How Bill de Blasio Failed New York City Leadership is never more apparent than when it is missing. By Alexander Nazaryan

Bill de Blasio has long been spoiling for a fight, just not the one now before him and his city. When he became the 109th mayor of New York, on a colorless winter day in 2014, he promised to lead a struggle against “injustice and inequality.” Although he has had some genuine successes, he has failed to turn the city into a Copenhagen-on-the-Hudson. He hasn’t turned it into Caracas, either. New York is pretty much the same global metropolis it was when he took over.

Aware that his progressive ambitions have been frustrated, de Blasio has complained that legions of enemies—conservatives, capitalists, newspaper headline writers—are arrayed against his vision for the city.

However determined these forces have been to undo him, they are not responsible for what New York magazine called, on March 26, “his worst week as mayor.” Worse than the week in 2014 when two police officers were shot and killed, degrading his relationship with the department. Worse than the many weeks in 2016 of overlapping ethics investigations, which threatened to ensnare the mayor and his top aides.

The enemy, this time around, is very small, in contrast to de Blasio, who is not only tall but somehow enlarged by his own ungainliness (he can perform the impressive feat of filling a room without commanding it). In that enemy’s arsenal is a glycoprotein that protrudes from its surface like the quills of a porcupine. In 1965, researchers decided the glycoproteins made the viral particle they were scrutinizing look like a crown. Resorting to Latin as doctors do, they called it a corona.

Trying to lop off glycoproteins is not why de Blasio got into politics. De Blasio has always looked past New York, has never hidden his national ambitions. Six months ago, he was a moderately credible presidential candidate. I went to a de Blasio event in Des Moines, Iowa, and was struck by the adulation directed his way. I was even more struck by how genuinely happy de Blasio seemed. After concluding his stump speech, he stayed for a good half hour, meeting voters, shaking hands. Through it all, he smiled.

Now he is telling people to wash their hands and cough into their elbows. Of course, every politician in the United States is lathering constituents in the same hand-washing, elbow-coughing advice. But de Blasio seems more irritated at having to do so than most.

He has indicated that irritation with the subtlety of a Times Square advertisement. As all New York tabloid readers know, de Blasio trekked daily from Manhattan to Brooklyn to exercise at the same gym he frequented before becoming mayor. De Blasio continued to travel back to Brooklyn right up to the day he ordered all gyms closed. That last gym trip has become the stuff of legend, an act of petulant defiance from which de Blasio’s reputation will probably never recover.

Leadership is never more apparent than when it is missing. De Blasio was slow to recognize the danger, telling New Yorkers to keep to their ordinary routines—as he did his—even after the World Health Organization had declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

De Blasio has often been spotted walking in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, near his old house, even as most New Yorkers are confined to their homes and some New Yorkers fight the coronavirus in overcrowded hospitals. You may have heard that there are parks in Manhattan. Gracie Mansion, where de Blasio lives, is located inside one, an esplanade that follows the East River as it opens gloriously to embrace the Bronx and Queens. The same convoy of SUVs that whisks him to Brooklyn could get him to Central Park in five minutes tops.

I imagine that de Blasio knows where Central Park is, more or less. That’s rather beside the point. Throughout the coronavirus crisis, he has evinced no passion for New Yorkers, or New York. When he gave an interview to MSNBC last Sunday, what marked his face was not exhaustion but exasperation.

In fact, he hasn’t given up on the possibility that he can do nothing in this crisis other than attack Trump, just as he did in his days as a presidential contender. “He’s not acting like a commander in chief, because he doesn’t know how,” de Blasio said on MSNBC two weeks ago. “He should get the hell out of the way.” Even so, he has continued to plead with Trump to do everything in his power to help New York, making for an odd combination of bluster and helplessness.

Much has been wanting about Trump’s response to the outbreak. But de Blasio’s fulminations against Trump are clearly meant to divert from his own failures of leadership. De Blasio equivocated on obvious measures like closing schools. He could not even bring himself to close the city’s playgrounds. When these were finally shuttered, it was by decree of New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. De Blasio went along with the plan reluctantly—“I respect that,” he said of the decision—like a child being dragged to the dentist by his determined dad. On WYNC on Friday, he said researchers had only discovered “in the last 48 hours” that asymptomatic people can spread the disease. If Trump made the same preposterous claim, there would be howling calls for impeachment, renewed questions about his state of mind. Public-health professionals have known for months how the coronavirus spreads and who can do the spreading. If de Blasio didn't know, the fault is fully his own.

Abandoned by both Trump and de Blasio, New Yorkers have turned to an unlikely savior in Cuomo, who until this new coronavirus came along had proved a confounding member of the Democratic establishment. That is partly a function of lineage: He is a Cuomo, yes, but he is not his father, Mario, whose speech at the 1984 Democratic National Convention was so eloquent an articulation of liberalism that it has not been rivaled in more than three decades. Andrew Cuomo has never quite explained what kind of liberal he is, other than the kind who wants power.

Cuomo considered a 2020 presidential run, then thought better of it. This was not a year for the kind of unsexy managerial expertise that tends to reside in a governor’s mansion. The voters wanted fiery rhetoric to match Trump’s. De Blasio, in this limited sense, was up to the task. “Donald Trump must be stopped,” de Blasio said in his announcement video. “I’ve beaten him before, and I will do it again,” the mayor said, leaving others to divine where those victories over the president had come.

The pandemic, however, has already changed the political calculus, and now some people are clamoring for Cuomo to replace Joe Biden, who leads in the delegate count for the Democratic nomination. How that would happen, nobody credible has a clue. And it probably won’t. But every time Cuomo takes to a podium in his windbreaker, such hopes are revived.

