“The book I’m reading is The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. It’s the story of Churchill and his family during the World War II London blitz, bringing to life the resilience of the family and the British people during such a challenging time. It’s a book that had been on my wishlist, but I pulled it from my nightstand as I found myself wanting to read about inspirational moments in history, where people had lived through experiences that were intense and overwhelming and to find inspiration in how other people had gone through unprecedented challenges. It’s a very beautifully written book.”

—Indré Rockefeller, Cofounder and Co-CEO of Paravel

Read it all and see what you make of the list.

‘Discover Joy in Work’ by @shundrawn is listed as one of the 25 best books for business leaders to read during the #coronavirus lockdown by @worthmag! #DiscoverJoyInWork https://t.co/YkR2ARE9V7

— InterVarsity Press (@ivpress) April 15, 2020

The upshot is that no government on earth has figured out just the right way to balance the reopening of their economy with reducing the spread.

The debate about how long to continue the current measures, and when to “reopen” the economy operate on the assumption that there is some sort of happy medium that allows more Americans to get back to work, while minimizing the risk of a faster spread that overwhelms ICU beds and hospitals. U.S. policymakers may soon have to confront the really dire scenario, that there is no happy medium — that changes designed to increase economic activity (and human interaction) will inevitably increase the number of cases in a bad way, and that there is no way to keep the pace of the spread slow really economically destructive quarantine measures.

There is this probably particularly American mentality that if we just study a problem long enough, and are somehow smart enough, we will inevitably discover some option that creates a win-win scenario that avoids both the terrible health consequences (more infections and more deaths) or the terrible economic consequences (a depression that forces all kinds of businesses large and small into bankruptcy). The coronavirus may be presenting the countries of the world with a no-win situation.

Read it all.

U.S. policymakers may soon have to confront the really dire scenario, that there is no happy medium – moves to help the economy will inevitably increase infections, and effective mitigation inevitably hurts the economy badly.
https://t.co/IE0N5Kk0ZF

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) April 14, 2020

He has also wrestled with his own fear. Walking the halls of temporary coronavirus wards amid the pumping hiss of mechanical ventilators and shellshocked hospital workers, he said: “I started to think about, maybe I could get this. Maybe it could kill me.” Yet Father Devaney still finds avenues of grace. “What gives me hope is that in the Catholic funeral liturgy, it says, life hasn’t ended, it has changed. So for me the hope is that there is a supernatural reality we can’t see, that there is eternal life, life in eternity. And that death doesn’t have the final word.”

Yet these sacrifices make up the core of the faith. The Gospel of John recounts that after arising from his tomb, Jesus Christ appeared to Mary Magdalene, who had come to tend to his body. He called to her by name, and recognizing her beloved teacher, she rushed to embrace him. “Do not touch me,” he said. How jarring that must have been to hear, and how painful to refrain — impossible, perhaps, save for the belief, held close in her heart, that the time would soon come to touch him again.

Read it all.

In the light of today’s Gospel, which she references at the end, read this compelling ⁦@ebruenig⁩ report of Dominican friars in Manhattan up-ending their existence in order to minister in the crisis. https://t.co/jdqPpR1yFv

— Austen Ivereigh (@austeni) April 14, 2020

Bishop, for many of us this will be the first time in our lives we won’t be in church on Easter morning. No Easter lilies; No packed crowd singing “Welcome Happy Morning;” No flowering of the cross. No big Easter dinner with extended family. The feeling of malaise is giving way to something darker. How are we to approach Easter this year?

There’s some remarkable irony there. Just think about that first Easter morning when Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of James, and Salome went to the tomb on the first day of the week just as the sun was rising. They were not going in the way you and I go to the Easter morning service with a great deal of expectation and hope, waiting to say, “Alleluia, the Lord is risen,” and hear one another say, “He is risen indeed, Alleluia!” They were going with spices to anoint the buried body of Jesus. They were hardly in a mood of expectation, of joy, of hope. They were going there overwhelmed by life, overwhelmed with what they had lost, what they did not have, who they could not see, the one they could not hold.

If we go through all of the Easter stories, one after another it is of Jesus appearing to a relatively small group of people. Not in a religious setting. Not in a synagogue, not in a temple, but in a home. It may be that we need to rediscover the power of the resurrection to lift us in the midst of our gloom, in the midst of our daily lives. It’s not something we have to go to to experience him, but whenever we gather in his name, he can be among us. That’s one aspect we need to cultivate and, perhaps, rediscover.

