Opinion

When New York City’s Covid-19 epidemic peaked in late March and early April, the city was reporting more than 5,000 new confirmed cases a day, and more than 60% of tests for the disease were coming back positive. In Arizona, which has a similar if somewhat smaller population (7.3 million versus 8.3 million), new cases are currently averaging about 3,000 ...

A basic truth about Russian President Vladimir Putin, which President Donald Trump evidently doesn’t understand: Putin is in the payback business. He believes the United States destroyed his former country, the Soviet Union. He likes the United States to feel pain, in Afghanistan and everywhere else. Trump has his own, much rosier take on Putin. And I can’t help wondering ...

As the number of Covid-19 cases starts to rise again in many states, the question is whether residents of those states will tolerate another lockdown. I used to think so, but it is increasingly clear that Americans have become comfortable with a remarkably high number of casualties. There is a mechanism of social conformity at work here. Most people will ...

Uber Technologies Inc needs to act fast to buttress its food-delivery business. It now has a second chance and shouldn’t blow it. The New York Times reported that Uber Eats-parent Uber Technologies Inc made an offer to acquire Postmates Inc, citing people familiar with the matter. A deal for Postmates would value the company at around $2.6 billion and could ...

Covid-19 is a crucible of leadership. Some people are failing this test — the presidents of Brazil, Russia and the US spring to mind. Others are passing it with flying colours, notably the leaders of New Zealand, Denmark and Taiwan. All three happen to be women and have largely controlled the spread of Sars-CoV-2 in their countries while preserving social ...

The road to a successful reopening of the US economy is strewn with hopeful intentions — and formidable obstacles. The biggest and most important obstacle is a surge in new coronavirus cases, which presumably will lead to more hospitalisations and more deaths as well as more firms shutting down. The closings will reflect lost customers who are either sick or ...

Why all the fuss about face masks? Why won’t people just wear them? “Masking has become controversial. It shouldn’t be,” former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said on “Face the Nation.” To health experts, masks seem like a simple, apolitical precaution. In medical jargon, they’re personal protective equipment, or PPE, like surgeons’ gowns, gloves and face screens. Nobody ...

There were two obvious losers in France’s runoff round of local elections, held after a three-month delay caused by the Covid-19 epidemic. One was democracy. Only about 40% of eligible voters bothered to turn up, a record low. The other was President Emmanuel Macron, whose core urban fan base went Green. The eco-friendly EELV party snatched control of several big ...

Boris Johnson wants Britons to lift their eyes to the horizon, forget Covid for a while and dream again. No longer cast as a Churchill at war, the British prime minister seems more inclined now to conjure up the healing figure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the US president whose New Deal sought to pull America out of the Great ...

America’s botched response to the coronavirus pandemic is a warning that, unless our broken political and administrative systems are fixed, the country could experience a similar breakdown in future national crises, such as a massive cyberattack. This stark message was contained in a little-noticed white paper recently released by the bipartisan Cyberspace Solarium Commission, titled “Cybersecurity Lessons from the Pandemic.” ...