Go read this New Yorker report on the failed response to COVID-19 in the US
Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge There are three moments this year that determined the scale of the COVID-19 catastrophe in the United States, argues New Yorker staff writer Lawrence Wright in a sweeping, searing look at the country's year spent fighting (and failing) against COVID-19. The magazine is devoting an entire double-issue to cataloguing those missteps and the many other mistakes made by officials that set us on a path towards hundreds of thousands of deaths from the disease.
The first happened January 3, when Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), spoke with his Chinese counterpart about a new respiratory virus. Redfield wanted to send a CDC team to China, but was turned down. Instead, the CDC was kept out of...