To be honest, I will miss it too—Easter morning at church. I will miss singing, “Welcome happy morning.” “The Day of Resurrection,” all of those great Easter hymns. I think I can play them here at home. In fact, I think I will!

Read it all.

Happy #Easter! Commemorating the Resurrection of Christ after his Crucifixion on Good Friday, Easter is one of the most important Christian holidays. This dynamic drawing by Rubens from 1614 shows Jesus rising from the tomb pic.twitter.com/0XiN1fMvFI

— British Museum (@britishmuseum) April 1, 2018

Late last month, Vice President Mike Pence sent a letter to administrators of the nation’s 6,000 hospitals requesting a favor.

He asked them to complete a form each day with data on the patients they are treating with COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and submit it to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The data will help us better understand disease patterns and develop policies for prevention and control of health problems related to COVID-19,” Pence wrote.

Now, as COVID-19 nears an apex in some parts of the country, it’s unclear how many hospitals have submitted the requested information. For its part, the CDC has not released the data publicly, saying only that it plans to do so soon.

Read it all.

MY LATEST: We Still Don’t Know How Many People Are in the Hospital With COVID-19 https://t.co/NX8UeqUWZc

— Charles Ornstein (@charlesornstein) April 9, 2020

Psychiatrist Philip Muskin is quarantined at home in New York City because he’s been feeling a little under the weather and doesn’t want to expose anyone to whatever he has. But he continues to see his patients the only way he can: over the phone.

“I’ve been a psychiatrist for more than 40 years; I have never FaceTimed a patient in my entire career,” says Muskin, who works at Columbia University Medical Center, treating outpatients in his clinical practice, as well as people who have been hospitalized. Normally, he says he walks patients to the door, shakes their hand or touches their arm or shoulder to reassure them. “Now I’m not doing that, and that’s weird to me. So it’s a whole new, very unpleasant world.”

The pandemic has already robbed many of his patients of their livelihood, or at least their sense of safety. People literally feel trapped, he says.

That, in turn, is leading to a spike in anxiety, depression and addiction — not just among Muskin’s patients, but across the U.S. To try to address those needs, physicians of all kinds are adopting the techniques and technology of telemedicine, which had been only slowly gaining wide acceptance — until the pandemic forced everyone to isolate themselves, mostly at home. The recent demand for telecounseling, as well as for other types of online medical visits, is causing backlogs of care for many providers who offer it.

There are now also even fewer in-person treatment options for some of the most acutely mentally ill in New York, Muskin says; the psychiatric wards at Columbia, where Muskin normally works, have all been converted to beds for COVID-19 patients.

“That means,” he says, “we have no place to send patients who need admission.”

Read it all.

The coronavirus crisis is leading to a spike in issues around anxiety, depression and addiction in the U.S.

So more mental health care providers are turning to telemedicine — and regulators are taking steps to make that easier.https://t.co/xsb6oxl3U5

— NPR (@NPR) April 9, 2020

The South Carolina State Guard helped to convert a MUSC fitness center into a 250-bed field hospital.

MUSC officials said their employees are working with the SC State Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers on the field hospital should it be needed for COVID-19 patients who do not require critical care.

The field hospital will be used for COVID 19 patients who are recovering and ready to be discharged.

“What was thought to have taken two weeks, took only two days to accomplish,” said Brian Wood the Emergency Management Coordinator for MUSC adding, “The level of professionalism and skill of the members of the State Guard was unbelievable, they went above and beyond.”

According to officials, 20 members of the State Guard’s 1st Civil Support Brigade began the mission at MUSC on April 3rd only one day after the orders were given and completed the mission in two days.

Read it all.

The field hospital will be used for COVID 19 patients who are recovering and ready to be discharged. https://t.co/cdZTQCiACB

— WIS News 10 (@wis10) April 8, 2020

Perhaps death has become our utilitarian coin of this policy realm: counter dead people with more dead people—or other more valuable, less mortal dead people. Death is a pretty solid coin, after all. Even Jesus wept at the death of Lazarus, and Woody Allen had to admit that while he didn’t mind dying, he just didn’t want to be there when it happened. Unlike the fiat money about to be thrown from helicopters, death is a hard coin that is hard to devalue. Perhaps death is the trump card for my neighbor’s decision. Sacrificing—not the carb-fasting that used to feel like sacrificing, but real sacrificing—seems apropos when people are dying.

