Customers at Publix, Bi-Lo, Food Lion and Harris Teeter supermarkets will soon notice plexiglass panels in areas of the store with direct interaction with shoppers.

Florida-based Publix will begin installing the acrylic plastic partitions this weekend at cash registers, customer service desks and pharmacies in all of its stores, according to spokeswoman Maria Brous.

The company expects every store to have plexiglass installed within the next two weeks.

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.@Publix expects every store to have plexiglass installed within the next two weeks.

Matthews, N.C.-based @HarrisTeeter expects to have plexiglass installed by Thursday.https://t.co/A6A95pDRso

— The Post and Courier (@postandcourier) March 26, 2020

An infectious disease epidemiologist says there is still confusion over a concerted national plan for responding to the coronavirus.

“We still don’t have a plan. I do not know what the national plan is for responding to this virus. Until we get that, it is a piecemeal situation,” said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Take the time to watch the whole video interview.

“We still don’t have a plan. I do not know what the national plan is for responding to this virus. Until we get that, it is a piecemeal situation,” infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Michael Osterholm tells @jimsciutto. https://t.co/R9PHoabkkb pic.twitter.com/A7RR9IkRBM

— CNN Newsroom (@CNNnewsroom) March 27, 2020

The tension between eschatology and banality defines the current moment for many of us who are both reacquainting ourselves with home in a period of shelter-in-place orders, and facing the reality of being laid off, or of having access to our loved ones in prison or long-term care suddenly shut off. The big numbers of COVID-19 are almost a backdrop, even while they determine most of what we do (and don’t do).

This past week, the American psyche has also seen a shift of the object of our apocalyptic fears from the big numbers of COVID-19 mortality to the big numbers of a market economy in crisis. The President is calling for a “resurrection” of the economy on Easter Sunday. This combination of market panic and an aching desire for getting to the truth of the moment has even led one prominent Christian writer, well known for his critique of modern secularism’s supposed “culture of death,” to conclude with no sense of irony that “there is a demonic side to the sentimentalism of saving lives at any cost,” and on this basis oppose public health measures that threaten our commercial wellbeing. How on earth did we get here?

We are flailing because we need the world to be meaningful, but the fact of a pandemic is not something from which we can easily extract meaning and truth. We are awash with data being updated from a global array of regional and local reporting centers in real time, and the smart visualization of this data often fools us into thinking that we are looking at the meaning of COVID-19. These numbers are one way of seeing the virus, and epidemiologists can interpret the data through computational models that give us a picture of what the pandemic means for human populations right now and in the immediate future. Likewise, economists can interpret the human toll of strained social systems as they are modeled from unemployment claims data. All of this is important for policy decisions, and meaningful in its own way, but the pandemic itself resists our attempts to make sense of it.

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Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

Stay home, protect the NHS and save lives

We are writing further to you given the rapidly changing nature of the situation in our country at present. We want to thank you for the ministry you are exercising and for the creative and imaginative ways in which you are responding to the crisis and showing the love and care of Christ to the communities we serve, particularly to the most vulnerable in our society.

As we move towards Passiontide, focussing on what Jesus did for us on the cross, more than ever this is brought into stark focus. We want to reiterate the advice we have already sent. The government is asking us to stay at home, protect the NHS and save lives. We call upon all our churches and church leaders, clergy and lay, to follow this advice.

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Could a plague of biblical proportions be America’s best hope for religious revival? As the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, there is reason to think so.

Three-quarters of a century has dimmed the memory of that gruesome conflict and its terrible consequences: tens of millions killed, great cities bombed to rubble, Europe and Asia stricken by hunger and poverty. Those who survived the war had to grapple with the kinds of profound questions that only arise in the aftermath of calamity. Gazing at the ruins from his window at Cambridge University, British historian Herbert Butterfield chose to make sense of it by turning to the Hebrew Bible.

