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      Covid-19 Pandemic Becomes a Key Issue in California Recall

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      Just a few months ago, when it seemed as though the worst of the coronavirus pandemic was behind us, Republican supporters of the recall felt vindicated and optimistic. The fact that so many people were out and about would only embolden the argument that Gov. Gavin Newsom had been too tough in his lockdown orders last year.Then came Delta.For a moment, Mr. Newsom’s political future looked bleak: He had only recently proclaimed the start of the “California comeback,” and counties were instead bringing back mask mandates.Amid a resurgence of cases across the country, Covid deaths spiked in Republican-led states, where restrictions and vaccine mandates were rare. But California, where Mr. Newsom was quick to mandate masks in schools and to require health workers to be vaccinated, saw less dramatic increases.Now, Mr. Newsom and his supporters have turned the recall into a kind of referendum on pandemic management tactics. In other words, the Delta wave effectively galvanized his voters.In the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Newsom and his supporters have been more than willing to frame the recall election as a choice between a governor who “follows the science” and favors tight restrictions, and one who would loosen protocols that meant to prevent transmission and deaths.“There is no more consequential decision to the health and safety of the people of the state of California than voting no on this Republican-backed recall,” Mr. Newsom said during a vaccine event in Oakland this month.His campaign previously released an advertisement portraying the election as “a matter of life and death.”The message appears to be working. Several polls suggest that Mr. Newsom will cruise to victory on Tuesday — and his handling of the pandemic has the support of a broad majority of voters.A poll released on Friday by The Los Angeles Times and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, found that most likely voters disagreed with the idea that the governor overstepped his authority in his response to the pandemic. The same poll showed that more than 60 percent of likely voters opposed the recall.Another poll, from the Public Policy Institute of California, found that seven in 10 likely voters say the outcome of the recall election is very important to them. Mark Baldassare, the president of the institute, tied that intense interest to the focus on the pandemic.“In our most recent poll, Covid is the No. 1 issue for Californians,” Mr. Baldassare said. “In the time of crisis, they feel he’s handling it well and that makes people more risk-averse.” More

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      Mike Bloomberg: New York City Can Recover

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      The future of New York City is being called into question. Neighborhoods have lost residents to the suburbs. Businesses have closed. People are on edge about public safety. And families are mourning the loss of loved ones.This was the situation in the fall of 2001, after hijackers destroyed the World Trade Center and brought the city to its knees. And it’s the same situation today, with a pandemic raging and millions of people once again wondering if this city’s best days are behind it.Unemployment remains in double digits, retail and office vacancies have soared, and the tourism industry is in dire straits, with the economic pain falling hardest on low-income families. Yet we have good reason to be hopeful, because what was done once can be done again — and better, by heeding the lessons of the past.Over the past eight years, I have been careful to stick to my pledge not to comment on my successor’s administration. Mayors don’t need their predecessors chiming in from the sidelines, and I don’t intend to start now. But I do believe New York City’s success in rebuilding Lower Manhattan after Sept. 11 and revitalizing all five boroughs can help the next mayor as he takes office in January and confronts the same two overarching challenges we faced 20 years ago.The first is urgent: improving vital services New Yorkers rely on every day, including policing, transportation, sanitation and education. In the months after Sept. 11, we were acutely aware the public needed confidence that we would not allow the city to enter a downward spiral, as it did in the 1970s, so we immediately focused on improving quality of life by making neighborhoods safer and cleaner, turning around public schools, and reducing street homelessness.To keep residents and businesses in the city, the next administration must come out of the gate with programs and policies to bolster those same essential services. Funding will be tight, but manageable; the revenue shortfall we faced was more than three times as large, as a percentage of the budget, as the one the next mayor is projected to inherit.The second broad challenge is more difficult, and inevitably in tension with the first: focusing on the city’s future years from now. Ultimately, the mayor will be judged not by the next day’s newspapers, but by the next generation. It’s his job to look beyond the light at the end of the tunnel and start building more tracks, even when it’s unpopular to do so.Two examples from Lower Manhattan come to mind.Not long after being sworn in, I canceled a planned subsidy for a new headquarters for the New York Stock Exchange, even though it was threatening to move out of the city. I didn’t think it was a smart use of scarce resources, but the prospect of the exchange leaving Wall Street raised fears that other large financial institutions might go, too, especially with much of Lower Manhattan in ruins.The easy and politically safe thing to do would have