What, exactly, has Cuomo done? Maybe, in aggregate, not so much. Then again, the answer really depends on what you mean by done. Cuomo can no more defeat the coronavirus on his own than General Patton could single-handedly beat back the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge. For that matter, no one expects de Blasio to hijack a Columbia University lab and emerge, after a feverish night, with a vaccine. People want decency, honesty, and compassion. They want him to understand that something greater than his gentle 90-minute communion with a stationary bike in Brooklyn hangs in the balance.

Many people are saying (to borrow a phrase) that Aristotle understood politics as well as any human who has ever lived—Nate Silver notwithstanding. A concept central to Aristotle’s political philosophy is phronesis, which he defined as “having the right feelings at the right time on the right occasion towards the right people for the right purpose and in the right manner.”

Politics is about getting it. The only reason Cuomo is being celebrated is because he gets it. He understands what is happening and why, what may happen, what can be done, what must be. Cuomo has the phronesis thing. He feels your pain. De Blasio is phronesis-free. He seems to have the opposite quality, an almost impressive ability to strike the wrong tone—the tone of a liberal warrior before the world changed.

Because New York remained prosperous and safe during most of de Blasio’s generally hapless tenure as mayor, his constituents have forgiven the man his shortcomings, whether these involve ethical lapses or embarrassing displays of national ambition. But of the many luxuries the coronavirus has effaced, one is the tacit acceptance of incompetence. New Yorkers no longer have any patience with rhetoric, nor any taste for purposeless fulmination. De Blasio rails against Trump on cable news and it means nothing, because people are dying in Elmhurst and Flatbush. The people need something, they crave it. Maybe it is the thing Aristotle wrote about, or maybe it is something else entirely. Maybe it is a ventilator; maybe it is hope. Whatever it is, Bill de Blasio is simply unable to give it to them.

A Make-or-Break Test for American Diplomacy The post-pandemic world will pose a massive test for U.S. statecraft, the biggest since the end of the Cold War. By William J. Burns

Over the course of my diplomatic career, I learned to be humble about America’s ability to anticipate the consequences of crises like the coronavirus pandemic. I also learned that massive jolts to the international system, like the virus, tend to exacerbate preexisting conditions and clarify future choices.

The post-pandemic world will pose a massive test for American statecraft, the biggest since the end of the Cold War. If policy makers are able to see the landscape before them as it is, and not as they want it to be, and are also able to draw the right lessons from our missteps over the past three decades, recovering a healthy and disciplined foreign policy is still possible. It is also essential to navigating the aftermath of this terrible storm.

In recent days, I looked through old commentaries from the last global shock—the financial crisis of 2008. They are full of confident predictions: America would consolidate its leadership, China would remain inward-focused, Europe would grow more unified, and closed political and economic societies would open. For all the talk of an “axis of upheaval” emerging across the developing world, commentators largely failed to foresee how the same winds of nationalism, xenophobia, and anti-globalization would batter our own backyard, or how our rivals would turn America’s crisis into their strategic opportunity.

In retrospect, the financial crisis didn’t so much introduce new variables into the equation of global politics as intensify trends already under way and expose nascent vulnerabilities. A “democratic recession” preceded the global economic recession. America’s dominance was already fading.

As the coronavirus moves toward its destructive peak in this country, its lethality deepened by the White House’s early failures, the full human and economic toll is hard to predict. But the wider geopolitical effect of the pandemic will likely turbocharge trendlines that were already creating a much more complicated and competitive landscape for the United States.

The liberal international order will become less liberal and less ordered. Following the greatest economic blow since the Great Depression, the flow of goods and people across borders will become less free. A shared sense of insecurity will intensify great-power competition, accelerate regional disorders, and worsen humanitarian crises in parts of the world already brimming with conflicts and refugees. New technologies will solidify authoritarian control and challenge democratic governance. International institutions will teeter, split apart by major-power rivalry and starved for resources, undermining prospects for a coordinated response to other looming global challenges—none more existential than climate change.

America’s moment of reckoning has been building for years, long before the Donald Trump era. Our dominance after the Cold War was never going to be a permanent condition. But the choices we made hastened the arrival and intensified the pain of the moment before us.

The impermanence of American dominance was visible before the scale of our post–Cold War primacy was apparent. In a now-declassified January 1993 memo, which I drafted as head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, we warned the incoming Clinton administration that the unfolding international landscape would prove “enough to almost—almost—make one nostalgic for the familiar discipline and order of the Cold War.” We flagged several traps.

The first was “the danger of hubris” born of the simple fact that “for the first time in fifty years we do not face a global military adversary.” America’s commanding position, I wrote, “did not imply American dominance of a unipolar world. Power, especially economic power, is too diffuse for a simple construct.” As I looked ahead, it seemed “certainly conceivable that a return to authoritarianism in Russia or an aggressively hostile China could revive such a global threat.” And while democracy seemed ascendant, “democratizing societies that fail to produce the fruits of economic reform quickly, or fail to accommodate pressures for ethnic self-expression, may slide into other ‘isms’, including nationalism or religious extremism or some combination of the two.”

The second was the trap of bumper stickers—the doomed search for a neat framework to replace the Cold War’s strategy of “containment,” which for decades had provided intellectual clarity and mobilized popular support. A strategy premised on “enlargement” of the coalition and ideas that had won the Cold War was enticing, although as one commentator pointed out at the time, the term sounded more like a prostate condition than a political rallying call. It was also a comfortable oversimplification, with inherent limits in a world in which challenges to regional order were bound to emerge, globalization would produce its own contradictions, and America’s temporary dominance would inevitably be contested by the rise of others.

The third trap was losing the connection between our global leadership and our domestic priorities. We were “in a moment in our history when many Americans will be preoccupied with domestic problems, and when budgetary constraints … are likely to be tighter than at any point in the last half century … It was relatively easy during the Cold War to justify national security expenditures and build support for American engagement overseas. It is infinitely harder now.”

