When the city of Cleveland instituted a partial lockdown in October 1918, shuttering nearly all businesses after 8 pm, a writer for a local newspaper observed that life had become “ just a big vacuum, a great monstrous wad of nothing.” To curb the Spanish Flu, Cleveland was not nearly as aggressive as cities like…
Tag: Pandemic
The Pandemic Has Led to a Huge, Global Drop in Air Pollution
This story originally appeared in The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.The coronavirus pandemic is shutting down industrial activity and temporarily slashing air pollution levels around the world, satellite imagery from the European Space Agency shows.One expert said the sudden shift represented the “largest-scale experiment ever,” in terms of the reduction of…
Panic, Pandemic, and the Body Politic
Infections don’t just attack weaknesses in the human body. They also exploit weaknesses in human society. Some disasters are small, and some disasters are just very far away. Covid-19 is neither. It’s big, and it’s here, and it’s fast. Infection rates are currently doubling roughly every three days. It’s going to be bad, and it’s…