Review of ‘The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid” by Lawrence Wright - The Washington Post

Why America failed to control the pandemic

"In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright explores the missed opportunities and biggest mistakes.

Carlos Lozada

WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 8 : Dr. Deborah Birx, White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC, listen as President Donald J. Trump speaks with members of the coronavirus task force during a White House briefing on April 08, 2020. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

But as I worked my way through “The Plague Year,” an older book of Wright’s came to mind more often: “The Looming Tower,” a masterful journey down the roads that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. There, too, a gathering menace was ignored, experts were sidelined, and action was deferred until an unfathomable calamity was upon us. “The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was that no one took it seriously,” Wright wrote in that 2006 book. “It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” It was a peril that seemed unthinkable, “up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageantry of history.”

“The Plague Year” does not reach the heights of “The Looming Tower” — few books do — but a global pandemic is an even deadlier threat in that savage pageantry of history, one for which the United States could have been far better prepared. Wright’s new book is most effective at detailing the missed opportunities to keep things from going so wrong. “Tens of thousands of people were bound to perish,” he writes. “But perhaps not hundreds of thousands.” This is the story of how we got that extra zero.

There were warnings; there were even manuals. Wright describes the Obama administration’s 69-page “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” a document bequeathed to Donald Trump’s incoming team during the presidential transition, outlining how various agencies should respond in case of a pandemic or bioweapon attack. Wright also cites “Crimson Contagion,” a 2019 exercise led by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services that included the Pentagon, the National Security Council, major hospitals, health-care organizations and a dozen state governments. In the exercise, tourists contracted a novel influenza during a China trip and quickly spread it across the world. Agencies couldn’t agree who was in charge; cities challenged recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; ventilators and protective equipment for medical workers were insufficient; business struggled to remain open. With no vaccine, nearly 600,000 Americans soon died. It was “spookily predictive of what was to come,” Wright emphasizes, but few reforms were instituted in response.

Blessed with world-class medical and research institutions and a robust pharmaceutical industry, the United States could have been well-positioned to deal with a pandemic, or at least address some of the failings revealed by the exercise, Wright writes. But three factors conspired against us. First, it took U.S. authorities too long to grasp the full threat. Wright cites former CDC director Robert Redfield’s conclusion that, if the agency’s experts had been allowed to visit China in early January 2020, “they would have learned exactly what the world was facing,” particularly the virus’s human-to-human transmissibility. Second was the CDC’s failure to develop an effective testing kit in a timely manner, “perhaps the lowest point in the history of a very proud institution,” Wright laments. And third was the transformation of masks from a public health measure to a cultural and political war, one the president of the United States eagerly waged.

“The image of the maskless president animated his base,” Wright explains. “Maskless, he appeared defiant, masculine, invulnerable, whereas to wear a mask would be caving in, being weak.” Though he praises the former president for imposing travel restrictions and promoting Operation Warp Speed for vaccine development, Wright brands Trump a “saboteur” for ridiculing mask-wearing and a “superspreader” for his continued political rallies and his well-attended White House event honoring the new Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett.

“Political divisiveness doesn’t lend itself to having a coordinated, cooperative, collaborative response against a common enemy,” the National Institutes of Health’s Anthony Fauci tells Wright, with considerable understatement. Absent such a response, options grow limited. The trade-offs that have defined the American experience with the coronavirus — such as embracing a national lockdown vs. averting an economic meltdown — were hardly inevitable. We made them so.

The virus isn't transforming us. It's accelerating the changes already underway.

Wright provides memorable historical context — during the flu pandemic a century ago, an Anti-Mask League emerged in San Francisco, proving there is really nothing new in the world — and even literary references, reminding readers that Boccaccio’s “Decameron” featured 10 friends sheltering in place in plague-era Florence. But he also holds up some heroes for our time. Researchers such as Barney Graham at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and his collaborator Jason McClellan receive copious praise for their vaccine development efforts, for instance, while Wright hails front-line medical workers from Seattle to New York for their professional and psychological fortitude. “Emotions were deferred, but they clawed deep scars,” he writes.

Chunks of “The Plague Year” are told through the experiences of Matthew Pottinger, deputy national security adviser in the Trump White House, who by January 2020 already regarded the outbreak as a major crisis. In some ways he seems an ideal protagonist: A former journalist, Pottinger covered the SARS crisis in China for the Wall Street Journal; he is married to a former CDC virologist; and his brother is an infectious-disease doctor in Seattle. Yet Pottinger is not always the most compelling of heroes, indulging in the classic laments of conflicted Trump officials — This time I’ll resign; no, maybe next time! — and getting kudos for, yes, bucking peer pressure and wearing a mask in the White House. The most memorable Pottinger moment is when he admits to his brother in March 2020 that the administration’s efforts to distribute protective equipment for medical personnel were too late. “I’m doing all I can, and help is on the way,” Pottinger says, “but it probably won’t be in time — so start tearing up bedsheets and turning them into lab coats, raid the Salvation Army for garments, wrap bras around your face in place of face masks if you have to.”