Despite important diplomatic triumphs in the years that followed, we as policy makers and leaders stumbled into each of those traps. End-of-history triumphalism inflated our ambitions, clouded our judgment, fed our complacency, and militarized our diplomacy, especially after 9/11. We misread the landscape, assumed too much about our transformative powers in the Middle East, shoehorned foreign policy into the War on Terror and the “freedom agenda,” and lost the trust of much of the American public. Our optimism about globalization blinded us to the dislocations building alongside it, and our indiscipline and dysfunction brought about a global financial crisis that further polarized our politics and corroded America’s example and influence.

To regain our footing after the pandemic and avoid fumbling what’s left of our primacy, American leaders will have to avoid the snares and delusions of the post-pandemic world. Most dangerous among them is the Trumpian hubris of “America first,” the reckless conviction that American power is best served unilaterally, unencumbered by allies who only take advantage of us or the enlightened self-interest that has animated U.S. statecraft at its best.

In past global-health crises, such as the AIDS epidemic or Ebola, disciplined American leadership and strong partnerships proved an invaluable force multiplier. In this one, the Trump White House’s blend of arrogance and ineptitude, against the backdrop of more than three years of diplomatic disarmament, is a force divider—exposing our citizenry to greater peril.

Even if Americans decide against doubling down on President Trump’s destructive narcissism in November, the new administration will still have to steer through a fog of anxieties and uncertainties about America’s role in the world, in which Trump has been more symptom than cause. It will not be easy to persuade Americans, struggling through the human and economic wreckage of the pandemic, to resist the temptation to pull up our national drawbridges and retreat. Nor will it be easy to be honest about the colossal failings of the Trump era, as well as the shortcomings of all of us in the Washington establishment for many years before.

There will be plenty of other pitfalls. Replacing old bumper stickers with new ones will be alluring, but simple frameworks often distract more than they clarify. If “America first” is discarded, a new administration will obviously want to renew the alliances that set the United States apart from lonelier authoritarian rivals, and reinvest in solidarity with other democracies. But distilling today’s disorder into a stark global contest between democracy and autocracy would be wrong-headed. That risks conflating distinct brands of authoritarianism, limiting America’s ability to play on those governments’ differences and competing interests, diverting us from the imperative of getting our own house in order, and launching another global struggle, for which little domestic support exists.

Many in Washington may also be tempted to apply a similarly reductionist approach to “containment” of China. The risk here is that the same lazy fatalism that led America to assume too much about the benefits of engagement with China will lead us to assume too much about the workability of containment, or the inevitability of conflict. There is a lot to be worried about in managing mounting friction with China, but containing its rise altogether is beyond America’s capacity. What U.S. leaders can do, however, is shape the environment into which China rises—working with allies and partners across Asia who share a profound interest in making sure China’s ascendance does not come at the expense of their own security and prosperity. That’s what diplomacy is all about, and why its revitalization is so pressing.

Finally, we ought to lay to rest the notion that we can resurrect the era of uncontested American primacy, or that our diplomatic relationships and tools can be willed back into exactly their pre-Trump, pre-pandemic shapes. America can’t simply reboot to a normal that has long been corrupted.

Rebalancing America’s national-security instruments, and rebuilding both hollowed-out institutions and the dignity of public service, will be urgent priorities. Leaders in Washington will have to shift the terms of engagement with allies, expecting more but also listening more. They will also need to level with the American people about the limits of our power, avoid the ideological fever dreams that have done so much harm to our interests, and demonstrate in practical terms that our leadership abroad is accelerating—not undermining—renewal at home.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said that you can’t step in the same river twice—and the same thing is true of the shifting currents reshaping today’s international landscape. For all the damage of recent years, and the body blow of the coronavirus, I still believe that the United States is better equipped than any of its rivals to help shape the course of those currents. Doing so, however, will require taking a hard look at where they’re heading, and at our own reflection in them.

The Pandemic’s Economic Lessons The most important ones are those that give us a glimpse of debates we will face once the crisis is over. By DANIEL SUSSKIND

It is remarkable how the economic debate that has dominated political life over the past decade in Britain and much of Europe—how austere should we be?—is completely irrelevant to our current crisis, as if that argument sits in a parallel economic universe that we no longer inhabit.

Instead of arguing about how swiftly governments should balance the books and lower their debt levels, leading economists, who are typically better known for their rhetorical sobriety, are suddenly making the case for much more aggressive public spending. People such as Mario Draghi, a former president of the European Central Bank, Olivier Blanchard, previously a chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, and the economist Kenneth Rogoff, who has often argued that too much debt leads to far lower growth, have all pushed for what they have described as warlike spending. The U.K.’s Office for Budget Responsibility, traditionally a guardian of fiscal prudence, now advises the British government to spend “what you need to spend to deal with this. In some ways it’s like a wartime situation.”

If this is right, what lessons might we learn from “wartime economics”—beyond a cautionary reminder that the standard economic tools available to us (cutting interest rates, carefully increasing government spending) are no match for the magnitude of the moment?

First, we should acknowledge the peculiar paradox at the core of this crisis, that although we are confronting an economic calamity, no actual economic weaknesses are to blame. The economy has not been leveled by bombs—we have simply turned it off. This creates a unique challenge: How do you support people during this moment of suspended animation, and ensure that, when we switch the economy “back on,” it is able to propel itself into action, unscarred by this pause? Some of the traditional lessons of war, thus, don’t apply. Today, for example, a crucial economic challenge is that consumer demand has been decimated by the virus—people are stuck at home across Britain, Europe, the United States, and elsewhere, unable to buy coffees or croissants, eat at their local restaurant, or purchase many new products. In contrast, what troubled John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, at the start of the Second World War was the possibility of too much demand. That combined with a shortage of supplies due to the war effort, he feared, would lead to explosive inflation. His solution, a compulsory saving scheme, is precisely the opposite of what we need.