been to leave the subsidy in place. But for decades, the city had been overly reliant on the banking and financial services industry. When Wall Street caught a cold, the saying went, the city got sick. So instead of bribing large firms to stay in Manhattan, we invested in projects in all the boroughs that would attract new businesses in different industries, including bioscience, tech, and film and television. Years later, those and other industries — and the jobs and revenue they created — helped us weather the Great Recession far better than most cities did.The next administration may face similar demands for subsidies from companies that threaten to leave the city. But there are better ways to retain and create jobs than giveaways, especially by investing in critical infrastructure, starting with the subway.In partnership with the state, the mayor can work to get trains on a full schedule again, which would help employers in every industry bring back their workers. It would help thousands of small businesses and their employees reclaim their customers. And it would provide confidence to those who may be thinking about opening a business of their own.Whatever policies the next mayor pursues, the crucial idea is that putting a city back on its feet economically requires more than aiding existing businesses. It requires creating the conditions for new ones to open and expand, further diversifying the economy.The second example from Lower Manhattan concerns housing. In the wake of the attacks, many people wanted to turn the entire World Trade Center into a memorial — or simply to rebuild what was there. I thought both would be a mistake, and I was pilloried for suggesting that housing be constructed at the site. But our administration wanted to transform Lower Manhattan from a 9-to-5 business district into a diverse, 24/7 neighborhood.City leaders had been trying to do that since the 1950s, but their focus had been primarily on developing buildings, including the original World Trade Center, rather than attracting people. We flipped the script by encouraging new housing development and creating the things all residents want: parks, schools and cultural opportunities, including a performing arts center at the World Trade Center that is now nearing completion.As our vision took shape, more families and young people moved downtown, more businesses opened, more jobs were created, and more visitors arrived. The last development site of the World Trade Center will be a tower that includes more than a thousand units of housing.The next administration will have its own opportunities not only to recover from the pandemic, but to reimagine areas of the city. Of course, it’s never easy to take on vocal and powerful groups that say, “Not in my backyard.” But across New York, there are parking lots, warehouses, rail yards and other properties that offer the next mayor opportunities to create housing for all incomes and jobs for all skill levels.Such projects require ambition and political courage. As a candidate, Eric Adams has shown both. That’s why I’m supporting him in the mayoral election this fall. His pragmatism and willingness to take on tough issues — and his experience as a police officer who understands the importance of public safety — will serve him well in City Hall. And I hope that Bloomberg Philanthropies will have a chance to support his administration, because this is an all-hands-on-deck moment.In government, collaboration is as important as competence, and the redevelopment of the World Trade Center site — including the construction of the Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum — showed how crucial strong partnerships are to achieving a vision. Working with nine different governors of New York and New Jersey, we built the memorial and museum to serve as a powerful tribute to those we lost, and to teach future generations about the extraordinary heroism and sacrifices that inspired and united the world.There were tensions and obstacles, of course. But a healthy working relationship between the mayor and governor is crucial to the success of major projects.Now, even before he takes office, Mr. Adams has a chance to begin building a close relationship with the state’s new governor, Kathy Hochul. They will not always see eye-to-eye, but we need them to work hand-in-hand.As the sun set on Sept. 11, 2001, it was hard to imagine the city could rebound as quickly and strongly as it did. But by pulling together, thinking creatively, planning ambitiously, and working toward a clear vision of the future — one that is true to the values of our city, including our welcoming embrace of immigrants and refugees — we began a period of rebirth and renewal unlike any in history.Now, we can do it again. If we heed the lessons of the past, I know we will.Michael R. Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) was the mayor of New York City from 2002 to 2013. He has been chair of the National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum since 2006.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      As Biden Faces a Political Crisis, His Party Looks On in Alarm

