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The shock to Western civilization produced by the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19 is only beginning to register. Most commentators have focused on the political and economic dimension of a historical moment unlike any other, in which entire nations across the globe have moved into shutdown...
In 1978-79, the United Kingdom experienced the winter of discontent. Trade unions around the country went on strike. On January 22, 1979, the UK experienced the largest strike action since the General Strike of 1926. Even gravediggers and waste collectors joined in, leaving corpses and...
Given the shortage of testing kits for COVID-19 around the world, the current testing regimen includes primarily (if not exclusively) symptomatic patients, making the rate of death appear to be worse than it might actually be. According to the US Centers for Disease Control, asymptomatic persons...
It is welcome news that the G20, representing the world’s biggest economies and 90% of global GDP, met via teleconference on March 26 to discuss the health and economic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus, known as COVID-19. It has been obvious for several weeks that coordinated international...
An article in the Harvard Business Review that acknowledges the dilemma many of the for-profit hospitals in the US are now facing sees the solution in an appeal to the insurance companies that dominate the American health care economy. How to Kill People to Save an Outmoded Idea of the...
With nearly every government and populace around the world now mobilized to combat the coronavirus pandemic, the sort of broad-based international coordination often seen in previous global crises remains glaringly absent, and it’s holding us back from a solution. The reasons for this lack of...
The Saudi crown prince and de facto ruler, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), finds himself in a difficult place, fighting three very different sorts of wars. The first — and the longest running — is the Saudi-led campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen that on 25 March passed its fifth...
It is terrible to be sick, and more terrible to be sick and alone. Ten years ago, my mother’s hospice unit was in quarantine for E. coli. In her last week of life, none of her friends were allowed to visit. Now everyone gets to taste that isolation in what may be the most widespread...
Writing for Forbes, Halah Touryalai reports on one characteristic behavior that has come to the fore in recent weeks in the US, as it tends to do in any time of crisis. More than people from other cultures, Americans have acquired the reflex of creating space around themselves whenever they feel...
The far right thrives on fear. It’s no surprise, then, that it would use the latest pandemic, which has generated widespread panic, to bolster its own agenda. All of the hallmarks of the far right are in play during the coronavirus crisis. It has pushed to close borders. It has demonized...
Many Western governments are willing to climb any mountain and pay any price to save lives. In the process, many of them are also politicizing their response to the coronavirus pandemic while acting too late and too meekly, setting the stage for what is yet to come. The West can learn a lot from...