Often, administration officials knew what needed to be done, but it still rarely happened. “Everyone on the task force understood the magnitude of the crisis; they were diligent, meeting every weekday, with conference calls on weekends,” Wright recalls. “The real problem was that the administration was simply not executing the tasks that needed to be done to limit the pandemic.” This administration declined to administer.

When top officials engaged, they often did so unofficially. Wright details how Deborah Birx, who served as the White House’s coronavirus task force coordinator, took an extended road trip with epidemiologist Irum Zaidi — “racking up 25,000 miles as they crossed the country eight times, visiting forty-three states” — to meet with politicians, health officials and hospital executives. “She was the only federal official doing so,” Wright points out. (He calls the chapter on their travels “Thelma and Louise,” not a particularly encouraging omen.)

Other books on the coronavirus crisis have imagined how this experience might change the country or the world. Wright, to his credit, mostly stops short of such prognostications, but he still thinks big. The lack of a comprehensive national plan, he concludes, led one pandemic to become multiple pandemics in this country, lived differently by race, age and geography. (“One has to wonder,” he posits, “how the nation might have responded had the victims been younger, whiter, richer.”) And though Wright is open to the lab-leak theory of the pandemic’s origins — “pathogens do escape from labs, even highly secure ones,” he notes — he points to major challenges ahead, no matter how this began. If the virus evolved in nature, we should “expect recurrences” because of all the new ways humans are interacting with animal life; if it came from a lab, “then it is a reminder that science is engaged in experiments that invite catastrophe with the smallest slip,” he writes. “In either case, Covid-19 is a harbinger.”

That is another way this story evokes the conundrums of 9/11. Will we ask the right questions and learn the right lessons? Or, imagining the end in sight, have we already begun to regard the unthinkable — nearly 600,000 U.S. deaths so far — as acceptable?

“It’s a fascinating experience to be presented with the unfathomable, and you resist it — because it’s unfathomable,” theater producer Jordan Roth tells Wright. “And then you wrap your head around that, and you take it in your hands, you say, ‘Okay, I’m there — but only there.’ And then the unfathomable moves. And you do it again. And it keeps moving and moving and moving farther and farther into more unfathomable.”

Review of ‘The Plague Year: America in the Time of Covid” by Lawrence Wright - The Washington Post

We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature. - The Washington Post

We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature.

"Labs like the one in Wuhan are essential to preparing for future pandemics

Security personnel keep watch outside the Wuhan Institute of Virology in February, during a World Health Organization visit. Attention has focused on the possibility that the pandemic started with a lab leak, but natural origins still seem likelier. (Thomas Peter/Reuters)

From the moment the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, emerged in Wuhan, China, scientists and the broader public have sought answers to some fundamental questions: Where did this virus come from? How did the pandemic start? From the early days, experts have considered two possibilities. Either the virus somehow escaped from a laboratory, perhaps the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or, like countless viruses throughout history, it arrived through zoonotic spillover, jumping from animals to humans.

More than a year later, we still don’t know exactly what happened. Though governments and news organizations have focused more attention recently on the notion that the virus leaked from a lab, it’s unclear that we’ll ever identify a theory that satisfies everyone as to how SARS-CoV-2 emerged. Ironically, given the recent prominence of the lab escape theory, the questions the world wants answered about the virus — and the astonishingly fast development of the vaccines that can quash the pandemic — depend entirely on research conducted in labs like the Wuhan Institute of Virology and across the world over the past several decades. This fundamental research underpins our ability to prepare for and respond to pandemics. We need to know what’s out there and what kind of viral threats we face. The only way to do that is to go where the viruses are, with our colleagues who are already there.

In March 2020, a group of renowned evolutionary virologists analyzed the genome sequence of SARS-CoV-2 and found it was overwhelmingly likely that this virus had never been manipulated in any laboratory. Like the earlier coronaviruses SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, they theorized, it “spilled over” from its natural reservoir host (bats) to a new one (humans). Viruses jump species frequently, with unpredictable consequences. Often a virus hits an evolutionary dead end if it cannot adapt to the new host rapidly enough to be transmitted again. Sometimes, however, it can. Clues that reveal this scenario can be found by analyzing the sequence of the virus genome, and that’s exactly what this study did.