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      Democrats fear that if the pandemic or the situation in Afghanistan continues to worsen, their party may lose the confidence of the moderate swing voters who lifted it to victory in 2020.With President Biden facing a political crisis that has shaken his standing in his party, Democrats across the country are increasingly worried about their ability to maintain power in Washington, as his administration struggles to defend its chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan and stanch a resurgent pandemic that appeared to be waning only weeks ago.While Americans watched devastating scenes of mayhem at the Kabul airport and ascendant Taliban forces last week, the steady drumbeat of bipartisan criticism left many Democrats frustrated and dismayed at a White House they viewed as having fumbled the end of the country’s longest war on multiple fronts.On Capitol Hill, lawmakers announced congressional investigations into the administration’s handling of the withdrawal, as a handful of Democratic lawmakers weighed whether calling for the resignation of Mr. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, would help the president “reset the narrative,” according to a Democratic House member, speaking on the condition of anonymity.The harrowing images appalled even the president’s staunchest supporters, many of whom — like a majority of the American public — support the decision to remove American troops from Afghanistan. But some of them worry the execution of the withdrawal has undermined Mr. Biden’s central campaign promise to restore a steady hand to governance, particularly on issues of national security.Interviews with more than 40 Democrats, lawmakers, strategists and party officials show a White House at a pivot point. If the virus continues to worsen or the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates further, many of the president’s allies fear he will lose the confidence of the moderate swing voters who lifted his party to victory in 2020. Already, Democrats in battleground districts have been sounding alarms that the party needs to become more aggressive with their messaging, particularly on the economy and the efforts to combat the surge in coronavirus cases fueled by the highly contagious Delta variant.There are plenty of other reasons for Democrats to be worried: Historically, the president’s party loses seats in the midterm elections and the Republican advantage in redistricting has only increased those odds.For many establishment Democrats, the Taliban’s rapid seizure of Afghanistan was the first time during Mr. Biden’s administration that they found themselves creating any daylight between themselves and the president.“I consider Afghanistan a bone-headed mistake, unforced error,” said David Walters, a former Oklahoma governor who is now a member of the Democratic National Committee’s executive committee. “There is no real excuse. This was morally and politically a disaster and just bad policy.”Yet, so far, most of the party has walked a fine line between expressing dismay at the current situation while not publicly denouncing the White House’s role in it.“Afghanistan definitely has entered the conversation in a big way. We’ve done six or seven town halls in the last week and Afghanistan has come up in all of them,” said State Senator Jeff Jackson of North Carolina, an Army veteran who fought in Kandahar and is now running for the U.S. Senate. “It’s pretty clear there are concerns. They’ve seen the images we’ve all seen.”Still, when asked about the administration’s responsibility for the evacuation of Afghans who risked their lives to support U.S. troops, Mr. Jackson offered a tempered critique.“It should have been a much higher priority for the current administration,” he said.On a conference call on Friday organized by the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington, four House members who served in the military — two Democrats and two Republicans — tried to tamp down the political recriminations, but their frustrations peeked through. Representative Kai Kahele, Democrat of Hawaii, acknowledged that the “optics” could not “get any worse than an entire airfield of Afghans running around a taxiing C-17, having that aircraft take off and have Afghans fall to their deaths.”Representative Kai Kahele, Democrat of Hawaii, is a combat veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.Kelsey Walling/Hawaii Tribune-Herald, via Associated PressWhether that kind of restraint will hold remains a major question for the White House. Administration officials believe that the public remains on their side, with polling showing firm support for the withdrawal, and that any political fallout from the current crisis will fade long before the midterm elections. But Republicans are salivating over what they see as an opportunity to push a broader narrative of a weak and incompetent White House, furthering the caricature of Mr. Biden as a bystander in his own administration.“​​Democrats are universally satisfied with their president. They think he’s kept his promises and they blame Republican obstruction for anything that he hasn’t gotten,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster who recently consulted with the White House on its pandemic response. “That said, there’s a certain point when Democrats will begin to question whether he’s got the right stuff.”Mr. Biden has offered a defiant defense of both his decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and his handling of the resurgence of the virus. After a campaign that promised bipartisan comity and a desire to extend a hand across the aisle, Mr. Biden has begun blaming Republican governors, some of whom have banned mask mandates in their states, for prolonging the pandemic and threatening the safe return to in-person schooling.He has attributed the swift collapse of the government in Kabul and tumultuous scenes at the airport there to the refusal of Afghanistan’s military to fight in the face of the Taliban advance. On Friday, Mr. Biden offered his most extensive remarks about the situation in a news conference, a tacit acknowledgment by the administration that its earlier response had failed to assuage concerns.