Outside the Beltway

The president of the country with the second most cases and fatalities has tested positive.

Leadership matters (as does culture).

Racial and xenophobic rhetoric and Covid-19.

Should government be taking harsher measures against smoking, car crashes, and the flu?

“Will some people be affected badly? Yes.”

A useful graph from WaPo

More on Covid-19 and the flu.

Some inchorent musings about a massive question.

Until our kids go back to school, we can’t go back to work.

A seemingly impossible coincidence.

President Trump can’t handle the truth.

The CDC director predicts a double whammy when flu season hits.

These figures indicate that we are experiencing a serious global health crisis that is, empirically, a deviation from the norm.

People who keep calling Covid-19 “just the flu” haven’t looked very closely at the numbers.

The pandemic is massively more livable given modern technology.

Not to encourage people to skip the longer version, but here’s a key point.

Critics of the modeling and of the data analysis are being too simplistic.

Social distancing is helping but too many aren’t taking it seriously enough.

President Trump has made plenty of mistakes handling this crisis. Let’s not invent dubious ones.

We’re passing grim milestones on a daily basis.

But they weren’t shouting it from the rooftops.

The President tweeted, “We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”

Young people acting selfishly is a fact of life.

We may be seeing the beginning of the end.

These decisions should be made by professionals.

Conferences, sporting events, and even school has been canceled to avoid spreading the pandemic.

Republicans are half as likely to take the outbreak seriously.

The administration’s handling underscores its poor governance skills (and the degree to which it doesn’t matter to supporters).

Donald Trump is once again trying to deflect reality.

What’s new isn’t necessarily what’s most important.

Cory Booker’s campaign is starting to show some of the same signs of collapse that Kamala Harris’s did.

And what a week it has been.

The Trump Administration has apparently decided that it will not be providing the flu vaccine to migrants being held in facilities at the southern border.

There are children being held in what amount to internment camps on the southern border under appallingly bad conditions and the President is more concerned with falsely blaming his predecessor for the problem.

The costs to the American economy of President Trump’s ill-advised trade war continue to add up.

Some vaccines lose effectiveness more quickly–and others last much longer—than previously understood.

Mandatory vaccination laws raise personal liberty issues that ought to be taken seriously, but in the end, public health concerns weigh heavily in favor of laws mandating vaccination.

A decade-long study once again establishes that there is no link between childhood vaccination and autism.

A Coast Guard officer and aspiring domestic terrorist was arrested late yesterday for plotting to kill Democratic politicians and members of the media.

By popular demand . . .

Kids are more likely to be killed driving to school than shot while there. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and prevent them.

Thanks for nothing, anti-vaxxers.

A new poll indicates that most Americans support a DACA deal, but don’t think it should be linked to measures to avoid a government shutdown.

The Swing Low, Sweet Chariot Edition OTB Caption Contest^TM is now over.

Clinton stumbles and leaves an event early, leading to the news that her campaign has been withholding health information from the press.

Concerns about the Zika Virus are leading some doctors to call for the 2016 Summer Olympics to be moved or postponed.

The rise of Trump and Sanders has resurrected a debate as old as Western civilization.