C. S. Lewis knew this line of argument when he addressed Oxford students in an evensong message in October 1939. He engaged the objections of his opponents, “How can we continue to take an interest in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe are in the balance?” Was not scholarship a kind of fiddling while Rome burned? But Lewis upped the ante. It is not death that should concern us most: it is eternal death. And yet in the face of both, culture continues. “Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice,” Lewis tells us. Whether that precipice is war or plague, we cannot wait for normalcy in order to resume our vocations.

Lewis’s imperative to pursue our vocations in the face of death is compelling; and everyone really ought to wrestle with his arguments, particularly Christians trying to determine their duties and callings at this time. But while Lewis argues in this particular work—almost glibly—that it is not panache but human nature that makes us comb our hair at Thermopylae, he elsewhere acknowledges our inclination to be anxious about our futures. Even if we can soldier on in our vocations, it may be with a lot of anxiety.

Lewis’s great meditation on the future is found in a better-known work, The Screwtape Letters. There Lewis imagines the advice of Screwtape, a senior demon responsible for mentoring a younger devil, his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood is tasked with keeping a man away from God, and Screwtape’s “letters” of advice showcase Lewis’s insights into human nature, including anxiety about our futures.

In one particular letter, Screwtape explains how both past and future are the enemies of the present. Only in the present can we exercise our virtues. Only in the present can we experience the eternity Christ won for us. It is “better” (for the devils), Screwtape tells Wormwood, if we live in the past or future. Of course, only old people and weird, scholarly types (“Read Bentham!” “Trolleycars!”) successfully do this. The way to trip up more people is to get their heads and hearts into the future. That was certainly easy for Wormwood’s Britons, fearful of their wartime future.

Read it all.

“ ‘Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice,’ Lewis tells us. Whether that precipice is war or plague, we cannot wait for normalcy in order to resume our vocations,” Glenn A. Moots writes. https://t.co/wTkts5Nn3B

— Public Discourse (@PublicDiscourse) April 9, 2020

South Carolina announced a dozen deaths Wednesday, the highest number of fatalities in coronavirus patients on a single day the state has seen.

There are now 2,552 total cases in the state, and 63 residents have died, according to the Department of Health and Environmental Control.

The 12 patients who died most recently include three Spartanburg County residents and three patients from Richland County. Clarendon, Horry, Kershaw, Laurens, McCormick and Newberry counties tallied one death each.

Read it all.

SC announces 12 more deaths from coronavirus, 2,552 total cases https://t.co/Q5UrubuMJO via @postandcourier

— Holy City Sinner (@HolyCitySinner) April 8, 2020

The coronavirus has infected nearly 1.4 million people and killed nearly 77,000, including 11,000 in the United States, according to the latest data from Johns Hopkins University from April 7.

As a result, stay-at-home orders are forcing millions to stay isolated for weeks, store shelves are empty due to hoarding and jobs are laying people off due to lack of customers.

“The coronavirus pandemic has upended nearly every aspect of our waking lives — our routines, our job security, our hopes for the future,” The Cut reported in an April 2 story on pandemic dreams. “And our nights are changing, too: our sleep can be fitful, our dreams darker — and, for many, unusually memorable.”

This is worrisome to health experts because lack of sleep makes us more vulnerable to illnesses, including the coronavirus.

“Scientific evidence is building that sleep has powerful effects on immune functioning,” according to a CDC report. “Studies show that sleep loss can affect different parts of the immune system, which can lead to the development of a wide variety of disorders. … Sleep loss is also related to a higher risk for infection.”

Read it all.

“Pandemic dreams” are being blamed for keeping stressed out Americans up at night during the coronavirus outbreak.

These dreams are described as vivid, weird and occasionally horrifying on Twitter, where examples are being shared via #pandemicdreams. https://t.co/ptdPXujXpR

— Miami Herald (@MiamiHerald) April 7, 2020

Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey, which has the second-most Covid-19 deaths, said the resumption of economic activity would be “slow and careful, because the last thing we’re going to need is going too quickly.… That’s the equivalent, I think, of throwing gasoline on the fire.”

San Miguel County in Colorado, using a test from United Biomedical, has plans to check all its residents for immunity. Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker last week announced a coronavirus tracking initiative that will involve 1,000 people working at a virtual call center to trace people exposed or infected with the virus.

GOP Texas Lieut. Gov. Dan Patrick announced Tuesday he is forming a task force on how to reopen the economy, and GOP Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has created a response team to discuss measures that must be in place for opening the state back up.