“I made the decision,” he said, while acknowledging that the United States received conflicting information before the operation about how quickly Afghanistan’s government might fall. “I took the consensus opinion.”Mr. Biden’s response was a sharp departure for a politician who spent decades stressing the importance of human rights while cultivating a folksy, feel-your-pain persona.Meighan Stone, an expert on women’s rights and foreign policy with the Council on Foreign Relations, said Democratic women spent years hearing about the plight of Afghan women and many were disappointed in what they saw as Mr. Biden’s callous response in this moment of crisis.“It’s been deeply disappointing to see the lack of empathy communicated,” said Ms. Stone, who also sits on the board of Indivisible, a national network of local liberal groups. “There’s a profound disconnect between President Biden’s remarks and the images women are seeing on TV and social media of Afghan women and girls in need.”Strategists in both parties caution that the midterm elections are still more than a year away, leaving far from certain the long-term political effect of both the Delta variant and Afghanistan on Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate and House.Understand the Taliban Takeover in AfghanistanCard 1 of 5Who are the Taliban? 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      A Possible Election Call as the Pandemic’s 4th Wave Gets Underway

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      Prime Minister Justin Trudeau may call an early election as soon as Sunday despite rising Covid-19 cases. If so, it won’t be campaigning as usual.The country may, or may not, be headed into an election at the same time that a fourth Covid-19 surge is now underway thanks to the Delta variant.A polling station in Ottawa on election day in 2019.Ian Austen/The New York TimesBased on indications to officials in his government and the Liberal Party, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is contemplating a visit to Governor General Mary Simon, perhaps as early as Sunday, to dissolve Parliament and set an election for Sept. 20. That call on timing is Mr. Trudeau’s to make, and on Friday afternoon it was still unclear if he had reached a decision.[Read: Trudeau Weighs Snap Election in Canada]Whatever the precise date of the election call, it is widely anticipated that the vote will come soon. And it won’t be the first campaign Canada has seen during the pandemic. Including Nova Scotia, which votes on Tuesday, elections have unrolled in five provinces plus Yukon.In Alberta, any federal vote in the near future will come on top of municipal election campaigns as well as referendums on Canada’s equalization system and daylight saving time.While none of the provincial elections were blamed for major outbreaks, a surge in cases caused Newfoundland to switch to mail-in ballots just 12 hours before voters were supposed to visit polls on Feb. 12, and to extend the election period until March 1. Things only got worse after that, with the final results not being confirmed until the end of that month.Stephane Perrault, the chief electoral officer, has warned that a pandemic vote will likely lead to an enormous increase in mail-in ballots and perhaps a delay of a few days in announcing some results. Canada does not start counting mail ballots until the day after in-person voting to make sure that no one double-voted and to allow people to submit their ballots right up to the closing of polls.That may leave some close races in limbo. In-person voters will also see changes such as voting at movie theaters because many usual voting spots like schools are currently reluctant to open up to large numbers of outsiders.For weeks it’s been apparent that an election is coming soon. Mr. Trudeau and his cabinet members have been traveling the country making spending announcements, and the opposition leaders have similarly hit the road.If Mr. Trudeau goes ahead less than two years into his last mandate, it will be the third time since it passed in 2007 that Canada’s fixed election date law has been treated with roughly the same respect as highway speed limits. (After introducing that measure Stephen Harper, the former Conservative prime minister, made the first two early calls.)Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.Blair Gable/ReutersEarly elections are rarely greeted with enthusiasm. And a poll released earlier this summer found little enthusiasm for a fall election. Both Erin O’Toole, the Conservative leader, and Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democrats, have condemned the idea of a pandemic vote as reckless.Mr. Singh sent the governor general a note asking her to turn down any request to dissolve Parliament from Mr. Trudeau. (When that happened in 1926 to William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Liberal prime minister at the time, it set off a constitutional crisis over the powers of the governor general. Most experts agree that Ms. Simon will not refuse to dissolve Parliament.)The question, then, is whether voters will punish Mr. Trudeau for the early vote. Shachi Kurl, the president of the Angus Reid Institute, a nonprofit opinion research firm in Vancouver, told me earlier this week that history suggests it won’t be a worry for the prime minister.“At the beginning of every advantageously called election, there are always several days of grumbling,” she told me. “Then people get on with it and judge the leaders and the issues accordingly.”The other question, of course, is will it be safe? While announcing that Canada is now in its fourth wave this week, Dr. Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer of Canada, added that “cases are plotting along a strong resurgence trajectory.”Deaths, she noted, remain comparatively low.Dr. Theresa Tam said this week that Canada is now in its fourth wave of the pandemic.Blair Gable/ReutersOf course this resurgence of the virus comes at a time when vaccination rates are high in Canada and still rising. Vaccination does not 100 percent guarantee protection against Covid infections or death from them. But a team of colleagues at The Times went through data from 40 American states on so-called breakthrough infections — when fully inoculated people contract the virus.The findings of their analysis, which likely apply broadly to Canada, are encouraging: “Fully vaccinated people have made up as few as 0.1 percent of and as many as 5 percent of those hospitalized with the virus in those states, and as few as 0.2 percent and as many as 6 percent of those who have died.”The Times report also found that “people who were not fully vaccinated were hospitalized with Covid-19 at least five times more often than fully vaccinated people, according to the analysis, and they died at least eight times more often.”[Read: See the Data on Breakthrough Covid Hospitalizations and Deaths by State]Earlier this month, Dr. Tam said that in-person voting can be done safely with public health guidelines but added that mail-in ballots are an option for anyone who feels uneasy.That will likely lead to an unusual campaign, assuming it begins before the current infection wave ends. The leaders will be spared endless handshaking, and they won’t cozy up to voters for selfies and baby kissing — something that in my experience happens with astonishing frequency. Big rallies will likely be outdoors with participants socially distanced, and virtual events will likely be common.And perhaps I’m being optimistic, but the pandemic may also have the effect of creating a campaign, whenever it comes, that’s actually focused on issues and substance rather than personality and stagecraft.Trans CanadaA Chinese court sentenced Michael Spavor to 11 years in prison.Associated PressIn a case widely characterized as an act of hostage diplomacy by China, a court in that country sentenced Michael Spavor, a Canadian businessman, to 11 years in prison for spying this week. The decision followed another Chinese court’s rejection of a death sentence appeal by Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, a Canadian convicted of drug trafficking. The decisions came as final arguments were underway in Vancouver at the extradition hearing for Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese telecommunications executive held in Canada who is facing fraud charges in the United States. The Canadian government contends that the two men as well as a Michael Kovrig, another Canadian arrested in China and accused of spying, are victims of political retaliation by China for Ms. Meng’s detention.Vjosa Isai continues to follow the disruption and devastation brought by wildfires in Western Canada and has also written an overview on how British Columbia is battling 300 wildfires all at the same time.Catherine Porter revisited Ted Freeman-Atwood, 90, a long-term care home resident who is now back in the greater world after nearly a year locked indoors because of coronavirus restrictions.I headed down to the border with the United States earlier this week when it reopened to fully vaccinated Americans for nonessential visits. While there were considerable delays crossing into Canada, largely because of new rules, the number of visitors heading north did not surge.Qianshi Lin, a botanist at the University of British Columbia, has discovered the secret of the Western false asphodel, a wildflower: It’s a carnivore.Tony Esposito, the Chicago Blackhawks’ goaltender for 15 seasons, died at the age of 78.As a director, David Cronenberg is credited with creating a subgenre of film known as body horror. Now he’s acting and starring in Season 4 of the Canadian horror anthology series “Slasher.”Joshua Barone, a music critic for The Times, writes that Robert Carsen, a Canadian, “might be the most, well, reliable director in opera. I meant it as high praise: His work is by no means repetitive, cautious or dull. But in more than 125 productions over three decades in the field, he has been peerlessly dependable.”A native of Windsor, Ontario, Ian Austen was educated in Toronto, lives in Ottawa and has reported about Canada for The New York Times for the past 16 years. Follow him on Twitter at @ianrausten.How are we doing?We’re eager to have your thoughts about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Please send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.Like this email?Forward it to your friends, and let them know they can sign up here. More

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      Boston Mayor Janey Draws Fire Over Criticism of Vaccine Passports

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      Boston’s acting mayor, Kim Janey, made waves this week by comparing vaccine passports to racist policies that required Black people to show their identification papers. Her unscripted comments drew sharp criticism from her political rivals and from Mayor Bill DeBlasio of New York.Asked on Tuesday whether she supported requiring people to show proof of vaccination when they enter restaurants, gyms, movie theaters and other indoor public spaces — a measure being introduced in New York City — Ms. Janey warned that such policies would disproportionately affect communities of color.“There’s a long history in this country of people needing to show their papers — whether we are talking about this from the standpoint of, you know, during slavery, post-slavery, as recent as, you know, what the immigrant population has to go through,” she said. “We’ve heard Trump, with the birth-certificate nonsense.”Ms. Janey tried to walk back that comparison on Thursday.