Opinion

We are seeing glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel that is the Covid-19 crisis. China, where the pandemic first struck, had its first day with no new deaths to report. Europe’s worst hit countries, Italy and Spain, are recording a slowing of their respective death tolls. And governments are now talking openly about lifting draconian lockdowns that ...

In the face of a global health emergency, automakers are stepping in — or being summoned — to make ventilators. Can they manufacture at the scale required, with the world needing a 10-fold increase in production to cope with the surge in coronavirus infections? It will be a severe challenge. Car companies such as Ford Motor Co, General Motors (GM) ...

In an ordinary April, Corporate America would now be gearing up for proxy season, preparing for annual meetings and arguing with activist investors over strategy. Instead, companies find themselves on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis, facing difficult choices about how best to protect workers, investors, and their businesses from the virus and its fallout. Among the issues normally ...

As a Manhattan resident, I’ll be the first to admit that New York City in general and Manhattan in particular are not optimally designed for social distancing. People here tend to get around not in their own automobiles but on foot or by bus, subway, taxi or ride-share. We buy our groceries mostly not in giant wide-aisled supermarkets but in ...

Italy was the first country in Europe to implement draconian measures to contain the Covid-19 epidemic. As the outbreak slows, the government is weighing when and how to reopen its economy. There’s not much cause for optimism, sadly. The coalition government of the populist Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party has been much better at enforcing lockdowns than ...

For a man who swept to office almost eight years ago vowing to restore Japan’s economic vitality after two decades of malaise, going back to the starting line must be particularly painful for Shinzo Abe. Japan’s longest serving prime minister, Abe has huge parliamentary majorities and no internal challengers to his command of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yet despite ...

Today’s pandemic has simultaneously inflicted the isolation of “social distancing” and the social solidarity of shared anxiety. In tandem, these have exacerbated a tendency that was already infecting America’s body politic before the virus insinuated itself into many bodies and every consciousness. It is the recurring longing for escape from individualism, with its burden of personal responsibility. It includes a ...

In every epidemic, some die, others become ill and recover, and the luckiest live through infection without symptoms. In today’s pandemic, we are seeing this play out before our eyes. Although the initial epidemiological data show that Covid-19 is more severe in older people, men and those with pre-existing conditions such as heart and lung disease, not everyone with severe ...

From the hospitals in Bergamo to the Pope’s prayers in Rome, Italy has become the symbol of the Covid-19 epidemic in Europe. But as the contagion in Italy slows and the daily death toll starts to fall, the eyes of the world have moved to Spain, which is suffering from an equal — if not worse — outbreak. Spain has ...

Europe needs enormous public spending right now — not to deliver stimulus in the usual sense, but to meet the immediate costs of fighting Covid-19, including generous income insurance to the people whose jobs are evaporating. What Europe most certainly does not need is to get bogged down in a debate about the best long-term solutions to an urgent problem. ...