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A year ago, the United States was regarded as the country best prepared for a pandemic. Our government had spent nearly two decades strategizing for a doomsday scenario. So what went wrong? How is it that America, which wrote the global playbook for pandemic response, accounts for just 4 percent of the world’s population yet more than 20 percent of the world’s coronavirus deaths? (Johnny Harris, Nicholas Kristof and Adam B. Ellick, 9/29)

The prospect of having the first supplies of at least a few effective Covid-19 medicines and vaccines by the end of 2020 is a key driver of recent market optimism. New treatments and vaccines are among the best bets for our societies against the risk of recurring Covid-19 flare-ups and persistent lockdowns into 2021. Yet many experts are questioning whether current research and manufacturing efforts can deliver these medical breakthroughs as quickly as they are being promised. (Sacha Sadan, Yo Takatsuki and Damiano de Felice, 9/28)

The mayor of Moscow just ordered all Muscovites older than 65 to stay at home. This idea of restrictions imposed on just one category of citizens — those most at risk of dying from Covid-19, which mainly means the elderly — will come up a lot more now that the second wave is here. To put it bluntly: Should we lock down the old, or is that like locking them up, and thus unethical? (Andreas Kluth, 9/29)

Managing Florida’s state university system is a herculean task in the best of times. Managing in the midst of the coronavirus crisis might be an impossible task, even for three wise men and 50 Nobel laureates. Still, the State University System’s Board of Governors is obliged to give it the old college try. Instead, the folks responsible for roughly 350,000 students at Florida’s 12 state universities have thrown up their hands and thrown in the towel. (9/27)

Jimmy Flanigan walked into his family’s packed Flanigan’s Restaurant in Coconut Grove Friday night, three hours after Gov. Ron DeSantis approved 100 percent inside seating, and thought it looked too busy. A crowd gathered to watch the Miami Heat play an 8:30 p.m. playoff game Sept. 25 on more than a dozen televisions. Patrons were standing shoulder-to-shoulder. The bar was steadily serving drinks.“It was a little scary walking into a Flanigan’s after six months and seeing it full,” said Flanigan, CEO and president of the South Florida-based chain of 24 sports-bar-style restaurants. “It was too busy. So we backed off to 50 percent.” (Carlos Frias, 9/28)

On a recent afternoon, I was reading about the Bobcat fire ravaging the San Gabriel Mountains when a text landed on my phone: A new fire was burning somewhere in Topanga, where I live. Immediately I checked the website of a local volunteer organization, the Topanga Coalition for Emergency Preparedness. The group, known as TCEP (pronounced TEE-sep in these parts), disseminates information when there is an emergency in the canyon. To call it a critical resource would be an understatement. If a mega-fire tore through Topanga the way the Camp fire did Paradise, the kind of information provided by TCEP could save lives.I rely on the group so often, I’ve made its website my homepage. (Abby Aquirre, 9/27)

Did you know that absentee ballots are not accessible for the more than 50,000 Iowans who are blind or have significant vision loss, even with corrective lenses? These ballots are often not accessible to people with other disabilities as well. Iowa’s current absentee ballot system relies on printed paper ballots that cannot be read privately or independently by voters who are blind or visually impaired. As a result, these Iowans must vote either in person during a pandemic or rely on another person to help them fill out Iowa’s paper-only absentee ballots.  (Carrie Chapman, Scott Van Gorp and Jane Hudson, 9/27)