“I wish I had not used those analogies, because they took away from the important issue of ensuring our vaccination and public health policies,” she said.But she did not withdraw her critique of the policies requiring proof of vaccination.If the credentials were required to enter businesses today, she said, “that would shut out nearly 40 percent of East Boston and 60 percent of Mattapan,” neighborhoods with large Black and Latino populations. “Instead of shutting people out, shutting out our neighbors who are disproportionately poor people of color, we are knocking on their doors to build trust and to expand access to the lifesaving vaccines.”She added that Boston has a mask mandate for its schools, and is working with labor unions toward mandating vaccination for city workers.Her remarks on Tuesday, five weeks before Boston’s preliminary mayoral election, had already drawn fire from several directions. City Councilor Andrea Campbell, a rival candidate in the race who, like Ms. Janey, is Black, called the acting mayor’s comparison “absolutely ridiculous” and said it “put people’s health at risk, plain and simple.”“There is already too much misinformation directed at our residents about this pandemic, particularly our Black and brown residents in Boston and in the commonwealth, and it is incumbent upon us as leaders not to give these conspiracies any oxygen,” she said at a news conference.Ms. Campbell added, “This is not the time to be stoking fears.”Mr. DeBlasio was scathing when asked on Thursday about Ms. Janey’s comments.“I am hoping and praying she hasn’t heard the details and has been improperly briefed, because those statements are absolutely inappropriate,” he said. “I am assuming the interim mayor hasn’t heard the whole story, because I can’t believe she would say it’s OK to leave so many people unvaccinated and in danger.”Mr. DeBlasio said New York had embraced a “voluntary approach” for seven months, and “it’s time for something more muscular.” More

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      How Covid Became a Red-State Crisis

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      Less than a month ago President Biden promised a “summer of joy,” a return to normal life made possible by the rapid progress of vaccinations against Covid-19. Since then, however, vaccination has largely stalled — America, which had pulled ahead of many other advanced countries, has fallen behind. And the rise of the Delta variant has caused a surge in cases all too reminiscent of the repeated Covid waves of last year.That said, 2021 isn’t 2020 redux. As Aaron Carroll pointed out Tuesday in The Times, Covid is now a crisis for the unvaccinated. Risks for vaccinated Americans aren’t zero, but they’re vastly lower than for those who haven’t gotten a vaccine.What Carroll didn’t say, but is also true, is that Covid is now a crisis largely for red states. And it’s important to make that point both to understand where we are and as a reminder of the political roots of America’s pandemic failures.Just to be clear, I’m not saying that only Republicans are failing to get vaccinated. It’s true that there are stark differences in attitudes toward the vaccines, with one poll showing 47 percent of Republicans saying they are unlikely to get a shot, compared with only 6 percent of Democrats. It’s also true that if we compare U.S. counties, there’s a strong negative correlation between Donald Trump’s share of the 2020 vote and the current vaccination rate.That said, vaccination rates among Black and Hispanic Americans remain persistently lower than among the non-Hispanic white population, an indication that issues like lack of information and trust are also inhibiting our response.But simply looking at who remains unvaccinated misses what may soon become a crucial point: The danger from Covid’s resurgence depends not just on the number of cases nationwide but also on how concentrated those cases are geographically.To see why, it may help to remember all the talk about “flattening the curve” early in the pandemic.At that point effective vaccines seemed a distant prospect. This in turn made it seem likely that a large fraction of the population would eventually contract the virus whatever we did. Prevaccine, it seemed as if the only way to avoid long-run mass infection was the New Zealand strategy: a severe lockdown to reduce cases to a very low level, followed by a test-trace-isolate regime to quickly put a lid on any flare-ups. And it seemed all too clear that the U.S. lacked the political will to pursue such a strategy.Yet there was still good reason to impose social distancing rules and mask requirements. Even if most people would eventually get the virus, it was important that they not all get sick at once, because that would overload the health care system. This would cause many preventable deaths, not just from Covid-19 but also because other ailments couldn’t be treated if the hospitals, and especially intensive care units, were already full.This logic, by the way, was why claims that mask mandates and distancing guidelines were attacks on “freedom” were always nonsense. Do we think people should be free to drive drunk? No, not just because in so doing they endanger themselves, but even more because they endanger others. The same was true for refusing to wear masks last year — and for refusing to get vaccinated now.As it turned out, masks and social distancing were even better ideas than we realized: They bought time until the arrival of vaccines, so that a great majority of those who managed to avoid Covid in 2020, and have since been vaccinated, may never get it.But there are regions in America where large numbers of people have refused vaccination. Those regions appear to be approaching the point we feared in the early stages of the pandemic, with hospitalizations overwhelming the health care system. And the divide between places that are in crisis and those that aren’t is starkly political. New York has five Covid patients hospitalized per 100,000 people; Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis barred businesses from requiring that their patrons show proof of vaccination, has 34.So, will Covid’s resurgence stop America’s much-awaited return to normalcy? In much of the country, no. Yes, vaccination