Some governors talked Tuesday with Scott Gottlieb, the former head of the Food and Drug Administration, about ways to work together or launch their own surveillance plans that would trace the disease should it resurface and spread. One idea is to galvanize congressional lawmakers to pass legislation setting a U.S. surveillance system for coronavirus in place.

Dr. Gottlieb, who ran the FDA from 2017 to 2019, released a report on the “roadmap to reopening” Tuesday with Mark McClellan, a physician and economist who ran the FDA under President George W. Bush.

“I’m worried we don’t have the systems in place to carefully reopen the economy,” Dr. Gottieb said in an interview. “You need to be able to identify people who are sick and have the tools to enforce their isolation and [tracing of people they contact]. You have to have it at a scale we’ve never done before. We need leadership.”

Read it all.

“The federal government has yet to put in place the kind of nationwide testing, tracing and surveillance system that public health experts say is needed to prevent another surge..” https://t.co/lYYo77DwCP

— Bob Grip (@Bob_Grip) April 8, 2020

p class=”css-exrw3m evys1bk0″>The official experts, under such conditions, are most trustworthy insofar as their admonitions track with nonexpert common sense. The approach that most experts are currently urging, for instance, is not some complicated high-science approach to disease management, but the most basic pre-modern method of disease control, as obvious to 15th-century Florentines as to 21st-century New Yorkers — shut things down, quarantine the sick and hope for the best.

Whereas the more specific and granular the experts get, the more the fluidity and chaos of the situation makes their pronouncements dubious. It’s good that we’re modeling the arc of the pandemic, but that doesn’t make any of the models trustworthy. It’s good that we’re trying to figure out how the disease spreads, but none of the claims so far about how you’re most likely to get it (from air, surfaces or otherwise) or who is most at risk (whether from viral load or pre-existing conditions) can be considered at all definitive. It’s good that we’re practicing social distancing, but all of the rules we’re implementing are just rough and ready guesstimates.

And you don’t want to overweight the pronouncements of official science in a situation that requires experimentation and adaptation and a certain amount of gambling. Yes, you should trust Anthony Fauci more than Donald Trump when it comes to the potential benefits of hydroxychloroquine. But the exigencies of the crisis require that experiments outrun the confidence of expert conclusions and the pace of bureaucratic certainty. So if you’re a doctor on the front lines trying to keep your patients from ending up on a ventilator, Dr. Fauci’s level of caution can’t be yours, and you shouldn’t be waiting for the double-blind control trial to experiment with off-label drugs that Spanish and Chinese doctors claim are helping patients.

The same logic applies for policymakers, for whom there is never going to be a definitive, one-size-fits-all blueprint telling them how and when to reopen cities or communities. Every single reopening will be its own unique experiment, with confounding variables of climate, density, age and genetics that are nearly impossible to model, and the advice of epidemiologists will only go so far. Governors and mayors will have to act like scientists themselves, acting and re-acting, adapting and experimenting, with expert advisers at their shoulders but no sure answers till the experiment begins.

Read it all.

Superb column from @DouthatNYT on coping with uncertainty and lack of wisdom from our institutions during the pandemic. Highly recommended. https://t.co/MaUcu6vJvL

— Eli Lake (@EliLake) April 7, 2020

As the coronavirus continues to spread, the Army announced it will stop shipping recruits to basic training, which will halt new soldiers from arriving at Fort Jackson in Columbia.

Those currently in basic combat training will finish and then be screened and monitored for COVID-19 symptoms before moving to their job assignments within the branch, the Pentagon said Monday.

“The decision to pause the shipment of trainees to BCT for two weeks will allow leaders to focus on setting conditions so movement can be conducted in a safer manner in the future,” said Gen. Paul E. Funk II, commander of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.

Read it all.

As the coronavirus continues to spread, the Army announced it will stop shipping recruits to basic training.

This will halt new soldiers from arriving at Fort Jackson in Columbia.https://t.co/Iinhp3X6ro

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) April 7, 2020

More than a million Americans have now been tested for the novel coronavirus, but access varies widely from state to state and often even between hospitals in the same region. New York State has tested more than 340,000 people, while California, with double the population, had tested just 143,800 as of Monday. That’s nearly five times as many tests when counted per capita.

And that’s just tests performed. With many facilities relying on third parties to process tests, that step in the testing process often becomes another bottleneck resulting in lengthy delays. After aggressive efforts to cut down a backlog of more than 59,000 tests, the state of California was still waiting Monday for results on more than 14,000 tests.

In New Jersey, results have frequently been delayed by up to two weeks. That’s led Governor Phil Murphy to caution that each day’s numbers include stale data.

