May 21, 2020

Good morning. Vaccine research is making progress. Chinese leaders have regained their swagger. And a new study shows the severe costs of delayed U.S. action on the virus.

Inaction that cost lives

By the final days of February, many public health experts were sounding the alarm about the coronavirus, and some people were listening.

In the San Francisco area, major employers began directing their employees to stay home. Washington State declared a state of emergency. South Korea, Vietnam and other countries ordered aggressive measures.

President Trump did not.

On Feb. 26, he said — incorrectly — that the number of cases was “going very substantially down, not up.” As late as March 10, he promised: “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

Some local leaders also continued to urge business as usual. In early March, Mayor Bill de Blasio told New Yorkers to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.”

This kind of advice appears to have cost tens of thousands of American lives, according to a new analysis by researchers at Columbia University.

If the U.S. had enacted social-distancing measures a week earlier than it did — in early March rather than mid-March — about 36,000 fewer Americans would have died, the study found. That’s more than one third of the current death toll, which is about 100,000.

If the measures had been in place two weeks earlier, on March 1, the death toll would be 54,000 lower.

By The New York Times

These are hypothetical estimates, of course, and they’re unavoidably imprecise. But they are consistent with real-world evidence from places that responded to the virus more quickly, including San Francisco, Washington State, South Korea and Vietnam — where per capita deaths have been much lower than the U.S. average.

Jeffrey Shaman, the leader of the Columbia research team, told The Times: “It’s a big, big difference. That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths.”

Related: Trump and some top White House officials are arguing that the reported virus death toll is overstated, The Times reports. Public health experts overwhelmingly reject this view.

A simple way to understand why experts believe the official count is actually understated: The number of Americans who have died in recent weeks is much higher than normal.

FOUR MORE BIG STORIES

1. Hope for a coronavirus vaccine

Developing a vaccine usually takes years, sometimes decades. Yet many scientists around the world are now cautiously optimistic that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready by next year. One sign of progress: Researchers published a report yesterday showing that a prototype vaccine protected monkeys from infection.

In other virus developments:

Nursing homes with more black and Latino residents have been twice as likely to have an outbreak as those with predominantly white residents, according to a new analysis.
Some Catholic and Lutheran churches in Minnesota plan to resume in-person services soon, defying the governor’s orders
The reality TV star Bethenny Frankel became an unlikely liaison for state governments seeking masks for medical workers, and she encountered a rogue’s gallery of scammers and con artists.

2. Flooding in Michigan after dams burst

Tittabawassee River in Midland, Mich.Gregory Shamus/Getty Images

Days of torrential rainfall breached two privately owned dams in Central Michigan yesterday, sending water surging at least 10 feet high and forcing thousands of people to evacuate their homes. The floodwaters flowed into a Dow Chemical complex and threatened a Superfund toxic-cleanup site, raising concerns of environmental fallout.

The evacuations complicate the state’s social-distancing efforts. “It’s hard to believe that we’re in the middle of a 100-year crisis, a global pandemic, and we’re also dealing with a flooding event that looks to be the worst in 500 years,” Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said.

3. Pompeo defends firing of watchdog

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo defended his recommendation for Trump to fire the State Department’s inspector general and denied the firing was retaliation for investigations into potential misuses of government resources by Pompeo and his wife, Susan.

NBC News reported this week that the Pompeos had used taxpayer money to pay for lavish dinners that included Fox News hosts, a NASCAR driver and the chairman of Chick-fil-A.

“Trump’s purge of inspectors general is unprecedented,” Jen Kirby writes in a Vox article explaining the history and role of the job.

4. China’s leader solidifies his rule

People’s Liberation Army’s Honour Guard Battalion outside the Forbidden City, in Beijing.Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

When the coronavirus began spreading from Wuhan, China, across the rest of the country, it seemed to weaken the Communist Party’s authority. Ordinary citizens were becoming bolder about their criticism of Xi Jinping’s regime, on social media and elsewhere.

But as Chinese leaders gather tomorrow for the start of their annual legislative session, Xi’s authority looks safer.

“Mr. Xi, shaped by his years of adversity as a young man, has seized on the pandemic as an opportunity in disguise — a chance to redeem the party after early mistakes let infections slip out of control, and to rally national pride in the face of international ire over those mistakes,” The Times’s Steven Lee Myers and Chris Buckley write. “So far, Mr. Xi has largely succeeded in rewriting the narrative in China.”