One lesson that we have learned, more from necessity than historical reflection, is the need for effective “big government,” for competent top-down planners to take the place of chaotic bottom-up markets. We have seen the state step forward in many countries to offer huge amounts of support for workers—in the U.K., for example, by underwriting almost the entire private sector through wage guarantees. And we have seen the state take a role in mobilizing and redirecting resources—medical staff, volunteers, equipment, and much else—toward the “war effort.”

Yet, in practice, the most important lessons we can learn from wartime economics are likely not those that teach us what to do now but those that give us a glimpse of the challenges and debates we will face in the future, once the war is over.

To begin with, few countries have been able to respond to this crisis alone. Almost none has had the domestic capacity to produce sufficient tests, masks, medication, or ventilators when the moment required. The U.S., for instance, relies on China for 90 percent of its antibiotics. Just as Keynes found himself, in the interwar period, reflecting on the merits of economic self-sufficiency, we will soon likely find ourselves further ensnared in debates about “strategic protectionism,” about the merit of intentionally building and shielding particular nationally important parts of the economy, even if to do so runs counter to the basic economic principle of comparative advantage.

If the U.K. had done this, we might have avoided the ongoing scrambles to secure sufficient ventilators, tests, and protective equipment; we could have built up the domestic capability to produce far more ourselves. This is after all, as one writer put it, no “black swan” event—pandemics are right at the top of Britain’s National Risk Register, an assessment of the most significant emergencies the country might face in the next five years. On testing, for instance, the U.K.’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, noted last week that “we didn’t go into this crisis with a huge diagnostics industry.” In preparing for the next pandemic, we may want to change that. Likewise, we must now turn to the other issues on that list. For instance, the risk of cyberattacks has increased, according to the report. Does the U.K. yet have the domestic capabilities in artificial intelligence and related technologies to fend for ourselves in the event of a future global attack?

We should see a transformation in the way we view certain types of work, as well. The Second World War catalyzed a shift in women’s treatment in the labor market, and this crisis may similarly force us to address another working-world flaw: the gap between the great social value of so many jobs, and the comparatively small market value (in the form of a salary) that they receive. In Britain, for instance, labeling doctors, nurses, care workers, social workers, teachers, criminal lawyers, and others as “key workers” betrays a two-fold irony: Though these roles are key (and have been for some time), that status is in many cases not reflected in their pay; and some of them are precisely the sorts of so-called low-skilled workers that post-Brexit immigration controls would keep out. In some countries, narrowing this gap will be easier: In the U.K., for instance, the state is the main employer for these particular jobs. It could swiftly narrow the difference between their social value and their market value, should it want to.

A third lesson is to monitor market competition, or the lack of it. A common complaint in the first half of the 20th century was that war conditions were particularly favorable to monopolization: Certain companies were either favored by the state or well placed to take advantage of the war effort, and many smaller firms struggled, eventually being bought out by larger ones with deeper pockets. We can see similar trends unfolding in this crisis: Companies such as Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, and Zoom find themselves providing the goods and services that are necessary at the moment, while others, typically smaller businesses without the financial wherewithal to stay afloat, are in trouble through no fault of their own. During the First and Second World Wars, excess profit taxes, levied on profits above prewar levels, were used to make sure no company benefited disproportionately at a time of great national suffering. We shouldn’t just consider using these taxes again, but, in time, we should also survey the general health of different sectors, checking that they are still characterized by healthy competition, rather than dominated by a lucky few who have managed to survive.

The final lesson from wartime economics—and the most significant—relates to the future of the state. Having stepped forward to deliver so much in the crisis, the state seems unlikely to simply retreat to its former shape and size once this is all over, given it has not done so in the past. Many of Europe’s strongest welfare states found their initial form in the postwar moments of the first half of the 20th century. The same, I imagine, will happen in our time. Citizens will ask why our preexisting economic crises—of inequality, poverty, and homelessness—did not, as the COVID-19 crisis has, demand a suspension of the economic reasoning that has kept most states in Europe so austere for the past decade. And, much as wartime economics did not cease when the world wars ended, these demands will ensure that the consequences of this “war” will be felt for long after it concludes.

This Is What Happens When the Federal Government Abandons You Local officials and health-care workers are losing faith in the national response, and struggling to improvise their own solutions. By Wajahat Ali

The federal government’s stockpile of medical supplies, gloves, and masks is nearly exhausted, President Donald Trump admitted at a White House briefing on Wednesday. Meanwhile, individual states are scrambling, bidding against one another for the equipment they need.

“The coronavirus pandemic is a damning indictment of this country’s health-care system,” Joseph Kantor, the assistant state health officer for the Louisiana Department of Health, told me. “The richest country in the world is scrounging around for ventilators” and personal protective equipment.

Kantor is one of a dozen health professionals across the country with whom I spoke this week. Taken together, those conversations reveal a federal government that has failed to protect, supply, and prepare the country and its cities. These health-care workers are looking with horror at the chaos in New York City as evidence of what can happen to a vibrant city in the absence of national strategy and preparedness. As they struggle to avoid a similar crisis, they’re losing faith in the federal government, and resorting to their own improvised solutions.

Louisiana, Kantor warned me when we spoke on March 30, is “in the exact situation, per capita, as New York City” and the state has witnessed one of the sharpest increases in coronavirus cases in the country.

This is an “absurd situation where every state and every hospital is competing with each other to buy supplies from the private market and the government,” Kantor said. He compared the situation to “a crazy flea market,” and called it “no way to manage a natural disaster like this.”

Louisiana is leaning on its experience, trauma, and resilience from Hurricane Katrina. The state is currently building a massive health-care facility with 2,000 hospital beds for COVID-19 patients inside the New Orleans Convention Center. Across the street from the center, work is under way on a new 250-patient facility for people awaiting test results. “We are working at a breakneck pace to expand acute-care capacity,” Kantor said.