The study carefully examined whether key elements of the virus, particularly the spike protein on its surface, appeared engineered. They did not. The spike didn’t optimally bind to its receptor, ACE-2, and the interaction between the two proteins was unpredictable even using the most advanced computer algorithms. Another key feature often cited as evidence of laboratory origin is the furin cleavage site, where the spike protein is cut in half to “activate” viral material for entry into cells. The viruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 don’t have this site, but many others do, including other human coronaviruses. The furin site of SARS-CoV-2 has odd features that no human would design. Its sequence is suboptimal, meaning its cleavage by the enzyme furin is relatively inefficient. Any skilled virologist hoping to give a virus new properties this way would insert a furin site known to be more efficient. The SARS-CoV-2 site has more of the hallmarks of sloppy natural evolution than a human hand. Indeed, a timely analysis last year showed convincingly that it is a product of genetic recombination, a natural feature of coronavirus replication and evolution.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has provided many opportunities to observe SARS-CoV-2 evolution in humans as it unfolds — and confidence in its natural origin has grown over time. The molecular handshake between SARS-CoV-2 and ACE-2, seemingly unique in early 2020, turns out to be found in several related viruses and has since evolved to be a better fit. Its ability to infect human cells also turns out to be unremarkable. A related virus discovered in pangolins infects human cells even more readily than SARS-CoV-2. The virus behind the pandemic may be special in its impact on our lives and the global economy, but the way it infects us isn’t unique at all.

The evolutionary trajectory of SARS-CoV-2 further undermines claims that the virus is obviously artificial and designed for human transmission. Early in the pandemic, a mutation called D614G took hold and spread rapidly around the world, showing that the virus was adapting to its host from the very beginning. Since then, mutations in the region of the spike protein that binds ACE-2, as well as near the furin cleavage site, show continued adaptation. Several of these are found repeatedly in different variants of concern and almost certainly contribute to increased transmissibility. SARS-CoV-2 continues to evolve. It wasn’t perfectly tuned for humans when it appeared, just good enough.

China could pay if nations come to believe the virus leaked from a lab

The epidemiological evidence in the World Health Organization’s origins mission report from this spring further bolsters the natural-origin hypothesis. Among early cases, 55 percent had had exposure to wildlife markets, and the growth of the outbreak over time, both in cases and excess deaths, clearly shows that the neighborhood surrounding the Huanan market was the initial center of the epidemic in Wuhan. It’s true that 45 percent of cases could not be linked to a market, but the silent spread of SARS-CoV-2 that has made it so hard to control also makes it difficult to rule out such connections. Yes, the WHO’s mission was imperfect and hampered by political forces in China and elsewhere; even the organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has nodded to those limitations by calling for a more thorough examination of the possibility of a lab escape. We don’t disagree about the benefits of doing so, and perhaps the U.S. government’s 90-day intelligence review will turn up compelling new information. We must consider every possibility — but our priorities should be guided by what is most likely. There are still missing pieces of data, including those unlinked cases and inadequate animal sampling, but most of the data we do have points heavily toward natural origin.

Some of the public consideration of a lab escape has focused on a kind of research known as gain-of-function, and whether such experiments could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2. This work is defined by the National Institutes of Health as research on influenza, MERS-CoV or SARS coronaviruses with the potential to enhance transmissibility by aerosol droplet or pathogenicity in mammals. A subset of that research, done at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and some labs in the United States, has involved constructing “chimeric” coronaviruses, where the spike protein of one virus is inserted into the genetic backbone of another, typically the original SARS-CoV or a bat coronavirus called WIV1 used at the Wuhan lab. This allows scientists to study the properties of the spike protein within the context of a well-understood system and make direct comparisons about virulence with a known virus.

China thinks the pandemic will make it the world’s new leader. It won’t.

These experiments carry some risk, as noted by researchers who have engaged in them, and it’s appropriate to consider the balance between that risk and their benefits.

Understandably then, some people have wondered whether these types of experiments could have produced SARS-CoV-2. The answer is, in this case, not really. In theory, if you had the right viruses in your catalogue, sure. But there are no indications that anyone had ever seen this virus nor any viruses similar enough to serve as its genetic building blocks before SARS-CoV-2 emerged in the population.

