Newsweek 4/17-4/24/2020

1968 Newsweek reported that tragedy struck: “a white assassin shot and killed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis.” The country was shocked and responded with a national period of mourning and with outrage that led to riots and with the expedited passing of the Fair Housing Act, considered to be the last Civil Rights-era legislation. Newsweek said of Dr. King, “He was, more than any single man, the voice and the instrument of the second American revolution.” Dr. King would be 91 years old, if he were alive today. 1961 A Russian, Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin, “took mankind’s first, triumphant step into space,” wrote Newsweek. This “epochal achievement” was surrounded by “secrecy, rumor, and the struggles of nation against nation.” Currently, two Americans and one Russian astronaut are aboard the International Space Station. 1978 Woody…

THIS TRUMP CAMPAIGN AD IS A THROWBACK to a time that’s hard to remember now. Entitled “The Fighter,” it features African American and Latino voters extolling the healthy U.S. economy created by President Donald Trump. ‘’Look at our economy, look what he’s done. How could you not support the president?” asks an African American woman wearing a red MAGA hat. The ad encapsulated what the Trump campaign strategy was going to do: emphasize low unemployment, rising wages and a strong stock market. It was also an effort to increase support for Trump among minority voters—a tack the campaign telegraphed in its Super Bowl ad touting criminal justice reform. Team Trump believed a bump in the African American vote from the 8 percent he got in 2016 to even the low teens in…

WHILE BEING HIT WITH coronavirus at rates equivalent to the civilian population, the U.S. military has activated its “defense support of civil authorities” apparatus, establishing liaisons in all 50 states, activating units and command posts, and moving forces to provide medical, transportation, logistics, and communications support in New York and Washington states. Lieutenant Gen. Laura Richardson, the commander of Army North (ARNORTH), has received approval for the deployment of ground units in response to the now declared national emergency. The moves begin to implement two existing contingency plans—CONPLAN 3400 for “homeland defense” and CONPLAN 3500 for “defense support of civil authorities”—as well as numerous new orders specifically relating to coronavirus. Fourteen states have also appointed “dual-status commanders,” presidentially approved National Guard officers who serve in both state and federal chains of…

“One thing I think the coronavirus crisis has already proved is that there really is such a thing as society.”—BORIS JOHNSON“THE SECRET OF GOOD COMMUNICATION? SCREAMING HELPS.”—PHIL DONAHUE“Don’t give me the MyPillow guy doing a song-and-dance up here on a Monday afternoon when people are dying in Queens.”—SPORTS RADIO HOST MIKE FRANCESA“I’m realizing life is really short. You don’t have a lot of time to tolerate s–t, you know?”—RIHANNA“I GET THE SENSE PEOPLE ARE EATING A LOT MORE ICE CREAM THAN USUAL.”—Andrew Yang“I believe it will happen that we may start seeing a turnaround, but we haven’t seen it yet.”—DR. ANTHONY FAUCI“MORE PEOPLE THAN EVER ARE PLAYING SCRABBLE RIGHT NOW BUT IT SURE AS HELL ISN’T BECAUSE SCRABBLE IS FUN.”—Seth Meyers…

AS THE TOLL OF THE CORONAVIRUS pandemic rises, Americans confront with increasing distress the idea of rationing health care. Choosing to deny care to people in desperate need is anathema; it feels unAmerican, even. But it happens all the time: when Congress allocates money for Medicare and Medicaid; when insurance companies reject claims; when the Trump administration decides to shut down the Federal marketplace for the Affordable Care Act. Rationing is also what happens when governments whittle down their budgets for preparing for deadly pandemics, as they did over the last decade. That goes some way to explaining why the U.S. now has the steepest trajectory of COVID-19 cases of any nation so far, including China and Italy, and is experiencing a critical-care crisis in hospitals across the land. As the…

As the rationing debate unfolds, Newsweek asked doctors, lawyers, ethicists and other health care experts to wrestle with the fraught questions involved. Their essays follow: THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS rapidly and radically disrupted any sense of normality in all aspects of medical practice in the United States. Rationing life-saving care is not something American doctors are accustomed to consciously considering in our daily working lives, let alone ever communicating it to patients or their families. At most, we are taught a little about it, typically in school, as a part of a formal course in medical ethics. At Harvard Medical School, where I have taught hundreds of students just such a curriculum for well over a decade, we spend a few hours on the subject in a classroom setting in their first…