Governor John Bel Edwards has ordered 14,000 ventilators, including 5,000 from the federal stockpile. As of Tuesday, the state had received only 300.

Yani Turang, a nurse in New Orleans, is working on the COVID-19 response at the convention center. She complains that health-care professionals and experts knew that a pandemic was inevitable in the United States, but even though the “writing was on the wall,” it had never been a priority for the country. In 2018, the Trump administration disbanded the National Security Council’s directorate focused on pandemics, and it has urged budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In 2015, Turang worked in Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak, but says that experience was less stressful than what her colleagues are enduring now in the United States. In Africa, she said, “there wasn’t even a question that I would ever have to reuse any supplies.” Her colleagues are now forced to purchase their own protective eyewear and face masks. She blames privilege and arrogance for this chaotic mismanagement, a “consequence of living in a world where you think you’re kind of untouchable.”

And Turang worries about the future. “I see hospital beds being full,” she said. “I see our convention center being overrun by patients we can’t manage, because they are so sick. I see a lot of people dying.”

Louisiana is hardly alone. “Right now, we’re still in what I call a lull before the storm,” said Nauman Qureshi, a nephrologist and the chief of medicine at Athens-Limestone Hospital in Alabama. Being two to three weeks behind New York has given his facility time to learn and adapt.

Although his hospital has enough personal protective equipment, or PPE, for now, Qureshi says they are all “preparing for the worst.” His hospital has been accumulating masks and gowns, and has increased its stock of ventilators by 80 percent. Local physicians are discharging nonessential patients and postponing elective surgeries. Teams of physicians have already been organized to rotate when patients become sick with COVID-19.

Qureshi says towns in rural areas such as his present unique challenges. The population is older, and internet access is spotty. “When we try to get in touch with patients, a third of them are able to connect with us through Zoom. A third of them prefer a cellphone, so we had to buy extra phones, and a third of them don’t know how to use smartphones.”

His community puts more emphasis on what’s happening in Birmingham, 90 miles from Athens, than on what’s happening in New York. “Life is very local here,” he said. “Everybody thinks local.” Convincing people to stop congregating together in church has been a challenge. “Over here, life revolves around church,” he said. Qureshi, a Muslim immigrant from Pakistan, volunteered to explain the urgency of the situation to local church leaders. In Athens, he said, people stopped congregating in churches and mosques nearly three weeks ago. Governor Kay Ivey finally implemented a “stay at home” order on April 4, as Alabama surpassed 1,500 cases. A recent epidemiological model predicts that the state could have the highest per-capita death rate in the country and the fourth-highest total death count.

North Carolina also has a stay-at-home order, but it is not enough to assuage Amy Marietta, the medical director of Blue Ridge Health in Polk County. “I don’t feel confident,” she told me. “I’m scared. The reason I’m scared is because we don’t have the capacity to meet the numbers we are going to see.”

Marietta works in a rural community in North Carolina where many physicians are older and nearing retirement. Unlike in larger cities, she said, if medical practices and hospitals cut elective surgeries or clinic work to accommodate a surge of COVID-19 patients, they lack “a financial cushion or parachute” to absorb the lost revenue. Her local hospital was already making cuts before the coronavirus, she said, even though it serves as a vital health-care facility for patients who can’t afford to travel out of the county.

Nearly 35 percent of her patient population is age 65 or older, and many have health conditions that put them at greater risk. After seeing what happened in New York and Seattle, she said, local providers are “frantically” increasing bed capacity, creating crisis-response centers, and seeking to deploy health-care professionals to provide services in surge locations.

The limitations of rural health care have forced Marietta and her team to come up with creative solutions. Because 60 percent of her patients don’t have reliable internet access and a third of them don’t have reliable cellphone access, the patients come to the clinic parking lot for their telehealth appointments. Her clinic purchased a single iPad and keeps it in a plastic bag; patients can drive up and use it for their visits. It’s a creative solution, but the pandemic has prompted her to ask, “Why can’t everyone, especially people in rural communities, have better Wi-Fi?”

In Michigan, Governor Gretchen Whitmer is asking why her residents can’t have access to crucial supplies and resources.

“It’s a very dire situation we are confronting right now in Michigan,” Whitmer told me in a phone interview last week. Michigan has the third-highest number of coronavirus-related deaths in the U.S., behind New York and New Jersey, and federal officials estimate that anywhere from 1,000 to 4,500 Michigan residents may die from the pandemic. “Like every single state in the nation, we are struggling to get what we need out of our federal national stockpile,” she said.

Meanwhile, Trump has attacked governors as “complainers” with “insatiable appetites.” He has reserved his harshest criticism for Whitmer, whom he has referred to as a “big problem” and a “woman governor” who blames the government. “We are not each other’s enemy,” she told me. “The enemy is COVID-19.” She said she is using every possible avenue to secure necessary supplies and masks for health-care workers. “It’s a source of strain on every governor in the nation,” she said. “We really would be served if we had a national strategy.”

That’s a common complaint of political leaders and health-care professionals across the country, but they will have to keep waiting. During Thursday’s press conference, Trump said the federal government is a “backup” and “not an ordering clerk.” Jared Kushner, who is advising the coronavirus-response team with zero experience and credentials, stated that the federal stockpile of supplies was “supposed to be our stockpile” and not that of the states. In fact, the stockpile was created specifically to help states in need during a crisis.

Not all states are suffering from the same degree of neglect. Some states, such as Florida and Oklahoma, have had all their supply requests fulfilled, while others have been left begging. Is it favoritism, putting states with pro-Trump Republican governors ahead of those governed by Democrats? “I don’t have an answer,” Whitmer said. “I know this: COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate along state lines, or party lines, or socioeconomic lines. COVID-19 is ravaging our country.” She wishes she could secure for Michigan all the test kits it needs, and provide PPE for all her frontline responders.

