I asked Collins whether that means we seem to be tracking with what happened in Italy.

“Right,” Collins told me. “If you look at the curve of new cases being diagnosed over the course of the last month, just look at the curve of what happened in Italy, and then look at our curve in the U.S., and you say if you go back eight days from today, they had about the same number of cases that we have today—that is, slightly over 2,000. And then if we follow that same track, then eight days from [March 22], we would be having the same kind of incredible crisis that they are facing.” (The New York Times described the catastrophe befalling Italy: “The coronavirus epidemic raging through Italy has already left streets empty and shops shuttered as 60 million Italians are essentially under house arrest. There are the exhausted doctors and nurses toiling day and night to keep people alive. There are children hanging drawings of rainbows from their windows and families singing from their balconies. But the ultimate metric of pandemics and plagues is the bodies they leave behind. In Italy, with the oldest population in Europe, the toll has been heavy, with more than 2,100 deaths, the most outside of China. On Monday alone, more than 300 people died.”)

Collins added this important qualifier: “Now we have a chance to change that, by applying now the most draconian measures on social distancing to try to limit the spread of coronavirus from person to person. But we will not succeed at changing the course from that exponential curve unless there is full national engagement in those commitments to try to reduce spread. I think we’re getting there; certainly in the last few days there seems to be a lot of waking up to just how serious the threat is, but that’s obviously not universal across this large and complicated country.”

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Francis Collins, a highly respected geneticist and the head of the NIH:

“It is incumbent on all of us to severely limit our social interactions. We need to ask the question about every interaction we have, and whether it is necessary or not.”https://t.co/8LL3kf8yI1

— Sarah Pulliam Bailey (@spulliam) March 18, 2020

On a normal Sunday, most of the 100 people filling the pews of the Rev. Lori Cornell’s congregation fit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s description of those at high risk for COVID-19.

So like the majority of churches in the greater Seattle area, Calvary Lutheran Church of Federal Way has suspended its worship services and is turning to technology not only for its weekly celebration of the Eucharist, but for all the pastoral and social contact an aging congregation depends on church for.

But with social distancing and electronic connections come challenges. Cornell is worried older members of her church may become lonesome.

“They have the potential to feel more isolated than ever, so we’re trying to be really mindful of that,” Cornell said. “My concern is for people whose lives very much count on the church and who find themselves often dependent on other people to get them places they need to go, like Bible study, church and other events.”

Her church’s leadership is using Facebook as a way to stay connected, with plans to post homespun sacred music created by church musicians, and leading video chats throughout the week.

For those not technically savvy, the phone has become an important tool, Cornell said.

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Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.

A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.

The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak.

Censors have been rapidly deleting the report from the Chinese internet.

Read it all (subscription).

A Wuhan lab that identified COVID-19 as a highly contagious pathogen in late December was ordered by local officials to stop tests and destroy samples. Beijing is now scrambling to censor the story https://t.co/3a28zGcPXn

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) March 18, 2020

An infection control experiment that was rolled out in a small Italian community at the start of Europe’s coronavirus crisis has stopped all new infections in the town that was at the centre of the country’s outbreak.

Through testing and retesting of all 3,300 inhabitants of the town of Vò, near Venice, regardless of whether they were exhibiting symptoms, and rigorous quarantining of their contacts once infection was confirmed, health authorities have been able to completely stop the spread of the illness there.

Andrea Crisanti, an infections expert at Imperial College London who is taking part in the Vò project while on sabbatical at the University of Padua, urged countries that have been limiting virus testing, which includes the UK and US, to learn lessons and ramp up the numbers of people being screened.

“In the UK, there are a whole lot of infections that are completely ignored,” Prof Crisanti told the Financial Times. “We were able to contain the outbreak here because we identified and eliminated the ‘submerged’ infections and isolated them,” he said of the Vò approach. “That is what makes the difference.”

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Aggressive testing helps Italian town cut new coronavirus cases to zero https://t.co/YSSmQkzogR via @IrishTimesWorld

— Dirk Brockmann (@DirkBrockmann) March 18, 2020

Watch it all.

We are lost in a trackless forest of information. We grasp for the apple of knowledge in the hope it will bring us peace, and yet fear lies coiled liked a worm within the apple. We consume the apple; the worm consumes us. The food we hoped would satisfy only makes our hunger more painful. No amount of knowledge will take our fear away.

To be human is to stand suspended over a chasm. To be human is to be vulnerable.

But when have we ever not been vulnerable? We have never been more than one week, one day, or even one moment away from losing the things we love in this world.

O Lord, we have always been in your hands. At your mercy. Why should that frighten us now?

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Combatting coronavirus is unlike any we’ve experienced in our lifetimes. Yet we believe there’s beauty even in times of trial.

Beginning today and each weekday hereafter, for however long, we will publish a meditation from President and CEO @TimDalrymple_https://t.co/UKn6dJhZU1

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) March 18, 2020

Cyril interprets this “breath of life” to be the Holy Spirit, and argues that God’s breathing of the Spirit into the first human demonstrates that we were created to exist in intimacy with God. We were created to partake of the divine nature, to participate in the divine, and so to attain the beauty of likeness with God.

Sin disrupted this intimacy. Cyril describes the fall, not as a descent into depravity and sinfulness, but as a loss of the Holy Spirit. Through the exercise of the freedom God gave us, humankind shrank from intimacy with the divine and so lost the Holy Spirit.

Cyril argues that one of the central purposes of the Incarnation was our recovery of intimacy with God through the Holy Spirit, and it is this recovery that Jesus’ baptism accomplishes. Through the Incarnation, the Son of God made man becomes the Second Adam, and at his baptism, the Second Adam receives the Holy Spirit, not for his own sake, but for the sake of all humanity.

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The Baptism of Jesus by the John the Baptist
Herrad of Landsberg pic.twitter.com/6iRnm11DD5

— Mirella Czajkowska-T (@MirellaTurek) September 22, 2016

Strengthen, O Lord, we beseech thee, the bishops of thy Church in their special calling to be teachers and ministers of the Sacraments, that they, like thy servant Cyril of Jerusalem, may effectively instruct thy people in Christian faith and practice; and that we, taught by them, may enter more fully into celebration of the Paschal mystery; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

#SaintoftheDay is St. Cyril of Jerusalem, bishop & Doctor of the Church.
Readings: https://t.co/kTGOkwZkiP
Lecturas: https://t.co/T7yIQwkx55 pic.twitter.com/27GMoiHjoZ

— Diocese KCSJ (@DioceseKCSJ) March 18, 2017

Most blessed Trinity, and one eternal God, as Thou hast this day awaked me from this bodily sleep, so awake my soul from the sleep of sin; and as Thou hast given me strength after sleep, now again to watch, so after death give me life; what is death to me is but sleep with Thee; to Whom be ascribed all glory, wisdom, majesty, dominion, and praise, now and for ever.

–Frederick B. Macnutt, The prayer manual for private devotions or public use on divers occasions: Compiled from all sources ancient, medieval, and modern (A.R. Mowbray, 1951)

If any one imagines that he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know. But if one loves God, one is known by him.

–1 Corinthians 8:2-3