The Wuhan institute’s most recent chimeric virus used a very different coronavirus as its genetic backbone. Looking at the body of research produced there, it’s clear that scientists were laser-focused on the bat viruses related to SARS-CoV, which spurred research on coronaviruses worldwide after it emerged in 2003 because of its pandemic potential. There’s just no trace of SARS-CoV-2 in the lab, and if the SARS-CoV-2 progenitor or its building blocks weren’t in the lab before the pandemic, the pandemic could not have started there — even accidentally. This precludes the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 evolved via serial passage in cell culture, or repeated rounds of infection of other cells in a lab, as do other observations about the virus. In standard cell culture, features like the furin cleavage site that are crucial for transmission and disease in humans are rapidly lost as the virus begins adapting to the vervet monkey kidney cells typically used to grow it. For the past 18 months, virologists around the world have been studying SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory, and they have not seen any evidence that it becomes more dangerous to humans in the lab. The opposite is true: The virus loses features key to transmissibility and virulence, forcing researchers to innovate new culture methods to allow the study of antivirals or vaccines.

It does seem like quite a coincidence that the pandemic started in Wuhan, which has one of the world’s leading coronavirus research labs, and that’s surely helped raise questions about a possible leak. But in addition to being a coronavirus research center, Wuhan is a city of 11 million people, home to a major transportation hub that is connected to every other part of China, as well as wildlife markets supplied by farms throughout the country. The presence of the lab in the city where the pandemic emerged is simply not suspicious enough on its own to outweigh what we know about the virus.

We agree that researchers should continue to study whether the virus could have emerged from a lab, but this cannot come at the expense of the search for animal hosts that could have transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to humans. Getting better answers will take rigorous scientific work — and cooperation from China. As frustrating as obfuscation by the Chinese government is, the answers are there. If we make accusations and demands that aren’t firmly grounded in evidence, we run the real risk of having no origins investigations at all.

Lab leaks happen, and not just in China. We need to take them seriously.

The only reason we can evaluate the genomic and virological evidence in a scientifically informed way, and the only reason we have vaccines so quickly, is decades of research on coronaviruses. We’d be years behind the curve without this fundamental knowledge, which resulted from gain-of-function studies and surveys of coronaviruses in bats and other wild animals. How many are there? Where are they? Can they infect us? How might they compare with the original SARS-CoV, which caused a global epidemic in 2003? An even bigger question looms now: Can we design vaccines that might protect us against all related coronaviruses? Research is progressing, but testing vaccine candidates will require finding out what viruses are out there. Again, we have to work with colleagues in China, where the viruses are, to do that.

As the vaccines start to bring the pandemic under control in the United States, the fundamental truth about how to identify and fight dangerous viruses hasn’t changed: Preparing for pandemics, global crises by definition, demands a global response. We must approach this collaboratively — and objectively recognize what the data shows. This virus is more likely to be a product of nature than a product of a laboratory. Letting politics lead us toward other conclusions won’t help keep anyone safer.

Twitter: @angie_rasmussen"

We may never know where the virus came from. But evidence still suggests nature. - The Washington Post

The Importance Of Critical Race Theory Was Proved This Memorial Day in Ohio

Congress Needs to Defend Vote Counting, Not Just Vote Casting

June 4, 2021

Illustration by The New York Times

By The Editorial Board

“The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

Republican-controlled state legislatures are whittling away at the integrity of electoral democracy in the United States, rushing to pass laws that make it harder for Americans to vote and easier for partisans to tamper with election results.

It is a legislative assault motivated by the failure of President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and justified by baseless allegations about the legitimacy of his defeat. Mr. Trump and his supporters pursued indiscriminate lawsuits to overturn the results and then, urged on by Mr. Trump, some of his supporters stormed the Capitol to halt the completion of the election process. Now they are seeking to rewrite the rules to make it easier for Republicans to win elections without winning the most votes.

This effort is inimical to the most basic principles of free and fair elections: that all who are eligible should have an equal opportunity to vote, that all votes should be counted and that the losing side should accept defeat and acknowledge the legitimacy of the outcome.

In the face of these threats, Democrats in Congress have crafted an election bill, H.R. 1, that is poorly matched to the moment. The legislation attempts to accomplish more than is currently feasible, while failing to address some of the clearest threats to democracy, especially the prospect that state officials will seek to overturn the will of voters.

Because there is little chance the bill will pass in its current form, Democrats face a clear choice. They can wage what might be a symbolic (and likely doomed) fight for all the changes they would like. Or they can confront the acute crisis at hand by crafting a more focused bill, perhaps more palatable for more senators, that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.

A new election law in Georgia highlights the shortcomings of H.R. 1. The Georgia law, passed in March, imposes a host of restrictions on voter registration and on voting, most of which would be reversed by the federal legislation. It also changes the rules of vote counting in ways that are not addressed by the federal legislation. It facilitates third-party challenges to the legitimacy of votes and arrogates to the state legislature, the General Assembly, the power to appoint most members of the state board of elections, who in turn have the power to replace county boards of elections. The legislature removed Georgia’s secretary of state from the State Election Board after the incumbent, Brad Raffensperger, refused to help Mr. Trump stake an illegitimate claim on the state’s electoral votes.