Asha Shahjahan could benefit from that magic. “[Our] medical supply is adequate for a normal situation. This is a war-zone situation,” she told me. She’s a primary-care doctor in Detroit, Michigan. To preserve supplies, she and her colleagues have been wearing one set of PPE for an entire shift, instead of changing for each new patient. “First, we didn’t want to be like Italy. Now it’s ‘We don’t want to be like New York City,’” she said. “It’s going to get worse and we have to be prepared.”

Jahan Fahimi, an emergency-medicine doctor at UC San Francisco, feels the same. “New York is the canary in the coal mine,” he told me. “We can see what’s going to happen.” Like other health professionals, he is using the limited time before the anticipated surge to prepare. He said doctors are developing work groups and doing dry runs, so that if a surge hits, they won’t be “caught flat-footed.” They are rushing to repurpose the hospital and are changing inpatient wards into negative-pressure isolation wards to accommodate the needs of COVID-19 patients. He praised San Francisco Mayor London Breed and California Governor Gavin Newsom, who implemented stay-at-home policies “in the nick of time,” which bought them crucial weeks and helped flatten the curve.

Fahimi, though, is distressed by the unevenness of the national response. He cringes at the packed beaches in Florida. “It’s insulting to the health-care professionals who will have to deal with the consequences and irresponsibility of everyone who said this was business as usual,” he said. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis finally ordered a statewide shutdown on April 2. He kept the beaches open for more than two weeks after Trump declared a national pandemic.

Kris Okumu, the chair of orthopedic surgery at Seton Medical Center in Daly City, California, told me that even though community physicians have been “banding together” like the Avengers and communicating with the local academic centers, such as UCSF and Stanford University, they are still not fully prepared.

Okumu is originally from Uganda, which he described as the “the country known for having viruses,” such as Zika, Ebola, and HIV. He’s long dealt with death, but the coronavirus is uniquely frightening for him. “It’s ironic to come to the U.S., the most developed country in the world, and deal with a pandemic, with a virus, affecting my life here and not in Uganda,” he said with a sigh.

His hospital, which has been leased by the state to treat COVID-19-positive patients, has a shortage of PPE. His wife is a physician who worked in Milan, Italy, and has kept in touch with her Italian colleagues over the past three months. She had been warning him that the U.S. was not prepared for the virus. He said his hospital currently has less than a week’s worth of isolation gowns, “which we should have for every health-care professional treating a COVID-positive patient or person under investigation.” He also said they don’t have enough N95 masks.

He told me the crisis is forcing them to ask difficult questions, such as “Who is going to be treated when we don’t have enough space to treat everyone?” If an older patient breaks her hip, will he still be able to help her? Where will she stay? He is still searching for the answers.

In Boston, Mary Ann Dakkak doesn’t have time to ask questions. She’s busy trying to save lives at Boston University’s medical center, where she’s an assistant professor and a family-medicine physician. Her state is expecting its peak caseload in the next two weeks.

Dakkak has rearranged her entire life to fight against the virus. In order to protect herself and others from potential contamination, Dakkak has stopped eating in the clinic and hospital during her 10-hour shifts. On March 9, after being informed she’d be starting COVID-19 service on March17, she arranged to have her husband and children stay with her parents in California. Like every health professional I interviewed, she is deeply worried she will be exposed to the virus and then come home and infect her family and local community. “I didn’t send my family to California so I can quarantine and be sick. I sent my family to California so I can be healthy and work,” she said.

Her peers call her tough, but she admits to crying every day. “Sometimes I cry because of something I’ve seen. Sometimes I cry because I’m exhausted. Sometimes I cry because I’m scared.” She said the last time she felt this helpless was when she worked in Chad, near the Sudanese border, in 2007. Back then, she felt that despite all her knowledge, she couldn’t stop people from dying. In the face of the coronavirus, she says, “I’m using everything I know, and I can’t do anything except hold a patient’s hands while they’re intubated.” She said all her colleagues went into medicine to help people and use science to fight diseases. However, she concedes, “I’ve never faced anything like this. This is so much more rapid-fire.”

She worries about resource-poor communities and rural hospitals that don’t have the same infrastructure or supply of doctors that Boston enjoys. Even in Boston, though, she told me, “we are pushing our backs against a dam that is breaking, and it might break over us anyway.”

Earlier this week, she asked her husband, Jason, to leave their children with their grandparents and rejoin her in Boston, realizing the stress had become too much to handle alone. She told me that Jason, a former marine, says his entire job right now is to make sure she is ready. He calls her the “spear.”

Ordinarily, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world would support its “spears”—its health-care workers—during a crisis. In the Trump administration, however, TV ratings seem to take priority over tests. Americans are being left to rely on one another.

The Revolution Is Under Way Already Far from making Americans crave stability, the pandemic underscores how everything is up for grabs. By Rebecca L. Spang

Fear sweeps the land. Many businesses collapse. Some huge fortunes are made. Panicked consumers stockpile paper, food, and weapons. The government’s reaction is inconsistent and ineffectual. Ordinary commerce grinds to a halt; investors can find no safe assets. Political factionalism grows more intense. Everything falls apart.

This was all as true of revolutionary France in 1789 and 1790 as it is of the United States today. Are we at the beginning of a revolution that has yet to be named? Do we want to be? That we are on the verge of a major transformation seems obvious. The onset of the next Depression, a challenge akin to World War II, a national midlife crisis—these comparisons have been offered and many more. But few are calling our current moment a revolution, and some have suggested that the coronavirus pandemic—coinciding as it has with the surge in Joe Biden’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and the decline of Bernie Sanders’s—marks the end of any such possibility. “The Coronavirus Killed the Revolution,” declared the headline of a recent essay in The Atlantic by Shadi Hamid, who argued that the COVID-19 crisis makes people crave “normalcy” over deep structural change. As a historian of 18th- and 19th-century France, I think claims like these are mistaken.