“We are getting only a very fuzzy picture of the scope of the problem, and it is very slow to develop,” said Eric Blank, the chief program officer for the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “There are all of these questions about the virus that have been swirling around, and we are only starting to get some sense of the issue.”

Read it all.

Coronavirus testing has become a massive logistical failure — one that has made it impossible to know how much the virus has truly spread and how many it has sickened https://t.co/5ueFJ320Ex

— Bloomberg (@business) April 7, 2020

South Carolina health officials identified 187 new cases of the coronavirus Tuesday, bringing the statewide total of known cases to 2,417.

Three additional South Carolinians have died as a result of the disease, according to the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control. All three were 60 years old or older, and had underlying health conditions. Two were from Lexington County and one was from Greenville County, according to DHEC.

Statewide, the death toll is now 51.

The actual number of S.C. cases is likely higher than what is being reported. As of Sunday evening, DHEC estimated the state had more than 15,000 cases of COVID-19, meaning about 85% of cases have not been tested or identified.

Read it all.

Identified coronavirus cases in SC reaches 2,417. Three more deaths reported Tuesdayhttps://t.co/KYNWZt9Tle

— WatchYourRepsSC (@WatchYourRepsSC) April 7, 2020

“For time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world, there is no time.”
–Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Less than four months after the 2019 coronavirus disease (COVID-19) was first reported, public warnings and action have escalated quickly past their previously steady crescendo. Though early reports were uncertain about the extent of the contagion’s threat, the number of cases in the United States has since skyrocketed, and organizations around the country have responded urgently and dramatically. A wave of schools across the country—including the University of Chicago—asked students not to return following spring break, and students and teachers alike have been required to adapt quickly to online formats for the foreseeable future. Local, state, and even national governments have declared states of emergency or ordered lockdowns.

These large scale efforts at “social distancing” are grounded in sound epidemiology: slowing the rate of transmission is necessary in order to avoid overburdening healthcare systems and leaving doctors in the impossible dilemma of choosing which patients to treat and not treat, as is currently the case in Italy. History also offers its proof: public health experts note that in the 1918 flu pandemic, non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs), like the ones currently being enacted, implemented at an early phase of the epidemic, drastically lowered peak mortality rates and total mortality. Moreover, given a new virus with even higher rates of transmission, each day that passes without intervention can result in magnitudes of difference in outcomes of infection. The urgency of this moment has required collective hurrying and quick response.

But now we must wait.

Read it all.

#photoprayeroftheday
During these hard times, as we struggle with #COVID19 lets learn to wait upon The Lord. Lets keep hope! #obtrax #operationblessingk pic.twitter.com/KP2Kn5lVX8

— Operation Blessing Kenya (@OBlessing_Kenya) April 7, 2020

I’m writing from home, where I am blessed and forced to be, sitting in the same chair where this morning I led worship and preached over Face­book Live to a congregation that encouraged me as I became a televangelist before their eyes, taking breaks from the gospel to wave to my four-year-old and my husband as they ran in and out of the screen.

Church looks different. Family looks different. Home looks different. School looks different. I am not homeschooling, despite having downloaded about 200 lists of “fun learning activities for kids to do at home.” Mostly I am refereeing fights in between Zoom calls and trying to figure out where God is in the midst of coronavirus haze and anxiety. I can no longer take daily life for granted, even as I can’t take toilet paper for granted, even as my dear friend who’s a nurse in California can’t take having proper protection in the ICU for granted.

Our capitalist system and our individualistic society have long rendered faith as cheap and acts of selfless love as obsolete or even stupid. Now we are asked to sacrifice for one another. We need Easter more than ever, and we are stuck in a Lent where sometimes it seems like no one wants to carry their cross.

We’ve mistreated valuable people and made them invisible. Home health care and hospice workers are easily discarded in America, while stock traders are cherished and protected. Our prized possessions arrive in a box on our doorstep from halfway around the world, and only now that they might be carrying a virus do we care about the low-wage worker in Asia who sewed our new sweatpants or the Amazon worker who raced to get back from his three-minute bathroom break to tape the box together on time.

A gift of this pandemic is that we can no longer make each other invisible….

Read it all.

I wrote about #capitalism, #Covid19, and churches for @ChristianCent https://t.co/CwhPOUE6cy

— Angela Denker (@angela_denker) April 6, 2020

“Mayors have had to have sessions explaining that the doors are not open for the churches to gather,” said Jesse Rincones, Executive Director of Convención Bautista Hispana de Texas — a collection of over 1,100 Hispanic Baptist congregations in Texas.