At least 13 states have joined Georgia in passing new restrictions. Among them are a Montana law that ends the practice of allowing voters to register on Election Day and an Iowa law that requires the state’s polling places to close one hour earlier. Other bills are pending, including in Texas, where Republicans may use a special legislative session to pass a package of voting restrictions that rivals the severity of the new rules in Georgia, and in Arizona, where Senate Republicans have been conducting a tragicomical “audit” of the 2020 election.

In a statement published this week by the left-leaning think tank New America, more than 100 leading scholars of government warned that election laws in some states “no longer meet the minimum conditions for free and fair elections.” The statement warned that “our entire democracy is now at risk.”

The new restrictions have a disproportionate impact on Black and other minority voters. There is little comfort in the fact that these rules are much less restrictive than those in the olden days. The Jim Crow regime was constructed gradually.

The vote-counting process necessarily relies on the judgment and integrity of local officials. No rules can perfectly prevent malfeasance. But Congress can take steps to protect the integrity of the election process.

One important measure included in H.R. 1 is to require a paper record of every vote, so that outcomes can be verified independently.

But the bill needs to go further. Congress also should establish uniform rules for vote counting, certification and challenges. It should also clarify its own role in certifying the results of presidential elections to prevent the possibility that a future Congress would overturn a state’s popular vote.

Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.

In addition to setting minimum standards for voting access, there is also a need to constrain states from moving backward, even if existing standards exceed those minimums.

Democrats are separately pursuing the revival of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain states and counties, mostly in the South, to obtain approval for any changes from the Justice Department. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling effectively ended this system, helping to clear the way for the restrictions that states are now imposing.

Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose support Democrats must win to advance a bill, has proposed to apply that standard to every state.

After the 2004 election, for example, Ohio created an extended period of early voting. The beginning of the window overlapped with the end of the voter registration period. During the period known as the “Golden Week,” Ohioans could register and vote on the same day. In 2014, Ohio shortened early voting and ended Golden Week, citing the standard phantasm of voter fraud. Under a national review requirement, Ohio would have been forced to defend the decision even though it still offered more early voting than many other states.

H.R. 1 is a sprawling bill that contains much more beyond this. Among other things, it would reshape campaign finance and impose new ethics restrictions on some government officials. This board has endorsed an earlier version of H.R. 1, many of the current bill’s goals, as well as ending the filibuster to pass the bill outright. If proponents can muster the necessary votes to pass an expanded version that addresses threats to vote counting, that would be the best outcome for the United States. If they cannot, however, then it makes sense to pursue a narrow bill aimed squarely at voting access rollbacks and subversion of election results.

Senators with hesitations about H.R. 1 need to put forward their own ideas for protecting the rights of voters. The power of the states to administer elections is unquestioned, but it is not unlimited. In a representative democracy, the legitimate power of the representatives cannot extend to acts designed to undermine democracy.

If Democrats can find 50 votes for reform, they should not postpone necessary interventions in the illusory hope of a bipartisan breakthrough, nor allow Republicans to filibuster.

American history is sometimes narrated as a gradual expansion of participatory democracy, as workers and women and Black people gained the right to vote. The reality is less flattering. Participation has expanded, and it has contracted. Democracy has strengthened and waned. The gains in the second half of the 20th century are now eroding. There is a narrow window of opportunity to intervene.“

After Lavish Nights of Clubbing in Bangkok, a Covid Outbreak Thailand went for months without a single confirmed case of local transmission, but the epidemic has now radiated from nightclubs to areas where social distancing is all but impossible.

After Lavish Nights of Clubbing in Bangkok, a Covid Outbreak

Thailand went for months without a single confirmed case of local transmission, but the epidemic has now radiated from nightclubs to areas where social distancing is all but impossible.

June 5, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ET

A crowded Khlong Toey wet market, one of the largest in Bangkok, at dawn. The markets have been incubators for the coronavirus.

“A crowded Khlong Toey wet market, one of the largest in Bangkok, at dawn. The markets have been incubators for the coronavirus.

BANGKOK — When the V.V.I.P. customers disembarked from their limousines at the Krystal Exclusive Club in Bangkok, young women in tiaras, angel wings and not much else sometimes greeted them.