has stalled far too soon even in blue states, and residents of those states should be a bit more cautious, for example by resuming mask-wearing when indoors (which many people in the Northeast never stopped). But so far it doesn’t look as if the Delta variant will prevent continuing recovery, social and economic.There are, however, places that really should put strong measures into effect — mask mandates for sure, and maybe even partial lockdowns — to buy time while they catch up on vaccinations.Unfortunately, these are precisely the places that will almost surely do no such thing. Missouri is experiencing one of the worst current Covid outbreaks, yet on Tuesday the St. Louis County Council voted to end a mask mandate introduced by the county executive.In any case, it’s crucial to understand that we aren’t facing a national crisis; we’re facing a red-state crisis, with nakedly political roots.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Trump, Covid and the Loneliness Breaking America

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      I wasn’t planning on reading any of the new batch of Donald Trump books. His vampiric hold on the nation’s attention for five years was nightmarish enough; one of the small joys of the post-Trump era is that it’s become possible to ignore him for days at a time. More

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      Book Review: ‘Landslide,’ by Michael Wolff

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      LANDSLIDEThe Final Days of the Trump White HouseBy Michael WolffForty-five years ago, when Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “The Final Days” came out, it was a different world: There was no cable news, no internet and no social media, and the political establishment offered at least the illusion of being in control. The Watergate scandal, culminating in Richard Nixon’s resignation, presented a riveting series of public events — hearings, trials and so on — but that left it open to Woodward and Bernstein to tell the story of what had been going on behind the scenes.“Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump White House,” Michael Wolff’s third book about Donald Trump’s presidency, after “Fire and Fury” and “Siege,” faces a different challenge in recounting Trump’s political demise (for now). Penetrating a buttoned-up White House was not the issue, because Trump ran his administration as a public performance. Nixon spoke calmly in public and ranted and cursed to his aides. Trump put his self-pity, revenge fantasies and paranoia on full display at his rallies and in his tweets. He was indiscreet, and he surrounded himself with other indiscreet people, whom he often motivated to become especially indiscreet by humiliating or firing them. How can one lend an element of revelation to an account of the crazy, terrifying weeks between Election Day 2020 and President Biden’s inauguration?Wolff’s method is essentially the same as in “The Final Days” and many other inside stories about highest-level politics: He uses lots of detailed off-the-record interviews with aides to produce a tale told in a third-person omniscient voice, without conventional journalistic attribution. I noticed only a time or two when he seemed to have put something that somebody had told him between quotation marks, with the person’s name attached. In books like this, the author adopts his sources’ perspective — narrowly, in the sense that they are shown behaving honorably, and broadly, in the sense that their overall take on events animates the story.In an epilogue, Wolff interviews Trump himself, at Mar-a-Lago. It’s an artfully drawn scene of the king in exile, but the former president doesn’t really say anything he hasn’t said many times before — and indeed elsewhere in the book Wolff wisely chooses to quote several of Trump’s public speeches at length, because nothing else quite as fully captures his (to use Wolff’s term) “derangement.” Wolff’s main sources seem to be a group of aides at a second or third level of celebrity, people who see themselves as “political professionals.” Administration staff members like Jason Miller (communications adviser), Mark Meadows (White House chief of staff), Matthew Morgan (counsel to the re-election campaign) and Marc Short (Mike Pence’s chief of staff) appear often in Wolff’s accounts of White House meetings, usually attempting unsuccessfully to impose a measure of order and sanity. It seems safe to assume that it’s their collective point of view, and that of others like them, that we’re getting in “Landslide.”Books like this usually burst out of the gate with a few newsmaking anecdotes, and Wolff does provide some of these. Trump believed that the Democratic Party’s elders would pull Biden, sure to lose, at the last minute, and replace him with a ticket of Andrew Cuomo and Michelle Obama. He toyed with the idea of using the pandemic as a pretext for indefinitely postponing the election. The most notorious line in his speech to the incipient mob on Jan. 6 — “we’re going to walk down to the Capitol” — was an ad-lib, not in the text his staff had prepared. But the strength of “Landslide” comes less from these stories and more from a coherent argument that Wolff, in partnership with his sources, makes about how we should understand the period between Nov. 3 and Jan. 20. Most quickly produced books about political events don’t do that.Trump, in these pages, is self-obsessed, delusional and administratively incompetent. He has no interest in or understanding of the workings of government. He doesn’t read or listen to briefings. He spends vast amounts of time watching conservative television networks and chatting on the phone with cronies. The pandemic puts him at a special disadvantage; many of the people around him are either sick or afraid to come to work because that would