Like other clergies still working to serve their congregations, the organization is trying to preserve a sense of community amid a loss of routine, ritual and, at times, a sense of peace. Rincones, a pastor of 18 years, has been helping other churches’ leaders move their services online.

The technology aspect has been easier on the United Hebrew Congregation in St. Louis, says Rabbi Brigitte Rosenberg. UHC, which serves over 900 families, already had its livestreaming services set up for the homebound and college students, the rabbi said. Still, it’s a different experience.

“I know for many congregants it has taken some getting used to not being together and just sitting in their homes and listening and feeling like they’re watching as opposed to participating,” she said.

The virtual transition will be particularly challenging during the Jewish holiday of Passover, which begins on Wednesday. The St. Louis synagogue is encouraging its congregants to allow for some flexibility with normally strict traditions. This year, the United Hebrew Congregation will be hosting its Passover Seder online.

“Whereas we may not be utilizing technology on a normal Passover, we are going to be using it this time so that we can connect,” Rosenberg said.

Read it all.

As the coronavirus pandemic intensifies across the country, many churches, synagogues, temples and mosques are temporarily shutting their doors to all public services.https://t.co/a55Oi0N9hF

— Weekend Edition (@NPRWeekend) April 5, 2020

Gregg Gonsalves, a professor of epidemiology and law at Yale, said: “I’d feel better if we had serological testing, and could preferentially allow those who are antibody positive and no longer infectious to return to work first. The point is, though, that we are nowhere even near accomplishing any of these criteria. Opening up before then will be met with a resurgence of the virus.”
He added, “That’s the thing that keeps me up every night.”

Until we get a vaccine or effective drug treatments, focusing on these major criteria, and directing efforts toward them, should help us determine how we are progressing locally, and how we might achieve each goal.

Read it all.

Everyone wants to know when we are going to be able to leave our homes and reopen the United States. The better question is: “How will we know when to reopen the country?” Experts offer four benchmarks that can serve as a guide. https://t.co/BG0Kt5wp8r

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 6, 2020

Tyson Foods is using walk-through infrared body temperature scanners at three processing plants in an effort to keep coronavirus out of its sites and maintain the stability of U.S. food supply.

The scanners can check employees’ temperature as they walk into the building.

Tyson gave CNBC an exclusive first look at video of how the walk-through scanners work.

Read it all.

This picture could be the near term future of entering US workplaces, infrared body temperature scanners to detect if employees have a fever, a common symptom of COVID-19. @TysonFoods is deploying now, Goldman Sachs and UPS are looking into it. @CNBC https://t.co/VTdn0VgrVa

— Frank Holland (@FrankCNBC) April 6, 2020

Seeking to further minimize movement across the state, South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster issued a more pointed executive order Monday telling people to stay at home if they are not at work or out tending to essential needs.

The executive order takes effect Tuesday, and follows a number of other mandates McMaster already has issued prohibiting large gatherings, closing access to beaches and lakes and closing many nonessential businesses to curb the spread of the coronavirus, which causes COVID-19, a potentially severe upper respiratory disease.

It also comes after days of McMaster urging South Carolina residents to use “common sense” and stay home if they can.

Read it all.

Gov. McMaster toughens South Carolina #coronavirus stance with ‘go to work or stay home’ order https://t.co/9OSckrd6V1

— Brian Murphy (@MurphinDC) April 6, 2020

…we believe that God came not as a book or a codex of laws or as a hologram or a creed or an idea, but as a person in a body, Jesus. In assuming a body, God redeems embodiment itself. Therefore, we believe in the resurrection not merely of the soul, floating away to some ephemeral mist, but also of the body.

Before two weeks ago, it was pretty easy to ignore the brute fact of our embodiment. We can habituate ourselves to noticing our bodies only when we are counting up their flaws or trying to improve them, as though they are a beast to tame or marble to sculpt. Or we can be tempted to embrace the digital revolution so wholeheartedly that we prefer the company of an avatar on a screen over the ordinary goodness of being a body with other bodies. Or we can ignore bodies altogether, focusing completely on the life of the mind. Or more often, on the bottom line.

This virus has exposed that we have whole segments of society that do not have paid sick leave, and human resource policies and cultures that depend upon overlooking the pesky reality that any worker has a limited and needy body that deserves care.