The V.V.I.P. clientele were whisked to the V.V.I.P. rooms, with their padded walls and plush sofas. Thai government bigwigs partied at Krystal — one of its mottos is “the luxury entertainment of night light” — as did diplomats, army officers and businessmen. For much of the pandemic, coronavirus restrictions did not stop the fun.

But this spring, as go-go dancers shimmied, Krystal and another neighborhood nightclub, Emerald, turned into the epicenter of what is now Thailand’s biggest and deadliest coronavirus surge, according to health ministry officials. Scores of people linked to the clubs have tested positive, including an ambassador and a government minister. (The minister’s staff said that he was infected by an aide who frequented Krystal.) Police officers and women who worked at the clubs have been infected, too.

A Ferrari showroom near the Thonglor area, where some of Thailand’s wealthiest people live and party in Bangkok.

A shopping mall in Bangkok in early May.

For all the mask-wearing rigor and lockdown obedience displayed by many Thais, the abandon of a privileged few catalyzed Bangkok’s latest coronavirus outbreak, health officials said. The nightclub cluster also highlights the impunity of the rich in a country with one of the largest wealth gaps among major economies.

Thailand went for months without a single confirmed case of local transmission, but the epidemic has now radiated from luxury nightclubs that cater to powerful and wealthy men to the warrens of slums that hug Bangkok’s highways and railroad tracks. In these cramped quarters, social distancing is impossible. Infections have also spread to prisons, construction camps and factories.

The Chao Phraya River, where some five-star hotels are offering an expensive “Hospitel” quarantine to people who test positive for Covid-19 and can afford to isolate there.

“The rich people party and the poor people suffer the consequences,” said Sittichat Angkhasittisiri, a neighborhood chairman in Bangkok’s largest slum, Khlong Toey, where the coronavirus has infected hundreds of people.

After recording fewer than 5,000 cases total through November, Thailand racked up more than 5,800 cases on a single day in late May. The total number of infections is now about 175,000. Gone are the days when the World Health Organization praised Thailand for its coronavirus-fighting prowess.

Thailand’s virus surge, happening just as many Western nations approach a semblance of normalcy, is part of a late-breaking wave that has washed over much of the rest of Southeast Asia, where adequate vaccines are largely unavailable. Thailand is counting on local production this summer of the AstraZeneca vaccine by a company controlled by the country’s king. The company has never made vaccines before.

A Covid-19 patient in an intensive-care ward at a private hospital in Bangkok in May.

Cardboard beds set up at a field hospital at Bangkok Arena in April.

The phuyai, as the gilded elite of Thailand are known, can book overseas tours to get vaccines unavailable at home; one $7,000 jaunt for jabs in Russia is fully booked until July. But the poor struggle. Many must wait for cots at free government field hospitals set up in stadiums or other areas. The rich with mild cases can convalesce at expensive hotels.

“Society is very, very unequal,” said Mutita Thongsopa, a dairy company employee who came to Bangkok to support her family of farmers from Thailand’s northeast. “The phuyai destroyed the Covid situation themselves, and we, the small people, we cannot live.”

On April 27, Ms. Mutita’s sister, Supatra Thongsopa, a 40-year-old grocery clerk at a Bangkok mall, arrived at a government testing site at 3 a.m. to secure a spot. She waited all day, then the next day and the next. As she waited, Ms. Supatra texted with her sister to complain of fatigue and stomach problems.

She was finally tested on May 1. The result came back positive, and she died five days later. Ms. Supatra’s boyfriend, who also developed Covid-19, is still in the hospital.

“People are dying like falling leaves,” Ms. Mutita said.

Residents of the Khlong Toey slum community who live along the railway tracks.

A worker spraying disinfectant in a home where someone tested positive for Covid-19.

Although a Bangkok court sentenced the managers of Krystal and Emerald to two months in prison for violating a Covid emergency decree, no one else is facing charges so far. The police say they are looking into whether prostitution, illegal in Thailand, may have occurred at the clubs. Representatives of both clubs refused to comment.

“On the Krystal case, it is still under investigation,” said Maj. Gen. Sophon Sarapat, the commander of a Bangkok Metropolitan Police division.

“We are waiting for the suspects to turn themselves in,” he added. “We have sent a letter to the owner of the club.”

When cases involve high-profile tycoons or politicians, though, investigations in Thailand have a habit of fizzling. Murder charges do not materialize. Well-connected individuals slip into exile. Thailand’s three waves of coronavirus infection have crested in the shadowy zones where the rich profit from questionable businesses and defy Covid protocols.

The first outbreak, in the spring of 2020, was traced by virologists to a Bangkok boxing stadium operated by the country’s powerful military, which makes money on sports gambling. The second cluster, late last year, was tracked by health officials to a sweatshop seafood business, which depends on immigration officers turning a blind eye to workers trafficked from neighboring countries. And the third, which has killed about 1,000 people, originated in the nightclubs whose coziness with law enforcement is an open secret.