entail complying with a regime of Covid noncompliance that Trump demands. If anybody tells him something he doesn’t want to hear, he marginalizes or fires that person and finds somebody else to listen to, who may or may not hold an official position. If Fox News becomes less than completely loyal, he’ll switch to Newsmax or One America News Network. He lives in a self-curated information environment that bears only a glancing relationship to reality.Before the belief that the election was stolen had taken full control of Trump’s mind, the idea was already there — because he chose to regard all forms of expanded access to voting, which tend to favor the Democrats, as stealing. He turned down entreaties from his staff to set up a Republican get-out-the-early-vote operation, just as he also turned down entreaties to endorse masking and social distancing during the height of the pandemic: off-brand. He was utterly disorganized, with endless firings and reshufflings of the key players. And during his second impeachment trial, Trump was represented by a comically incompetent, squabbling team of lawyers whom he had barely met.In the early hours of election night, when he was running well ahead of the pre-election polls, Trump decided he had won. After it became clear to everyone but him that he hadn’t, he empowered an alternate-reality team of advisers, headed by Rudy Giuliani and including people whom even Giuliani considered to be unacceptably out-there, like Sidney Powell, the freelancing lawyer, and Mike Lindell, the C.E.O. of MyPillow, and he embraced every available conspiracy theory and strategic fantasy about how he could change the result. To Trump, in Wolff’s telling, elections are roughly similar to the due dates for loans in his real-estate business — a place to start negotiating. Because he divides people into two categories, strong and weak, and because he has the deep cynicism of an unprincipled person, he chose to believe that he was not the first result-denying presidential candidate, only the first who was manly enough to challenge a typically corrupt outcome.Nobody holding official power in the White House or the Republican Party — in particular, Mike Pence and Mitch McConnell — took Trump’s ravings seriously, so the horrifying events of Jan. 6 came as a surprise, probably even to Trump himself. The various rallies that day had been organized by independent right-wing political entrepreneurs with businesses to promote, not by the White House, and it wasn’t yet clear to most Republicans in Washington how fully Trump’s followers had accepted his insistence that the election had been stolen. Almost nobody in the White House was actively trying to persuade members of Congress to vote for the election challenges that were before them on Jan. 6.One obvious question all this raises is: If Trump was so unrelievedly awful, not to mention dangerous, why were Wolff’s sources working for him? “In insider political circles,” Wolff writes, “almost all politicians are seen as difficult and even damaged people, necessarily tolerated in some civics class inversion because they were elected.” Over time the realization dawned that Trump was in a specially appalling category. After that, “You took it and put up with it and tried to make the best of it, not in spite of everything, but because this was what you did; this was the job you had.” Or you thought you could help by “keeping it from being so much worse than it otherwise might be.” Or you persuaded yourself that you were serving a larger cause, as in the case of Marc Short: “He detested the president but saw a tight-lipped tolerance, however painful, as the way to use Trump’s popularity to realize the conservative grail of remaking the federal courts and the federal bureaucracy.”More than all this, though, the quality of Trump’s that best explains what happened is that he commands a vast, enthusiastically loyal following that may represent as much as a quarter of the voting public, or even more, and a majority of the people who vote in Republican primaries. Nobody holding an appointed position has this, and very few elected officials do either. Wolff says the people around Trump believed he had “magical properties,” based on “a genius sense of how to satisfy the audience.” Everyone knew from firsthand observation how incompetent a chief executive he was: “Beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability — or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call — to make anything happen.” Therefore they assumed that his postelection lunacy would have no consequences, and that it was safe to avoid any public argument with the president that might arouse the Republican base. Essentially the only nefarious misdeed he was capable of pulling off was the one he did pull off, not entirely wittingly: the power to incite a violent, democracy-subverting mob of his devotees.Trump’s election, his term in office and the manner of his departure have reawakened a dormant debate about the essential health of the American political system. Are there too many barriers in the way of voting? Is the public misinformed? Do billionaires and other elites control the system? Do the Electoral College and the way congressional representation is apportioned overempower underpopulated rural areas? Wolff raises a more fundamental and frightening possibility: that the lesson of Trump is that in a democratic society, a malign and dangerous “crazy person,” especially one with a deep instinctive understanding of public opinion and the media, can become genuinely popular. Millions of Americans love Trump. As Wolff points out, after Jan. 6, his standing in the polls went up.This is not an abstract or theoretical concern. Wolff doesn’t make a direct prediction. But he leaves us with the strong impression that Trump will be running for president again in 2024. More