have banned people from Hubei outright, while vigilante…

U.S. HOSPITALS OWN ABOUT 160,000 ventilators—less than half the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the U.S. as of April 8. As diagnoses tick upward and more patients need help breathing, inventors are resorting to increasingly creative solutions to stave off a ventilator shortage. But the stakes are high for getting it right, and some doctors aren’t sure jerry-rigged ventilators are worth risks like delivering the wrong amount of oxygen, or leaving doctors without patient feedback gauges. ‘Do I do something harmful … or do I not do something?’—Dr. Ken Lyn-Kew Dr. Ken Lyn-Kew, a pulmonologist at Colorado’s National Jewish Health, says alternative ventilators present a hard choice. “Do I do something that’s likely to be harmful for the sake of doing something,” he asks, “or do I not do…

DIED Ellis Marsalis Jazz royalty ONE NIGHT DURING MY freshman year in high school, I called Ellis. The famed pianist, who died April 1 at 85 due to COVID-19, was my teacher—so it was “Mr. Marsalis” then, and I was terrified. One didn’t call him at home. But I’d found a chord progression I thought had never been heard on earth, so I dialed. His deep “Hello” still echoes in my mind. “Mr. Marsalis! Listen to what I discovered!” I explained it thoroughly. “That’s good,” he said. “Now I’m gonna go back to my dinner.” Years later, I reminded him of the story. He laughed and admitted he’d known those chords too. I asked why he hadn’t just taught them to me. “Because,” he said, “you had to figure…

Many Americans, and those around the world, are mystified by the apparent shortages of N95 masks, protective gear, ventilators and other materials essential for battling COVID-19 effectively. After all, aren’t markets supposed to respond quickly and efficiently to changes in demand? They seem to be failing us, just when we need them most. New York, the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus crisis, is clamoring for medical supplies. Trump has said, Don’t look to us, the federal government. He even argued that states should compete in getting the supplies they need. His answer: trust in markets. But markets are disappointing. They work well when everything is going smoothly, when things are normal. But markets don’t work well in crises. Indeed, economic crises are symptomatic of markets not working well. The 2008…

AS WE HAVE ADAPTED TO BEING HOMESCHOOLERS, HOME hairdressers and cloistered shut-ins, many among us have noticed that our marital skills—and probably our barbering skills as well—could use a refresher class. But where to turn in such an unprecedented time? Who can advise us on how to stay together, when it’s this much together? TIME checked in with three sets of relationship experts who live and work side by side. Here are their top seven tips. Cool it with the criticism. The right time to point out mistakes is almost never, but midcrisis is egregious. Especially when it comes to money, says Ashley Willis, a marriage and family coach who hosts the Naked Marriage podcast with her husband Dave. “It’s so easy to point fingers and say, ‘I told you…

ON A RECENT MORNING IN WASHINGTON, D.C., A group of camouflage-clad men in black leather chairs gather around a table inside the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers headquarters, staring at a video display. The screen flicks to a map showing the latest modeling of the coronavirus’s spread through the U.S. An orange-and-white blob swallows the Boston region whole. “Wow,” says Lieut. General Todd Semonite, the Army Corps’ commander. His eyes widen. “We’d better stay on top of that.” In March, Semonite was two months from retirement, looking forward to retreating to his home woodworking shop. Now he’s the architect of a nationwide plan to build thousands of emergency hospital beds in states with critical shortages, converting convention centers, sports arenas and college dormitories into makeshift hospitals as the U.S. braces…

IT’S UNUSUAL FOR A RESPIratory disease to spare young patients, but the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic suggested that this time was different. Children did not seem to be as severely affected by the novel coronavirus as adults. That trend, reported first by doctors in China, appears to be holding true in the U.S. In the latest report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scientists say that compared with adults, patients under age 18 are less likely to experience fever, cough and shortness of breath and are also less likely to need hospitalization or to die from the disease. Doctors are still trying to understand why. Many of the worst symptoms among adults are caused by an aggressive immune reaction to the virus that can damage…

AS A PENGUIN RESEARCHER WORKING IN SOME of the most remote regions of Antarctica, conservation biologist Alex Borowicz documents colonies on coastlines and islands that have rarely, if ever, been visited by other people. That doesn’t mean they are free from human impact. Walking through a beach teeming with newly hatched chicks on Snow Island, Borowicz spots a white plastic milk jug. Farther along he picks up a tangle of bright green rope, then a faded fishing buoy. “We like to think of Antarctica as a pristine wilderness, but it clearly isn’t,” he says. Over the course of a six-week expedition aboard a Greenpeace research vessel earlier this year, Borowicz and his fellow scientists collected approximately 3 metric tons of garbage from Antarctic beaches. Marine scientists working on another…

AMERICANS NOW grappling with COVID-19 may believe Asia’s experience offers hope in the form of a glimpse at a postviral world. After all, this was the region where the virus began—and is therefore the first to recover. Unfortunately, that’s not quite what’s happening. Take Japan, where in early April, a new surge in confirmed coronavirus cases forced Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to declare a state of emergency. This in a country where face masks are part of daily life in large cities even in normal times and there is much higher confidence in warnings from public officials than in the U.S. The one-month emergency declaration will empower Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike and governors of other prefectures with large cities to take urgent steps to contain the COVID-19 spread, such…