We must embrace social distancing, for as long is as needed, to protect our health care system and the very real, fleshy bodies of millions of people. But we also need to collectively notice that something profound is lost by having to interact with the world and our neighbors in mostly disembodied, digital ways. This is something to lament and to grieve. And like all grief, it exposes the value and glory of the thing that was lost.

Read it all.

“We must embrace social distancing,” writes @Tish_H_Warren. “But we also need to collectively notice that something profound is lost by having to interact with the world and our neighbors in mostly disembodied, digital ways.” https://t.co/XNUZRCkvdg

— New York Times Opinion (@nytopinion) April 5, 2020

Twelve doctors at her hospital and the chief executive were sickened with the coronavirus. A colleague had died. Patients as young as 19 were being placed on ventilators.

But Michele Acito, the director of nursing at Holy Name Medical Center, in the hardest-hit town in New Jersey’s hardest-hit county, felt like she was holding up.

Then her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and brother-in-law arrived.

The disease that has crippled New York City is now enveloping New Jersey’s densely packed cities and suburbs. The state’s governor said on Friday that New Jersey was about a week behind New York, where scenes of panicked doctors have gripped the nation.

Hospitals in the state are scrambling to convert cafeterias and pediatric wings into intensive care units. Ventilators are running low. One in three nursing homes has at least one resident with the virus.

Read it all.

12 doctors and the chief executive of the New Jersey hospital where Michele Acito works contracted the coronavirus. A colleague died. Ms. Acito was still holding it together, then her mother-in-law, sister-in-law and brother-in-law became ill. https://t.co/oCtC5cKCpy

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 5, 2020

Across the Commonwealth and around the world, we have seen heart-warming stories of people coming together to help others, be it through delivering food parcels and medicines, checking on neighbours, or converting businesses to help the relief effort.

And though self-isolating may at times be hard, many people of all faiths, and of none, are discovering that it presents an opportunity to slow down, pause and reflect, in prayer or meditation.

It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister.

We, as children, spoke from here at Windsor to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety.

Today, once again, many will feel a painful sense of separation from their loved ones. But now, as then, we know, deep down, that it is the right thing to do.

Read it all.

“We will meet again.”

I have to be honest. I love the Queen right now 💙https://t.co/TH87KM5QeD

— Rachel Clarke (@doctor_oxford) April 5, 2020

Take the time to watch it all.

A stretch of Interstate 40, which runs from downtown Memphis across the Mississippi River into Arkansas, has come to illustrate the patchwork of rules restricting movement in the United States. On the Arkansas side of the river, where the governor has resisted a statewide mandate, some “nonessential” businesses remain open. On the Tennessee side, a stay-at-home order went into effect this week, closing stores.

Now, the owner of a chain of clothing stores called Deep South located on both sides of the Mississippi is operating under two different sets of rules. The company’s owner, Munther Awad, a 47-year-old immigrant from the Middle East, said he owned two stores in Arkansas, which are open, one in West Memphis and another in Little Rock. And he owns a third store in Memphis, which is now closed because of a local mandate last week.

“I feel like if you would have just went ahead and put the whole nation at the same time on a lockdown, we could have got some control over it,” said Lavanda Mayfield, 33, who was waiting to serve takeout to customers at the Iron Skillet restaurant at a truck stop near I-40 in West Memphis on Friday.

“But now it’s just out of control,” she said, “because you did state-to-state.”

Read it all.

For a small number of states in the South and Midwest, pressure is growing for governors to issue stay-at-home orders. “What are you waiting for?” said Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who issued the first statewide order last month. https://t.co/mUoN83OWyr

— NYT National News (@NYTNational) April 4, 2020

Gov. Henry McMaster continued to resist the idea of issuing a stay-at-home order after he was peppered with questions at a Friday news conference about why he chooses to issue incremental orders closing businesses and restricting residents’ movement while refusing a broader rule.

The questions came as more than 40 other states have issued broader shelter-in-place orders.

South Carolina is the only state in the southeast that has not issued one yet.

“The measures we have taken are both mandatory and voluntary about staying home,” McMaster said on Friday. “We are taking a deliberate approach. Our state is not like everyone else’s state.”

Read it all.

Gov. McMaster said Friday he has repeatedly urged South Carolinians to stay home, making an order unnecessary. https://t.co/IMYGWQLT75

— The State Newspaper (@thestate) April 3, 2020

At the beginning of June, Carolyn and I were supposed to be leading a travel course for Regent College in Italy, “Martyrs, Monks, and Mystics,” but we sent a note to all the participants in mid-March to cancel because of the coronavirus. This seemed a judgment call at the time, but within days it became clear that it was the right decision: Europe went into lockdown and the grim statistics of the growing number of dead were reported each evening.