A woman from the Khlong Toey slum community getting a nasal swab test at a school.

A child from Khlong Toey was discharged from a community isolation area. He tested positive for Covid-19 but was unable to isolate in his crowded home.

“In Thai culture, we can smile and lie at the same time,” said Chuwit Kamolvisit, an anticorruption campaigner and former member of Parliament. “Maybe to survive in politics, that is OK. But when it’s Covid, this is too dangerous.”

Before he ventured into politics, Mr. Chuwit made his fortune through a collection of massage parlors in Bangkok with names like Victoria’s Secret. He said his business was greased by bribes to the police.

“Krystal is like another Government House, because it’s so popular with those people,” Mr. Chuwit said, referring to the Italianate building that holds the offices of the prime minister and the cabinet.

Earlier this year, Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, a retired general who staged a coup seven years ago, warned that if anyone referred to Krystal as an alternate to his offices at Government House, they could face legal consequences.

It’s hard to say how the coronavirus infiltrated Khlong Toey, where thousands of people live crowded together in slum communities near railroad tracks and a fetid canal. One origin story traces this spring’s outbreak to a woman who some say frequented various clubs.

The Khlong Toey slum district, foreground, where a surge in Covid-19 cases has spread. The high-rise condos and offices of the Sukhumvit Road commercial district are in the background.

Another connects it to a man who met a friend who had partied in the Krystal neighborhood. When he started feeling unwell, the man quarantined in his car because he had nowhere else to go, said Mr. Sittichat, the neighborhood chairman. Still, the man passed the virus to three others, setting off community transmission, Mr. Sittichat said.

“Officials talk about quarantine, but that’s for rich people,” he said. “Our houses are too small. We have no space.”

In another Khlong Toey community, about 10 percent of residents have tested positive for the virus. Neighborhood officials were forced to isolate the infected behind sheets of plastic at the back of an outdoor community center.

After suiting up in a plastic raincoat and plastic glasses to deliver water to a new batch of Covid patients, Mariam Pomdee, a community leader, handed out donated meals to residents whose food supplies were waning. With the virus spreading through Khlong Toey’s narrow alleys, employers have been shunning its residents.

Residents from Khlong Toey waiting to be tested for Covid-19.

A woman from Khlong Toey received a Sinovac vaccination.

Yet the people of Khlong Toey are vital to making Bangkok run. They deliver the packages and the takeout meals, their motorbikes weaving past Mercedes tightly sealed from the heat and the haze. They build the glass-sheathed condominiums and the malls that seem to materialize like mushrooms after the monsoons. Their vast market feeds Bangkok its vegetables, fruits and wriggling seafood.

Unemployment, already high because of Thailand’s pandemic-closed borders, has soared in Khlong Toey. To survive, some families have sold the vaccine registration cards they received as residents of a high-risk neighborhood.

Thailand has yet to fully start nationwide mass vaccinations, and less than 2 percent of the population is fully inoculated. A few wealthy Bangkok residents have boasted on social media about buying vaccination cards from the city’s most desperate residents.

“The rich who are already privileged are stepping on the poor,” Ms. Mariam said. “They believe their money can buy anything.”

Health care workers handing over ashes and other remains to the mother of a Covid-19 victim.

A health worker with the remains of a Covid-19 victim, at a temple in Nonthaburi, Thailand.“

Germany Acknowledges Genocide in Namibia but Stops Short of Reparations | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine

Germany Acknowledges Genocide in Namibia but Stops Short of Reparations

"Between 1904 and 1908, colonial forces murdered tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people

Two protesters hold a sign reading "Reparations to descendants instead of 'development aid' to Namibia" at a demonstration in Berlin on May 28. That day, the German foreign minister formally acknowledged the Herero and Nama genocide and promised €1.1 billion in infrastructure aid—but stopped short of labeling the effort "reparations."

Decades before the Holocaust, German officials engineered a lesser-known genocide in what is now Namibia. Between 1904 and 1908, colonial soldiers imprisoned, abused and murdered tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in the territory then known as South-West Africa. Some historiansdescribe the atrocities—the first mass murders of their kind to take place during the 20th century—as a “forgotten genocide.”

Germany has, historically, refused to acknowledge its role in the ethnic cleansing, which decimated two marginalized ethnic groups in the South African country. But last week, more than 100 years after the violence occurred, the European country finally acknowledged that its actions constituted genocide. As Foreign Minister Heiko Maas said in a May 28 statement, Germany plans to pay $1.35 billion (€1.1 billion) toward infrastructure development in Namibia over the next three decades.

