Good morning! Today: what we can learn from how Singapore is managing the pandemic, how people are managing grief online during lockdown, and what it will take to get us back outside. Get your friends to sign up here to get The Download every day.
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How to manage a pandemic
My first taste of coronavirus panic came early one morning in January. An email with the heading ‘Important Information: Please Read’ arrived from our son’s elementary school. The parents of one of his teachers, who had recently returned from China, had been infected—Singapore’s cases 8 and 9, as it turned out—and the teacher in question was being quarantined.
Early commentary in the West focused on the failings of China’s autocratic system, which hid the severity of Wuhan’s outbreak—at what we now know to be catastrophic cost. The more the epidemic has spread, the more it has become clear that Western liberal democracies have badly mishandled it too, ending up with severe outbreaks that could—perhaps—have been avoided.
Yet it makes little sense to view the coronavirus as some kind of perverse vitality test for liberal and authoritarian regimes. Instead we should learn from the countries that responded more effectively—namely, Asia’s advanced technocratic democracies. In the West the virus exposed creaking public services and political division. But Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea have managed better, while Singapore and Taiwan have kept the disease almost entirely under control, at least for now. Read the full story by James Crabtree.
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The lonely reality of grieving online during social isolation
A grim trend: The global coronavirus pandemic has forced people to think about death, while simultaneously upending the ways in which we are used to experiencing grief and loss. The only option is to grieve online.
Not new: The coronavirus pandemic didn’t create online mourning and grief. Facebook groups already connect mothers grieving young children to each other, and social-media profiles often become memorials. Live-streaming, too, is already a part of how people grieve. Well before coronavirus sent billions of people into lockdown, there were reasons not everybody could make it to a funeral.
An added pain: The covid-19 pandemic has forced all those dealing with death to confront the possibility that they won’t be able to access what mourners may need most: human touch, connection, and community support. Read the full story.
—Abby Ohlheiser
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This is what it will take to get us back outside
We have to prepare for a world in which there is no cure and no vaccine for a long time.
There is a way to live in this world without staying permanently shut indoors. But it won’t be a return to normal; this will be, for Westerners at any rate, a new normal.
It will entail a considerable degree of surveillance and social controls. It will also create or exacerbate divisions between haves and have-nots.
This new social order will seem unthinkable to most people in so-called free countries. But any change can quickly become normal if people accept it. Getting to normal, therefore, is not so much about getting back the old normality as it is about getting back the ability to know what is going to happen tomorrow. MIT Technology Review’s editor in chief Gideon Lichfield, has the full story on what a post-coronavirus future might look like.
Tune into a new episode of Radio Corona at 2pm ET today. Jennifer Strong, our audio and live journalism editor, will speak with economist John Van Reenen about how to make effective policy to salvage the global economy. It will also be available on our Facebook page and YouTube channel.
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We can still have nice things
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The top ten must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 What the world can learn from Kerala about how to fight covid-19
The Indian state is flattening the curve through epic levels of contact tracing and social assistance. ( TR)
2 Apple and Google are building contact tracing into iOS and Android
The app, slated to launch next month, uses Bluetooth to check who’s been near you. ( TR)
+ They answered questions about it on a call with journalists yesterday. ( TechCrunch)
+ The UK government is building a similar app. ( BBC)
3 This is what the global pandemic picture looks like, in charts
The number of cases in the US is still accelerating rapidly. ( FT)
4 Amazon is hiring another 75,000 warehouse workers
That’s on top of the 100,000 people it’s hired since mid-March. ( CNN)
+ Amazon is putting new grocery customers on a waitlist to cope with surging demand. ( Reuters)
+ Amazon workers describe what it’s like to work there right now. ( Wired $)
+ Workers who’ve been quarantined say Amazon hasn’t paid them. ( Buzzfeed)
+ Amazon was already powerful. Once this is over, it’ll be unassailable. ( Recode)
5 Surveillance may be here to stay 👁️
Governments in at least 25 countries are deploying enhanced monitoring. ( The Guardian)
+ This is what each country is doing. ( OneZero $)
6 The unholy alliance of covid-19, nationalism, and climate change
When the pandemic wanes, a poorer, more divided world will still face the rapidly rising threat of global warming. ( TR)
+ We halted the global economy, and emissions still may only fall 4% this year. ( TR)
7 The race to find a covid-19 drug in the blood of survivors
One problem is that there’s still so much we don’t know about the coronavirus. ( TR)
8 Okay that’s enough remote meetings now
You’d think being online would reduce the number of meetings we have. Nope. ( Quartz)
+ Boomers are enthusiastic Zoomers. ( Axios)
+ People are using Zoom to break up. ( The Guardian)
+ Never mind video conferencing. Host your next meeting in VR. ( IEEE Spectrum)
9 Coronavirus is screwing up our sleep 😴
It’s mostly down to stress. ( Wired UK)
+ Having weird dreams? You're not alone. ( Wired UK)
10 The ups and downs of virtual haircuts 💇
I can’t be the only person starting to panic about my split ends. ( NYT $)
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“You don’t know anyone who has made as much money out of this as I have.”
—An Australian investor tells the New Yorker he’s earning a lot more thanks to predicting the current pandemic.
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