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Americans awaken this morning to the grave news that President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for the dreadful coronavirus that has killed more than 207,000 people in the U.S. and brought the U.S. economy to its knees. ...No matter how you feel about Trump’s performance as president — and we feel pretty strongly that it has been a disaster — this is another crisis for a nation reeling from a year that almost seems apocalyptic: Trump’s impeachment, COVID-19, a popular outcry over racial injustice, the deaths of John Lewis and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, catastrophic wildfires. And now this: A reckless president whose irresponsibility has endangered not only himself and his family but the stability of the country by throwing the executive branch into chaos. Another crisis, this one fully of Trump’s own making. (10/2)

It is likely to go down as the biggest “October surprise” in the history of US presidential elections. Yet anyone who was paying attention could have seen it coming. Donald Trump tested positive for the coronavirus after claiming “it will disappear”, telling the journalist Bob Woodward he was downplaying it deliberately, failing to develop a national testing strategy, refusing to wear a face mask for months, floating the idea of injecting patients with bleach, insisting to one of his many crowded campaign rallies that “it affects virtually nobody” and, at Tuesday’s debate, mocking his rival Joe Biden: “He could be speaking 200 feet away and he shows up with the biggest mask I’ve ever seen.” (David Smith, 10/2)

It’s a measure of the cynicism that has infected American politics — and, yes, me — that among my initial reactions to the news that President Trump had tested positive for the coronavirus was: Are we sure? Can we trust that? A man who so frequently and flamboyantly plays the victim, and who has been prophylactically compiling ways to explain away or dispute a projected election loss to Joe Biden, is now being forced off the campaign trial, which will be a monster of an excuse. I couldn’t help thinking that. ...He didn’t wear a mask. He encouraged large gatherings — including the Tulsa, Okla., rally that Herman Cain attended before falling sick with the coronavirus and dying, and his big convention speech, at which hundreds and even thousands of people, many without any facial covering, packed in tight. At the first presidential debate on Tuesday night, he mocked Biden for so often wearing a mask, suggesting that it was a sign of … what? Timidity? Weakness? Vogueishness? Moral vanity? (Frank Bruni, 10/2)

A disturbing new trend is making the coronavirus even harder to control: A rising proportion of infections are occurring at informal gatherings of family and friends. At the beginning of the pandemic, there were many outbreaks in congregate facilities such as nursing homes and prisons. State and local authorities put into place infection-control measures that have substantially reduced transmission in these high-risk settings. (Leana S. Wen, 10/1)

Imagine an approved treatment is imminent. In fact, many new medicines and vaccines are in placebo-controlled clinical trials for COVID-19. However, drug trial participants are overwhelmingly white, meaning over 80% of medicines meet the established standard of proof of safety and effectiveness for white people only. We've known for many decades about the potential for serious differences in drug responses that relate to genetic ancestry, habits, practices, comorbid disease and environments that often associate with race and ethnicity. (James H. Powell and David Hawks, 10/2)

Where does all this stand, days after the debate and a month before the election? All summer, wise people were saying Joe Biden’s ahead but Donald Trump’s in the game, can’t write him off, a lot of issues (rising crime, economic fear, a poor Democratic convention) are going in his favor, this thing is dynamic. But things are congealing now, taking on their final shape, and isn’t it kind of obvious, especially after the debate, what’s happening? (Peggy Noonan, 10/1)

The coronavirus started as a medical crisis, but quickly produced an unemployment crisis and a state fiscal crisis. Medicaid, the state-operated health care entitlement that covers 67 million low-income Americans, has been strained by all three. (Chris Pope, 10/1)

After hours of discussion, and for the umpteenth time in recent months, the Miami-Dade School Board tackled on Tuesday how to return to the schoolhouse model of learning. But this time, board members did it under what they believed was a veiled threat — not from coronavirus fears, but from Florida Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran. In a stern letter, Corcoran instructed the nation’s fourth-largest district to reopen its school doors by Monday, Oct. 5 or be prepared to justify exemptions on a school-by-school basis by Friday — oh, and also face the possibility of having state funding withheld. What appalling thuggery.

At the debate this week, President Trump was crystal-clear about his intention to wipe out the Affordable Care Act. He said: “We do want to get rid of it.” But, in addition to promising to wipe out the ACA’s actually existing protections for people with preexisting conditions, he also promised to replace them with some other nonexistent plan that would do the same thing. “We will protect people,” he said.When moderator Chris Wallace pointed out that Trump has been promising a plan for four years — and still hasn’t yet delivered — Trump just filibustered, and the discussion turned to another topic. It appears a lot of people who plan to vote for Trump find this sufficient. (Greg Sargent, 10/1)

“It was dehumanizing,” Slade Skaggs told us about how health care providers treated him when he turned to them for help with his substance use disorder. “They made me feel like I was drug-seeking and that I was not deserving of their time or care.” Fortunately, he finally got the help he needed and is now in recovery, serving as a peer-support specialist for others with substance use disorders. (Richard Bottner, Christopher Moriates and Matthew Stefanko, 10/2)

The pictures are simultaneously mundane and intimate. A pregnant woman, crying, leans forward in a hospital bed as she’s prepped for an epidural. A mother and father hold a baby nestled in the candy-stripe Kuddle-Up receiving blanket recognizable to legions of new parents.The black-and-white images posted Wednesday by celebrities Chrissy Teigen and John Legend document not just familiar birth scenes but also death: Teigen, who had been on bed rest, lost her pregnancy. This tragedy — what writer Elizabeth McCracken has described as “the happiest story in the world with the saddest ending” — is deeply personal. Yet in grieving for their son as openly as they share other experiences, Teigen and Legend are doing a public service for families who have suffered similar losses — and outsiders trying to understand this sort of mourning. (Alyssa Rosenberg, 10/1)