The WHO isn’t to blame for Trump’s disastrous coronavirus response

In an April 14 press conference, President Donald Trump blamed the World Health Organization for the Covid-19 crisis in the United States and said he would halt its funding “while a review is conducted.” It’s not clear if the president has the authority to do this: Congress approved the United Nations agency’s budget in December 2019, but the Wall Street Journal reports that Trump may be able to reroute the $116 million allocated for 2020 to other global health purposes or organizations or withhold funds for the next fiscal year.

This is not the first time the president has accused …

Survey: 80 percent of Americans said they saw fake coronavirus news in the early days of the pandemic

A new study from the Pew Research Center suggests many Americans had a poor understanding of the risks posed by the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic — and that the majority, some correctly and some incorrectly, felt they were being presented with untrue information from the media.

The survey of 8,914 US adults, conducted from March 10-16 (with a 1.6 percentage point margin of error), found 80 percent of respondents noting they had been exposed to at least some false news reports about the virus (48 percent said they’d seen “a lot” or “some” and 32 percent …

America’s embarrassingly mediocre coronavirus testing, in 2 charts

Over the last week, from April 8-15, the US averaged about 151,000 coronavirus tests per day. At the end of last month, from March 25 to April 1, the country was performing about 110,000 tests every day.

The number of tests done each week is going up, which is good. But experts say that’s far short of the millions upon millions more tests America needs to conduct every day if we’re to resume anything resembling normal life. Testing right now is not nearly good enough.

If the Trump administration is serious about starting to reopen the country soon and wants …

Hungary’s “coronavirus coup,” explained

Two weeks ago, Hungary stunned the world. Using coronavirus as a pretext, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán pushed through a law that suspends elections and gives him the authority to rule by decree indefinitely — making him, at least temporarily, a dictator. A far-right firebrand exploiting a global catastrophe to seize near-unlimited control has obviously scary historical parallels; it’s the kind of power grab that got some citizens of Western democracies ruled by right-wing populists worrying about what their leaders might soon do under the circumstances.

In reality, Hungary has not been a democracy for years. But Orbán had cleverly …

The other hospital workers on the front lines of the pandemic

Most evenings on her drive to the hospital, Gisella Thomas receives calls from her six children. They call from Las Vegas, Bakersfield, and the cornfields of Nebraska. They ask what she’s seeing at work. They want to know if she’s going to be okay.

As a respiratory therapist at the Desert Regional Medical Center outside of Los Angeles, Thomas, 72, is responsible for assisting to intubate patients diagnosed with Covid-19. Intubating requires her to lean over and thread a tube down the patient’s throat to ensure oxygen flows to their lungs. Her face is inches from their mouth. If …