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It’s the agony and the tragedy of America. At a time when we long for hope, we’re getting depressing news. At a time when we need a high-minded leader to unify the country, we have a president consumed with his own political prospects.And as a consequence, at a time when we need to pull together as a nation, it sometimes feels as though the United States is coming apart at the regional, ideological, and generational seams.In the midst of this crisis, against the backdrop of a traumatized nation, we saw on Tuesday what this president is really about. Explaining his refusal to let Dr. Anthony Fauci testify before the House of Representatives, Trump said that House Democrats “frankly want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death.” (Scott Lehigh, 5/5)

Today, everyone is desperate for reliable information. We want to know how the virus spreads, what new treatments might be effective against it, how long until we have a vaccine, and how to get the economy going again. And we want answers from people who really know what they’re talking about. Yet the anti-expertise sentiment that was brewing before Covid-19 struck is still with us. (Paul Todd, 5/6)

Does the President have any sense of what's at stake? While the University of Washington's coronavirus model -- one often cited by the White House -- is predicting American deaths will be nearly twice as high as it had previously predicted, and the New York Times reports that the White House's own internal documents say the death toll could rise to 3,000 deaths every day by June 1, President Donald Trump is telling the American people that it's time to ease the social distancing protocols. What could go wrong? (Jill Filipovic, 5/5)

How long can Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci keep this up? We’ve been watching their faces, and we know as surely as we know ourselves that they are in agony working for an administration ruled by chaos and led by an irresponsible enemy of science who gets his facts wrong, contradicts himself and steps clumsily on their life-or-death message. The two eminent doctors have obviously made the calculation that they’re more valuable on the inside than the outside, and that they’ll make compromises and put up with a measure of indignity to remain in the inner circle of power. But surely late at night, they must have moments of moral doubt, looking hard into the mirror and asking themselves whether they’ve made the right decision to stick by President Trump’s side. (Nicholas Goldberg, 5/6)

House Democrats last week sought testimony from Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, about the Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus crisis. The White House quickly stepped in to block it, claiming that Fauci's testimony would be "counter-productive." Now the ball is back in the House Democrats' court, and they've given no indication of doing anything more than dropping it and skulking away. (Elie Honig, 5/5)

Five years ago, I was a doctoral student studying the history of medicine in Malawi, one of the planet’s poorest countries. I spent my days in a dusty archive, surrounded by the soft rustle of turning pages. It was there I learned about the activism of John Chiphangwi, an obstetrician who worked in an overcrowded and underequipped maternity ward in Blantyre, a center of commerce in Malawi. When the country’s murderous dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, arrived for his annual Christmas rounds in 1978, Chiphangwi had a plan. (Luke Messac, 5/6)

One might think it’s good news that more than half of all states are either partially reopening or have plans in place to reopen after a nearly two-month COVID-19 shutdown. If those states were truly ready, this would be good news. But many of the plans being rushed out now are almost certain to fall hardest on those people who will not be able to protect themselves or their families. Whether because of lack of access to health care, low household income, immigration status, racial discrimination, disability, lack of safe or affordable housing or myriad other factors, millions of people are going to pay for our nation’s entrenched inequities that have existed for generations but have become even more apparent and appalling during this pandemic. (Dr. Richard E. Besser, 5/5)

Credit to California Gov. Gavin Newsom for agreeing Monday to lift the state’s strict lockdown later this week and let lower-risk counties further relax their restrictions. This is a concession to political and public-health reality, and we hope other Democratic governors follow. Mr. Newsom spurred a wave of state lockdowns by ordering all citizens to stay home. The state’s initial dire predictions of surging fatalities and infections overwhelming hospitals have not come to pass. California’s fatality rate (5.8 per 100,000 people) is much lower than those of New York (127.4), Massachusetts (59.9) and even Colorado (15.4), whose Democratic Governor is letting businesses reopen. (5/5)

During the early days of the pandemic, the public’s attention was fixed on various models, each showing a steep upswing, with cases steadily increasing each day, followed by the tail-end of the curve as cases fade away. Americans saw, with increasing dread, the predicted upswing in the national numbers. Then, over the last couple of weeks, it stopped. And yet, forecasters are projecting even more deaths on the horizon. A leaked document obtained by The New York Times projected more than 3,000 people could die each day by the end of May. Another historically conservative model, favored by the Trump administration, just doubled its projected death toll, too. The tail-end of the national epidemic is not materializing. (Nathaniel Lash, 5/6)

The lack of common knowledge is an underappreciated reason why it is so difficult for society to quickly adjust to emergencies such as COVID-19. People care about doing right, but also about how they are perceived. You may know wearing a mask or not letting your kids attend a play date is responsible, but wouldn’t these be easier choices if you knew others were going to do likewise? For us to do right as a community, it is not enough for us each to know what is right. We also need to know that others know it. While the death toll from COVID-19 may be slowly moving us toward new norms of behavior, we aren’t there yet. (Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Mehdi Shadmehr, 5/1)

Many governors are refusing to lift their COVID-19 shelter-in-place decrees until long lists of conditions are met... As a matter of science, the governors are wrong. They assume that they are making a tradeoff of a short-term reduction in employment for a long-term reduction in age-specific mortality. They are actually making a tradeoff of a short-term reduction in COVID-19 deaths for a long-term increase in age-specific mortality for working people and their families. (Alexander Galetovic and Stephen Haber, 5/5)