“The power of the Old Testament teaching on history—perhaps the point at which the ancient Jews were most original, breaking away from the religious thought of the other peoples around them—lay precisely in the region of truths which sprang from a reflection on catastrophe and cataclysm,” Butterfield wrote in “Christianity and History” (1949). “It is almost impossible properly to appreciate the higher developments in the historical reflection of the Old Testament except in another age which has experienced (or has found itself confronted with) colossal cataclysm.”

Americans, chastened by the horrors of war, turned to faith in search of truth and meaning….

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Can the idea of death and suffering bring us closer to God? If we are to find meaning in this pandemic, the answer must be yes: https://t.co/Na9unukKdJ

— Nick Givas (@NGivasDC) March 27, 2020

FOR many people, the Covid-19 pandemic has brought and will bring seemingly meaningless destruction to their lives. To explain too much is to offer nothing of use to them and us.

In time to come, we can reflect on how this experience may change how we treat each other and creation. But for now, what the Church needs to be is a people who, empowered by the Spirit, can live with the paradox of simultaneously affirming the core testimony in word and deed, as well as offering our laments to God about the world’s pain. Anything else would be less than the honest and open relationship that God desires with us.

The practical challenges are many, if we take this seriously. We have had a day of prayer in which we put candles in our windows as a hope-filled reminder of Jesus, the light of the world. How might we do something that creates national space for lament as well?

We created hope-filled collects for people to pray; but where are the collects that are inspired by the psalms of lament and Book of Job — prayers that have teeth, and bring honest, raw language to God about what many feel as we try to work through this time.

In order to aid the world, the Church must embody an honest relationship with God and lead others to do the same. Senior leaders and all others in the Church must not overlook the lament genre, which has such an important place in scripture for just such times as these.

So, as we walk this road together, let us think afresh how we might enable a deeper, richer level of honesty with ourselves and with God, as we cling to the hope of the resurrection that reaches into eternity.

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Could the striking severity of their disease—twenty- and thirty-year-olds with covid-19 generally experience a self-limited, flu-like illness—be correlated with the amount of virus to which they were initially exposed? At least two E.R. doctors in the United States, both on the front lines of the pandemic, have also fallen critically ill; one of them, in Washington State, is only in his forties. To go by available data from Wuhan and Italy, health-care workers don’t necessarily have a higher fatality rate, but do they suffer, disproportionately, from the most severe forms of the disease? “We know the high mortality in older people,” Peter Hotez, an infectious-disease specialist and vaccine scientist at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN. “But, for reasons that we don’t understand, front-line health-care workers are at great risk for serious illness despite their younger age.”

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In a 2004 study of the coronavirus that causes SARS, a team from Hong Kong found that greater exposure to the virus was correlated with a more severe illness. Could the same be true of COVID-19? https://t.co/77xYEadwlm

— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) March 26, 2020

O God our Father, Who hast sent Thy Son to be our Saviour: renew in us day by day the power of Thy Holy Spirit; that with knowledge and zeal, with courage and love, with gratitude and hope, we may strive manfully in Thy service: may He keep our vision clear, our aspiration high, our purpose firm, and our sympathy wide; that we may live as faithful soldiers and servants of our Lord Jesus Christ.

–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)

Today at the 11am service of Holy Communion at Santa Margarita, Menorca, we will commemorate William Temple, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942-1944. https://t.co/gMOQMbiNLU pic.twitter.com/xWszeTUzuG

— Rev Paul Strudwick (@anglicanmenorca) November 6, 2019

And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away, and nurse him for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed him. And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son; and she named him Moses, for she said, “Because I drew him out of the water.” One day, when Moses had grown up, he went out to his people and looked on their burdens; and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his people. He looked this way and that, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand. When he went out the next day, behold, two Hebrews were struggling together; and he said to the man that did the wrong, “Why do you strike your fellow?” He answered, “Who made you a prince and a judge over us? Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” Then Moses was afraid, and thought, “Surely the thing is known.” When Pharaoh heard of it, he sought to kill Moses. But Moses fled from Pharaoh, and stayed in the land of Mid’ian; and he sat down by a well.

–Exodus 2:9-15