Here’s what else is happening

Cyclone Amphan prompted the evacuation of more than three million people in eastern India and Bangladesh but appeared to cause less devastation than initially feared.
The Supreme Court temporarily blocked Congress from seeing redacted materials from Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. The order could mean that the full Mueller report would not become public before the November election.
A father and son suspected of helping the former Nissan chief Carlos Ghosn make a brazen escape last December from Japan were arrested yesterday in Massachusetts.
The Bureau of Prisons announced that Michael Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, would be released on furlough today.
Else Blangsted, a top Hollywood music editor who fled Nazi Germany as a teenager, died at 99.

Continue reading the main story

BACK STORY: PROGRESS FOR NEW YORK HOSPITALS

Sheri Fink is an investigative journalist with a medical degree who’s won Pulitzer Prizes for her coverage of Hurricane Katrina and Ebola. She’s recently been covering the virus in New York. And as New York hospitals move past the worst of the epidemic, we asked her if she saw any parallels to her earlier reporting. She replied:

I was reminded of a moment when I was in Liberia in 2014 during the Ebola outbreak. There were so many horrific scenes and so many more sick people than could be cared for. And then, all of a sudden, the numbers started going down. And everyone was scared — were we just not seeing new cases?

But, in fact, it turned out to be real. The curve was bending, and it was due to the painstaking work of people in the communities and work that people did to keep themselves and their families safe. One thing that the drop in new Covid cases tells us is that whatever techniques were put in place have had an effect.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, READ

When a mask makes a statement

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Capitol Hill in Washington.Erin Schaff/The New York Times

For public figures including Emmanuel Macron and Ivanka Trump, the act of wearing a mask — or not wearing one — has become political. Nowhere is this more visible than in Nancy Pelosi’s color-coordinated facial wardrobe, Vanessa Friedman, The Times’s fashion critic, writes.

Big summer reads

The Book Review’s annual summer reading list is out, and it can point you to the latest in thrillers, cookbooks, true crime stories and more.

Some picks: Escape your immediate surroundings with Conor Knighton’s account of visiting 59 national parks over a year in “Leave Only Footprints,” or trade real-life horrors for fictional ones with “The Return” by Rachel Harrison, a tale about a reunion of friends gone wrong. If you’re in the mood for a gripping sports read, there’s “The Victory Machine” by Ethan Sherwood Strauss, which tracks the Golden State Warriors’ rise.

Tips from our homes to yours

Kale-sauce pasta.Gentl and Hyers for The New York Times

Our staff took to Google Docs to share recommendations of what they’re doing and eating and watching right now. (They’ll be updating the documents with new ideas.) Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor, listed all of the memorabilia she’s collected — including a 12-year-old slice of Britney Spears’s birthday cake — and there’s a horror movie guide by the reporter Taylor Lorenz.

Tejal Rao, one of our restaurant critics, compiled what she’s been cooking. (She likes mixing this bright kale sauce with paneer or pasta, depending on the day.) For more on how to make the most of life indoors, check out The Times’s At Home newsletter.

A vegetarian manifesto: The writer Jonathan Safran Foer writes in the Opinion section, “If you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals.”

Diversions

Visit an island in the remote waters of the South Atlantic.
The Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang “You Will Be Found” from the musical “Dear Evan Hansen.”
Stephen Colbert: “The Georgia Department of Public Health posted a bar chart that appeared to show that new confirmed cases had dropped each day over two weeks. Good news, until it turned out that chart put the days in the wrong order. The Georgia Department of Public Health is just a little confused. It explains their sign, ‘Put a mask on your elbow and cough directly into the face.’”

Games

Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Sinatra’s signature song (five letters).

You can find all our puzzles here.

Thanks for spending part of your morning with The Times. See you tomorrow. — David

P.S. The word “doomscrolling” appeared for the first time in The Times yesterday, in an Opinion column about the coronavirus (as noted by the Twitter bot @NYT_first_said).

You can see today’s print front page here.

Today’s episode of “The Daily” is about a mysterious syndrome affecting children who have tested positive for the coronavirus.

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

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Lauren Leatherby, Ian Prasad Philbrick, Jonathan Wolfe and Sanam Yar contributed to The Morning. You can reach the team at themorning@nytimes.com.

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