A spokesperson for Namibia’s president, Hage Geingob, tells Luisa Beck, Max Bearak and Shinovene Immanuel of the Washington Post that the country’s leaders viewed the announcement with cautious optimism as a “first step in the right direction.”

Discussions between the countries’ governments began in 2015. The declaration was the result of nine rounds of joint negotiations, reports Philip Oltermann for the Guardian.

“We will now officially call these events what they are from today’s perspective: a genocide,” said Maas in the statement. “Given Germany’s historical and moral responsibility, we will ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness.”

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is set to travel to Namibia later this year to issue a formal apology in front of the Namibian Parliament, report Norimitsu Onishi and Melissa Eddy for the New York Times. The $1.35 billion in aid will go toward professional training, infrastructure projects and other development initiatives, with a focus on the regions where Herero and Nama survivors’ descendants live today.

A memorial honoring victims of the 1904–08 genocide in Namibia's capital, Windhoek

But many critics argue that Germany’s agreement does not go far enough to atone for its crimes. Despite persistent calls from activists, the European nation refused to offer direct reparations to genocide victims’ descendants, according to the Post. The omission of the word “reparations” in the formal agreement also allows Germany to avoid opening a legal avenue for other countries to claim reparations, per the Guardian.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) notes that opponents of the announcement accuse Germany of shirking the legal and financial responsibilities associated with reparations under international human rights law.

“That is why people are so outraged,” John Nakuta, a legal scholar at the University of Namibia, tells AFP. “Development assistance has no legal obligations. Germany got away lightly.”

On Friday, protests against the announcement took place in Berlin and outside the German embassy in Namibia’s capital, Windhoek, reports German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Vekuii Rukoro, leader of the Ovaherero Traditional Authority, and Gaob J. Isaack, leader of the Nama Traditional Leaders Association, released a joint statement regarding Germany’s decree on Monday.

“The so-called ‘compensation’ to finance ‘social projects’ is nothing but a coverup for continued German funding of Namibian Government projects,” the statement read, as quoted by the Post. “Germany must pay reparations for the genocide.”

As Kuzeeko Tjitemisa reported for Namibian newspaper New Era last week, at least three key traditional leaders refused to endorse the final wording of the declaration, in large part because the agreement did not discuss the possibility of reparations. Rukoro, the Herero paramount chief, adds in an interview with Reuters that he views the agreement as “a complete sellout on the part of the Namibian government.”

Germany first seized land and established a colony in southern Africa in 1884. Over the next decades, chiefs such as the influential Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi spearheaded Indigenous efforts to resist German occupation.

Nama leader Hendrik Witbooi and his son Isaac (center) stand alongside German colonial officers.(Public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

In 1904, German colonial authorities responded to a rebellion led by Nama and Herero leaders with brutal force. General Lothar von Trotha issued an “extermination order,” writing that “[w]ithin the German borders every Herero, with or without a gun, with or without cattle, will be shot,” per the Economist.

Over the next four years, German officials indiscriminately shot, hung and tortured tens of thousands of Herero-Nama adults and children. Colonists drove scores of people into the nearby Kalahari Desert, where they were left to starve to death; German troops also constructed concentration camps where survivors were forced into enslaved labor and often died of exhaustion.

Estimates of the death toll vary, but most historians suggest that German soldiers killed around 80,000 Herero people and 10,000 Nama people—about 80 and 50 percent of the groups’ respective populations at the time.

Germany ceded control of its colonies to other European countries after World War I. But former colonial officials still managed to transport victims’ skulls and other remains to Europe, where they were used to justify pseudo-scientific claims about the superiority of the white “race.” (In 2018, the remains of 27 of these victims were repatriated to Namibia, as the Associated Press’ Kirsten Grieshaber reported at the time.)

As the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum notes, German officials’ investment in eugenics during the colonial period laid the foundation for Nazi theories about race, as well as the systematic genocide of Jewish people during World War II.

Germany has long engaged in well-publicized reparations efforts for Holocaust survivors and their descendants, including paying tens of billions of dollars in compensation to survivors around the globe. Comparatively, argues Namibian analyst Emsie Erastus in a BBC News op-ed, German’s apology to Namibia arrives late and represents a “patronizing” approach to development aid.

Erastus adds, “Jewish victims have been given reparations for the Holocaust, and Ovaherero and Nama communities are grappling with how they can secure the same.”

Germany Acknowledges Genocide in Namibia but Stops Short of Reparations | Smart News | Smithsonian Magazine