An urgent desire for stability—for a fast resolution to upheaval—is in fact absolutely characteristic of any revolutionary era. “I pray we will be finished by Christmas,” wrote one beleaguered member of the French Constituent Assembly to a good friend in October 1789. In reality, of course, the assembly took another two years to finish its tasks, after which another assembly was elected; a republic was declared; Louis XVI was put on trial and executed in January 1793; General Napoleon Bonaparte became “first consul” in 1799 and emperor in 1804; Europe found itself engulfed in wars from 1792 to 1815. In short, life never went back to how it had been before 1789.

The United States may not be having a revolution right now, but we are surely living in revolutionary times. If we do not perceive them as such, it is because news coverage and everyday conversations alike turn on nonhuman agents. Instead of visionary leaders or outraged crowds, viruses, markets, and climate change seem to shape events today. History feels like it is out of our hands.

People sometimes imagine yesterday’s revolutions as planned and carried out by self-conscious revolutionaries, but this has rarely, if ever, been the case. Instead, revolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas (peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress) become fused into a more or less stable constellation. The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history. Likewise, the actions we take and the choices we make today will shape both what future we get and what we remember of the past.

Analogies between the first months of the French Revolution and our current moment are easy to draw. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-diseases expert whom President Donald Trump often sidelines or ignores, is Jacques Necker, the popular finance minister to Louis XVI. Necker’s firing in early July 1789 was viewed widely as a calamity: “It was like losing your father,” the mathematician and astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly wrote in his memoirs. The recent spike in American gun and ammunition sales recalls the Parisians who stormed the Bastille Fortress in the hope of finding weapons and gunpowder. (They incidentally released a handful of individuals imprisoned there, but that was not the crowd’s original intent.) The conflict among city, state, and federal officials over coronavirus-related closures directly parallels 1789’s municipal revolutions, in which some cities had leaders who quickly proclaimed devotion to the new National Assembly, while the leaders of other cities remained loyal to the old structures of absolutist royal power and the mayors and aldermen of yet others were violently deposed.

That comparisons can so easily be made between the beginning of the French Revolution and the United States today does not mean that Americans are fated to see a Reign of Terror or that a military dictatorship like Napoleon’s looms large in our future. What it does mean is that everything is up for grabs. The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed. Life will not go back to normal for us, either, because the norms of the past decades are simply no longer tenable for huge numbers of Americans. In a single week in March, 3.3 million American workers filed new unemployment claims. The following week, 6.6 million more did the same. Middle-class Americans who placed their retirement savings in the stock market have recently experienced huge losses. Even before the pandemic, black Americans on average had only 7 percent of the wealth of white ones (Native Americans, even less). Among non-Hispanic white Americans, deaths from drug abuse, suicide, and alcohol continue to rise. Nearly 2.5 million people are incarcerated. Trust in existing institutions (including the Electoral College and Congress) was already vanishingly small. Is it safe to go grocery shopping in a pandemic? Should we wear masks? Nobody knows who to believe.

Much like the past 40 years in the United States and Western Europe, the 1700s were a period of remarkable economic, social, and technological transformation. Comparatively cheap mass-manufactured goods from Britain and China sparked what historians call the 18th-century “consumer revolution.” In the 1780s, four-fifths of working-class Parisian households had more than 10 dishes in their cupboards, and more than half had a gold watch (in the 1720s, the figures were 20 percent and 5 percent). Whole new media forms emerged—the modern novel, easily reproduced prints, mass-market newspapers heavy on advertisements—as did new physical places (coffee shops, lending libraries, Freemason lodges) and virtual spaces (“the Republic of Letters” and “public opinion”) where those works were discussed and debated.

As sources of information proliferated, long-standing sources of authority (monarchy, aristocracy, and the established Church) feared losing power and turned reactionary. At the same time, the longer-term transformations on which these social and cultural innovations were built—the growth of European overseas empires and the emergence of settler colonialism, massive silver exports from South and Central America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade—continued, and in ever more brutal forms. More than 6 million Africans were sold into slavery in the 18th century—a time that some still call the “Age of Enlightenment.”

In the summer of 1789, as peasants attacked chateaus and revolutionaries vowed to “abolish privilege,” many members of the elite felt that their world had suddenly fallen apart. In truth, it had been disintegrating for decades. Today, as in the 1790s, an old order is ending in convulsions. Even before the coronavirus prompted flight cancellations and entry bans, climate activists were rightly telling us to change our modes and patterns of travel. Even before nonessential businesses were shut by government orders, online shopping and same-day deliveries were rapidly remaking retail commerce, while environmental concerns and anti-consumerism were revolutionizing the fashion industry. The pandemic and resulting public-health crisis have caused an abrupt and salutary revaluation in which cleaners, care workers, grocery-store stockers, and delivery drivers are gaining recognition for the essential work they have been doing all along. Taken together, these changes may not look like a revolution—but real revolutions are the ones that nobody sees coming.

The men and women who made the French Revolution—a revolution which, in a few short and hectic years, decriminalized heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft; replaced one of the oldest European monarchies with a republic based on universal male suffrage; introduced no-fault divorce and easy adoption; embraced the ideal of formal equality before the law; and, for a short time at least, defined employment, education, and subsistence as basic human rights—had no model to follow, no plans, no platform agreed upon in advance. As the UCLA historian Lynn A. Hunt has argued, they made it up as they went along. Yet for more than two centuries, elements of their improvised politics have been revolution’s signature features: a declared sovereignty, devised symbols, an anthem, war. At the junction Americans face today, however, we need to imitate not the outcome of the French revolution but the energy, creativity, and optimism of the French revolutionaries.

