Where were the Progressives as the pandemic broke?

When I consider the shortlist of culpable parties, the unquestionably correct ranking of who deserves the most blame for the current pandemic is:  #1. the CCP,  #2. the FDA, and #3. the White House.  (No, that is not an absolution of Trump -- there is more than enough blame to go around.)

What really stumps me is how does Progressive America fit in here?  By construction, the party out of power has less responsibility.  But thinking about their role in the crisis, the Democratic Party seems almost...irrelevant.  To my knowledge, there were no left-leaning figures in Congress sounding alarms in February.  We had three primary debates between January 14th and February 19th without a mention of the coronavirus.  (It finally got a passing shoutout at the South Carolina debate on February 25th.)  Progressive news outlets routinely downplayed the threat of the virus.  Anecdotally, I socialize pretty much exclusively with extremely intelligent Democrats and progressives, very few of whom took the coronavirus seriously until March.

Progressives are obsessively focused on the tail risks associated with global warming; why did so many miss the pandemic?  I don't really have a good answer, but am memorializing some observations:

• The outbreak overlapped with the impeachment trial and the presidential primary, so perhaps these crowded out attention that otherwise would have been engaged by the coronavirus.
• Perhaps progressives have over-learned from 9/11, and are now too skeptical about alarmism over foreign threats.
• At the outset, the best chance of limiting the outbreak was by limiting travel, and that is a right that is too near-and-dear to progressive values.
• From casual conversation, the progressives I know are willing to acknowledge the FDA and CDC failures when pressed (so that is a win), but they don't really want to talk about it.  Instead, they prefer hobby-horses about suspicious trading activity and Trump's cutting a bureaucratic pandemic response department within White House that (unlike the aforementioned bureaucracies) would have done more good than harm.  Is the dominant progressive approach to understanding the world actually pretty rigid?
• This is at least in part confirmation of my thesis from three years ago that Trump would make progressives dumber. 

The Best Covid-19 Projects on GitHub

The amount of attention that Covid-19 got last week increased dramatically, and that is a good thing.  An unfortunate casualty is that the quality of the average discussion of the virus dropped as the story-of-the-day journalists piled into coverage.  My twitter feed was getting stale and repetitive, so as an experiment I tried to see what coronavirus projects were up on GitHub.  Here are the top finds.

1.  Johns Hopkins Dashboard

The source data and code for the much-linked Johns Hopkins dashboard is here.  There is also a coronavirus package for R that makes it easy to pull the Johns Hopkins data, and looks to provide the plumbing behind many of the "days behind Italy" that were everywhere last week.

I would still love to see a public dataset on confirmed and suspected cases at a more granular level, preferably by city block like the map available for Singapore.

2. Wolfram Language code and notebooks related to the coronavirus outbreak

Example code for maps, animated charts (flattening the curve is that much better when you can see it move), images, and web scraping from Wolfram.  And here is the Wolfram community page.

3. Folding@Home

"Folding@home (FAH or F@h) is a distributed computing project for disease research that simulates protein folding, computational drug design, and other types of molecular dynamics."  I've literally never heard of them before this weekend.  Here is their wiki and their website.  Their GitHub page covering their Covid-19 efforts is here (of less practical use, unless of course you are deep in the weeds on protein folding and computational drug design).  Donating some processing power seems like an easy and say way to contribute to efforts to combat the virus, and you can start folding here.

4.  Nextstrain

"Nextstrain is an open-source project to harness the scientific and public health potential of pathogen genome data."  The GitHub page for this one is also going to be for a pretty limited audience, but it is here.  According to their website, the project has sequenced over 500 samples of Covid-19.  I recommend this interview with computational biologist/co-developer Trevor Bedford, who happens to be at Fred Hutch in Seattle. 

Deng Xiaoping Was Not a Good Guy

Deng Xiaoping was not a good guy.  Though not a core thesis, that is one of the more obvious takeaways from Frank Dikotter's The Tragedy of Liberation:  A History of the Chinese Revolution (1945-1957).  I did not know much about Deng the individual or his rise within the CCP prior to reading this book.  If pressed, I might have imagined him as a genteel and inoffensive reformer.  Alas:

• Deng managed the conscription of "some 5 million men and women, sometimes even children" during the Civil War (1945-1949).  "[H]e imposed strict quotas for each village and threatened severe punishment when is orders were not met.  These pick-and-shovel crews not only provided logistical support, carrying food and material on their backs to the front, but they were also used as human shields, forced to march in front of the troops.  Dense waves of unarmed villagers overwhelmed the nationalists.  Lin Jingwu, an ordinary [Nationalist] soldier in the trenches, remembered years later that his hands went numb from firing bullets into a sea of civilians."
• While overseeing land reform in southwest China (where he was functionally governor), the Party's cadres killed landlords, their families, and their families' families.  There was a brutal cycle of murder, whereby fearing reprisals from the relatives of those purged, the Party preemptively purged yet more people.
• During the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (aka China's Great Terror), "The provinces under Deng Xiaoping, namely Guizhou, Sichuan, and Yunnan, are unlikely to have had killing rates below two per thousand."
• During the Korean War, Deng extracted so much grain and other provisions from southwest China that it pushed the populace into starvation:  "As Deng Xiaoping proudly proclaimed his determination that every man and woman should contribute up to 4 kilos of grain in war donations, tens of thousands of people in the county of Ya'an [in Sichuan province] alone were reduced to foraging for roots to eat.  In Yunnan, also under Deng's purview, more than a million people were starving, many of the victims stripping the bark off trees or eating mud that filled the stomach but often caused excruciatingly painful death as the soil dried up the colon....In November 1951...Deng announced that farmers in south-west China would be asked to contribute an extra 400,000 tonnes of grain beyond the usual procurements.  Six months later 2 million people were starving in the region, with reports of cannibalism[.]"
• Deng led the Anti-Rightist Campaign beginning in 1957,  which persecuted more than a half million dissidents after they had been encouraged to criticize the party during the Hundred Flowers Campaign.

For a kinder introduction, check out this 2007 blog post from Brad Delong calling Deng "quite possibly the greatest human hero of the twentieth century."  How was Deng able to pivot from monster to the architect of Modern China?  I am adding Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life and Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China to my reading list.