As a historian, it has given me pause. I remember that we have been here before.

It is as though the clock has been turned back several centuries. I was struck by the comment in the Financial Times of the famous virologist Peter Piot (who discovered Ebola): “All we have is medieval ways of containment: isolation, quarantine, contact tracing.” We have gone back in time.

As we were canceling our Italy trip, I was reminded of the early medieval bishop of Rome, Gregory the Great. He was called to lead in the hardest of times. We were hoping to park the tour bus by his family estate at the present church of San Gregorio Magno al Celio before we left Rome for Assisi. We would have told everyone that from his home on the Caelian hill, he could literally have looked straight across the little valley (as we can today) to the Palatine hill to see the crumbling palaces of past Roman emperors. To Gregory’s right was the already decaying Colosseum and ruins of the Forum. Repeated sieges of Rome had left famine and disease in their wake. Large areas of the city were destroyed by fire, and civil society stopped functioning altogether.

And that is not all: plague was pandemic during Gregory’s whole adult life. Something like a third of the population was wiped out during these years by their version of the coronavirus.

In this situation, what did Gregory do? He served his generation. He fed the poor, clothed the naked, and ministered to the sick. He devoted himself to prayer, supported the new Benedictine communities, sent out missionaries, promoted high standards for pastoral care, and took over the running of the city.

The pressures of his life meant that he could write eloquently of what it was to balance a life of active service with a life of prayer. He found inspiration from the example of the ministry of Christ himself.

Read it all.

(Regent College) [Church Historian] Bruce Hindmarsh–#Coronavirus+The Communion Of The Saints https://t.co/C9uUScvhgB #churchhistory ‘plague was pandemic dring Gregorys..adult life. Somethng like a 1/3 of the popltn was wiped out during these yrs by their versn of the coronavirus’ pic.twitter.com/ku7B3zkOyD

— Kendall Harmon (@KendallHarmon6) April 3, 2020

Christians are to be encouraged to make their own paper or card ‘palm’ crosses and display these in their windows in a national virtual church service for Palm Sunday to be broadcast by the Church of England.

The Bishop of Manchester, David Walker, will put a paper ‘palm’ cross in the window of his Salford home in a national service he will lead for Palm Sunday, marking the start of Holy Week and Easter.

The Holy Communion service will be broadcast at 9am on the Church of England’s Facebook page and Church of England website, with readings from the Archdeacon of Manchester, Karen Lund and prayers by Lucy Hargraves from St Peter’s Church in Bolton. All three record contributions from their own homes in keeping with the rules on physical distancing.

In his sermon, Bishop David will speak of the strength and mutual support from the crowd that he addressed in Manchester city centre following the Manchester Arena attack in 2017

At a time when gatherings are no longer permitted in order to stop the spread of coronavirus, he said support and comfort was being drawn from events such as virtual church services and campaigns such as #ClapForCarers to thank NHS staff and key workers.

Read it all.

Please join us for the @churchofengland national service, coming from @DioManchester this
Palm Sunday.https://t.co/weay32usfT

— David Walker (@BishManchester) April 2, 2020

The news media have a huge responsibility to report right now on both the raging health dangers and the economic damage caused by The Great Lockdown.

However, “social distancing” and “flattening the curve” will — someday — be mere bad memories and America will be able to fully assess the carnage. And, meanwhile, if there’s anything that should send people down on their knees in prayer it’s COVID-19.

But with few exceptions, Americans can only do this as individuals and families because of the massive halt of worship services. Here’s an arresting thought from political scientist Ryan Burge: “This coming weekend may represent the fewest people engaging in corporate worship in the last two millennia.”

David Crary of The Associated Press (a former reporting team colleague of mine) has taken an early look at what religion is facing.

The bottom line: America’s churches “are bracing for a painful drop in weekly contributions and possible cutbacks in program and staff.”

It’s not too soon for American religion, and thus religion writers, to carefully consider not only this month’s ministry challenges but whether after this emergency ends online worship may substantially undercut in-person attendance, and whether contributions will be able to rebound.

Regarding attendance, the aforementioned Burge looks at past data to predict that folks who never attend worship now are unlikely to return after this crisis. Nor are faithful attenders going to fade away. He recommends that Virus Era pastors pay special attention to reassuring and helping those in the middle, the occasional attenders who might step up participation.

Read it all.