I COULD HEAR MY MOM IN ANOTHER ROOM ONCE AGAIN asking if the kosher beef ribs had arrived. Or maybe it was the kosher potato chips. I’d been hearing calls like this all week, check-ins with stores in Houston, where she and my dad live. This time, though, I turned to my husband: “Which one of us is going to tell them they have to tell her that Passover isn’t happening?” Her, he knew, meant Mamaw, my maternal grandmother, who has hosted Passover seders for about 50 years. Knowing what we do now about the coronavirus outbreak, it seems obvious that families will not gather for the Jewish holiday this year the way they have in years past. But at the time, about a month ago, the situation was only…

AMERICA’S FLIGHT ATTENDANTS WERE AMONG THE first to raise the alarm as COVID-19 spread outside the Chinese province of Hubei in late January. More than two months later, flight crews fear they have become a dangerous part of the problem. In interviews and emails with TIME, more than a dozen flight attendants say airlines failed to heed their concerns. After weeks of working without proper supplies, they say, they have been potentially exposed to thousands of cases and in turn may have transmitted it to the hundreds of thousands of Americans who continue to fly every day. “It’s awful, because we know we’re definitely spreading it, seat to seat, city to city, person to person, hotel to hotel,” one Atlanta-based flight attendant with 15 years on the job tells…

ON A RECENT SATURDAY NIGHT, HIP-HOP eminence Derrick “D-Nice” Jones threw a dance party for 100,000 with attendees including Michelle Obama, Mark Zuckerberg, Drake, J. Lo, Rihanna and both finalists for the Democratic presidential nomination. In an interview with CBS This Morning’s Gayle King the following Monday, D-Nice confirmed his plans to keep the party going as long as possible. And he has. But before you cancel the DJ, rapper and producer for creating the world’s most distinguished COVID-19 cluster, I should mention that the gatherings—dubbed “Homeschool at Club Quarantine”—have taken place exclusively on Instagram Live. The host, ensconced in his kitchen alone, is practicing social distancing. This is live entertainment in the coronavirus era, when theaters, concert halls, museums, sports stadiums and nightclubs are closed; music, comedy and book…

WHEN THE NEW CORONAVIRUS first hit the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told people not to wear face masks unless they were sick or caring for someone who was. Masks help capture some of a sick person’s respiratory droplets, which might otherwise spread the virus. In early April, however, the CDC began advising all people to wear nonmedical “masks”—any fabric that covers the nose and mouth—when they leave home. The reason for the shift? Scientists now know that many people who are infected with the coronavirus show no symptoms yet can still spread it to others. ‘There’s so much inherent variability in a homemade mask.’—Anna Davies, University of Cambridge But the efficacy of homemade masks is not scientifically settled. Studies do find that masks can help…

IN CERTAIN CIRCLES, DR. SCOTT GOTTLIEB IS famous for keeping a flock of seven chickens in his backyard—and for once retweeting a (fake) cover of the (real) magazine Backyard Poultry bearing his likeness. Under nearly any other circumstances, I would have begged to see said chickens the moment I started talking to the former U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner. But in these coronavirus-dictated circumstances, I settled for talking with Gottlieb, 47, from Brooklyn, a socially distant 55 miles from his home in Connecticut—where, save occasional trips to Washington, D.C., he’s hunkered down with his family and his flock. Despite the fact that Gottlieb is working from home, he arguably has been in the public eye more now than at any time since he resigned from the FDA…

The coronavirus-induced limitations on life have arrived at the same time as Lent, the season of doing without. But this Lent has no fixed Easter to look forward to: a fast without the promise of a feast. No doubt some will tell us why God is doing this. A punishment? A warning? Perhaps the biblical tradition we really need to turn to is lament. Lament is what happens when people ask, “Why?” and don’t get an answer. It’s where we get to when we move beyond our self-centered worry about our failings and look at the suffering of the world. In the Bible, God also laments. The Spirit groans. Jesus weeps. God grieves for his world. It is no part of the Christian vocation to be able to explain what’s…

CATE BLANCHETT MAKES HER GRAND ENTRANCE AS THE star of Mrs. America wearing an American-flag bikini, heels and a smile. It’s 1971, and her character is onstage at a fundraiser. But when she turns away from the audience, Blanchett looks bored. She has ambitions beyond her prescribed role. And by the end of this decade-spanning miniseries, she’s an unstoppable force in American politics. Her story has the arc of a classic female-empowerment narrative, but Blanchett’s character happens to be Phyllis Schlafly, whose biggest achievement was squashing the Equal Rights Amendment. This irony, which suffuses the exceptional nine-part series, wasn’t lost on Schlafly’s enemies in the women’s movement, and the show is about them—Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug—as much as it is about her. Each episode complicates ongoing…

IT CAN’T BE EASY PLAYING THE MOVIE version of a noble real-life figure like Sérgio Vieira de Mello, the U.N. diplomat from Brazil who, in the midst of a career unwaveringly dedicated to humanitarian efforts, died in the 2003 terrorist bombing of the Canal Hotel in Baghdad. But in Sergio, director Greg Barker’s drama about the last years of Vieira de Mello’s life, Wagner Moura (from Netflix’s Narcos) gives it his all. Vieira de Mello was sent to Iraq in 2003 as the Special Representative of the U.N. Secretary-General to help the country move forward after the fall of Saddam Hussein. In an early scene, we see Moura’s Sergio and his small entourage rolling up to the hotel that will serve as headquarters for what’s intended to be a four-month…