Human beings are responsible both for much of what is wrong and for much of what could be right about the world today. But we have to take responsibility. In hindsight a revolution may look like a single event, but they are never experienced that way. Instead they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity. As some Americans take shelter in their homes from a newly arrived threat and others put their health at risk to combat it, we can all mourn lost certainties, but we can also set about intentionally creating new possibilities. To claim this moment as a revolution is to claim it for human action.

North Korea's official coronavirus count: Zero. Why that claim is hard to believe. By Victoria Kim

A worker sews face masks in a Pyongyang factory in February. (Kim Won-Jin / AFP/Getty Images)

If the country is to be believed, North Korea is one of maybe a dozen nations not yet invaded by a deadly virus that has spread across the globe from remote islands in the South Pacific to outposts nestled high in the Pyrenees or the Greater Himalayas.

North Korea's assertion would mean that despite sharing a nearly 900-mile border with China, one tens of thousands have crossed to escape or navigated as part of a robust smuggling trade, the isolated nation has managed to block a mercurial virus that has upended richer and more powerful countries.

The U.S., its longtime existential foe, has more than a quarter of a million confirmed cases of the coronavirus. China, its erstwhile backer and most important trading partner, has more than 80,000.

North Korea's official coronavirus count is zero.

The tightly controlled country has boasted to its people that international organizations and public health experts were marveling at its success in keeping the virus at bay. As recently as this week, a state health official rebuffed suspicions that the country was being less than forthcoming about its coronavirus situation, telling foreign reporters in Pyongyang that not a single person had come down with COVID-19 thus far.

People review information explaining the coronavirus at the Pyongchon District People's Hospital in Pyongyang. (Jon Chol Jin / Associated Press)

The lack of free media and scant independent monitoring make it nearly impossible to vet the official account. Yet many outside observers and officials have questioned the country's claim, alleging the regime of Kim Jong Un may be suppressing information or willfully blind to potential local outbreaks because it lacks the capacity to conduct widespread diagnostic testing.

With a poorly equipped medical system ravaged by sanctions in recent years, the country has struggled with a population susceptible to infection, widespread malnutrition and inadequate sanitation. An outbreak of the coronavirus may be an impending disaster, former North Korean health professionals and outside experts say.

"You can't trust North Korean statistics," said Choi Jung-hun, who worked for a decade as a physician in North Korea before escaping in 2011. "The epidemic really plainly shows the nature of the North Korean regime. ... The regime's face saving is more important than citizens' health or life."

In fact, North Korea was one of the first countries in the world to take swift action as the coronavirus began spreading in China. It closed its borders to foreign tourists in January, around the same time China imposed travel restrictions in Wuhan. It imposed strict, lengthy quarantines on foreign diplomats and canceled virtually all international flights. More than 10,000 of its citizens were placed under isolation or travel restrictions as measures against the virus.

Nagi Shafik, a public health advisor and a former project manager for the World Health Organization in North Korea, said the early drastic steps indicated how cognizant the government was of the threat that an epidemic could pose to its stability.

"They don't have medicine," he said. "They don't have reagents to diagnose cases. They don't have protective equipment. If I were them, I would do the same thing, this is the only thing I have. To close borders with China, this is the lifeline for them. It shows you how desperate they were."

But as much as North Korea's authoritarian system is able to impose severe restrictions on its citizens' movements, the virus is likely to make it into the country at some point if it hasn't already, he said.

"Sooner or later something will spill over," said Shafik, who last visited the country in 2019 to consult on a humanitarian mission. "Whatever you try, everywhere in the world, some people go through the borders without being noticed."

People wear masks on a bus in Pyongyang. (Jon Chol Jin / Associated Press)

Choi, the North Korean doctor who now works as a research professor at South Korea's Korea University, said even though North Korea was plagued with infectious diseases, its capacity to conduct laboratory tests to diagnose them was minimal during his years of working there. When an illness began spreading in the country's northern region around 2006, officials mistook it for scarlet fever for more than two months before finding out that it was, in fact, measles, he recalled.

In the absence of testing, patients would die from symptoms matching an infectious disease without doctors ever getting confirmation of what the person was sick with, according to Choi. Many patients simply turned to antibiotics across the board, creating drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis or typhus, he said.

"It's not like there's proper treatment even if people are diagnosed," Choi said. "The basic infrastructure like electricity and water isn't a guarantee even at medical clinics. Medical supplies and equipment are antiquated."

In mid-February, North Korea quietly reached out to international organizations and nonprofits requesting assistance such as diagnostic test kits, protective gear and equipment, including ventilators and oxygenators. Russia in late February sent 1,500 coronavirus test kits to North Korea at its request, according to the Russian Foreign Ministry.

A health worker takes a woman's temperature at an entrance of the Pyongchon District People's Hospital in Pyongyang. (Kim Won Jin / AFP/Getty Images)

Groups including Médecins Sans Frontières, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent and the World Health Organization obtained humanitarian exemptions from the U.N. committee overseeing sanctions to send in coronavirus-related relief supplies.

Since some of the outside supplies have arrived, the country has been conducting about 60 tests a day for the coronavirus, having completed about 1,000 as of this week, according to a person familiar with humanitarian efforts in North Korea who asked not to be named so as not to jeopardize their work in the country.

That's a far cry from the widespread testing that's being done in places like South Korea — which has tested more than 420,000 as of this week — to get a full picture on how the virus is spreading.

Even more dire than the virus' potential impact might be the economic repercussions of sealing the border. Many North Koreans heavily rely on a network of unofficial markets, much of which is supplied by trade from China. For months before the coronavirus outbreak, many working on humanitarian assistance to North Korea had warned of food shortages in the country exacerbated by drought and international sanctions imposed in response to its weapons tests.

"This was a massive decision, with huge implications not just for the people but for the state economy," said Kee B. Park, a consultant for the WHO and lecturer at Harvard Medical School who frequently travels to North Korea. "You might think it's overreacting in a way, but they really understand the idea of breaking the transmission chain."