I read this editorial from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, curious to determine whether it included the obvious reason that schools have been closed. It didn’t. It did, however, include this interesting snippet:

Many observers have said that schools should be the first public institutions to open, since child development is crucial to the future of the country. They point out that children are less likely than adults to catch the coronavirus, and kids are more likely to recover if they are infected. However, there is a related inflammatory disease that is affecting a small number of children and teens, and more information about this disease is needed.

It is my understanding that if folklore rather than science. The Kawasaki-like disease does not satisfy Koch’s first postulate—some of those with the disease have not tested positive for COVID-19. Consequently, characterizing it as related to SARS-CoV-2 is beyond present knowledge. IMO it is more likely to have multiple causes. It could even be a reaction to ingredients in hand sanitizers or antibacterial cleansers.

In an alternate universe the schools would never have been closed. They would have been kept open, staffed by teachers and staff under the age of 50 who don’t live with people over the age of 50.

In a field about 100 km west of Moscow, near the Dubosekovo railway station, there is a war memorial, statues in the Soviet “socialist realism” style, commemorating the Battle of Dubosekovo in which a handful of brave Soviet soldiers, known as Panfilov’s 28, stopped a column of German tanks from advancing on Moscow on September 30, 1941. The event was dramatized in 2016 in a movie, Panfilov’s 28 Men which I watched streaming on Amazon Prime yesterday.

The movie began its life as a crowd-funded project which ultimately gained corporate and government backing from Russia and Kazakhstan. I found the English language dubbing distracting so I watched it in Russian. Gave me a chance to brush up. I found it exciting, rousing.

Only the battle may never have actually taken place. It appears in no official records, Russian or German, only in an account in Red Gazette, almost certainly patriotic propaganda. But at this point its historicity cannot be challenged. As the line from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance put it, when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

I honestly don’t know what to make of the Chinese authorities’ decision effectively to abandon the “one country, two systems” policy now. The editors of the Washington Post are dismayed:

There’s every reason to expect that once the legislation is in place this summer, Beijing’s thugs will employ it to behave as they do on the mainland — crushing dissent by subjecting those who criticize the regime to disappearance, torture and lengthy prison sentences. First in line could be those Hong Kong leaders, such as Martin Lee and Joshua Wong, who have traveled to Washington and other Western capitals to lobby for pressure on Beijing to fulfill its commitments on Hong Kong, including for universal suffrage and free elections. Both are already facing prosecution.

Such a crackdown would compound what is already a crisis in U.S.-Chinese relations and present Washington with some difficult choices. It doesn’t help that President Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have been heaping abuse on the Xi regime in recent weeks as a way of distracting from the Trump administration’s abysmal response to the covid-19 pandemic; in fact, the mounting U.S. hostility may have persuaded Mr. Xi that he had little to lose by smothering Hong Kong.

On Friday, Mr. Pompeo issued a blistering statement saying the pending People’s Congress action would “be a death knell” for Hong Kong’s autonomy and would “inevitably impact our assessment of One Country, Two Systems and the status of the territory.” That was an unmistakable reference to the special trading privileges Hong Kong has enjoyed under U.S. law since 1992. Under an amendment Congress adopted last year, the State Department must issue a report on whether the territory remains “sufficiently autonomous” to justify the measures, which include exemption from tariffs applied to mainland exports.

and

The assault on Hong Kong requires a robust U.S. reaction — but one that is carefully calculated and not driven by election-year demagoguery.

Not satisfied by imagining that China is a country different than it is, they insist on imagining that the U. S. is a country different than it is.

Are the Chinese authorities eager not to let a crisis go to waste? Think the rest of the world is too busy with its problems, which they had a hand in creating, to notice what they’re doing? Think it’s now or never? Or have they just decided that the present arrangement has outlived its usefulness? Perhaps Taiwan should watch its back.

The United States Department of Justice has filed a statement of interest challenging Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker’s decrees in the state under emergency powers:

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Governor of Illinois has, over the past two months, sought to rely on authority under the Illinois Emergency Management Agency Act to impose sweeping limitations on nearly all aspects of life for citizens of Illinois, significantly impairing in some instances their ability to maintain their economic livelihoods. According to the lawsuit, the Governor’s actions are not authorized by state law, as they extend beyond the 30-day time period imposed by the Illinois legislature for the Governor’s exercise of emergency powers granted under the Act.

Representative Bailey brought his case in Illinois state court and elected only to assert state law claims. On May 15, the presiding state court judge ordered Bailey to file his motion for summary judgment by May 18 and instructed the Governor to respond to it by May 21. A hearing on the motion for summary judgment was scheduled to take place in state court today. Yesterday, however, instead of responding to Bailey’s motion for summary judgment, the Governor removed the case to federal district court.

“The Governor of Illinois owes it to the people of Illinois to allow his state’s courts to adjudicate the question of whether Illinois law authorizes orders he issued to respond to COVID-19,” said Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the Civil Rights Division. “The United States Constitution and state constitutions established a system of divided and limited governmental power, and they did so to secure the blessings of liberty to all people in our country. Under our system, all public officials, including governors, must comply with the law, especially during times of crisis. The Department of Justice remains committed to defending the rule of law and the American people at all times, especially during this difficult time as we deal with COVID-19 pandemic.”

“However well-intentioned they may be, the executive orders appear to reach far beyond the scope of the 30-day emergency authority granted to the Governor under Illinois law,” said Steven D. Weinhoeft, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois. “Even during times of crisis, executive actions undertaken in the name of public safety must be lawful. And while the people of Illinois must be physically protected from the effects of this public health crisis, including by complying with CDC guidelines their constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties must be safeguarded as well.”

In its statement of interest, the United States explains that this dispute belongs in Illinois state court, and that Representative Bailey has raised substantial questions as to whether the Governor’s current response to COVID-19 is lawful. Although the complaint does not raise any federal constitutional claims, the statement explains, “It is up to the Illinois courts to rule on Plaintiff’s claims, which, because of the sweeping nature of the Orders, may affect millions of lives and raise significant constitutional concerns in other litigation.” Even in the face of a pandemic, states must comply with their own laws in making these sensitive policy choices in a manner responsive to the people and, in doing so, both respect and serve the goals of our broader federal structure, including the guarantee of due process in the U.S. Constitution.

I am unfamiliar with “statement of interest” under the law except as it relates to amicus briefs but this sounds like a “shot across the bow” to me.

IMO Illinois’s political leadership has systematically bungled its handling of the COVID-19 crisis both in what it has done, in how it has done it, and in what it hasn’t done. Back in March the legislature should have enacted appropriate legislation to empower it to do its work remotely. Actually, that should have been done 20 years ago. The categories of “essential workers” are far too broad, diluting the lockdown directive. There have been plenty of threats and precious little enforcement of the directives. Business as usual should not have been allowed to proceed for mail order or e-commerce orders. When it was obvious weeks ago how limited the effects of the lockdown have been, additional measures should have been put in place. And so on.

I’m only going to quote one sentence from John Kass’s Chicago Tribune column about the “leaders of the lockdown party—Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot”: “Rookie politicians make rookie mistakes”.

I rarely read the New York Post and I doubt that I’ve linked to anything in the Post more than a time or two but I found this cri du coeur by columnist David Marcus powerfully written:

By prolonging the coronavirus shutdown long after its core mission was accomplished, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio have plunged tens of thousands of New Yorkers into poverty.

It needs to end. Now.

In mid-March, we were told we have to endure a lockdown to ensure that hospitals didn’t get overrun. We did. The hospitals were not overwhelmed. We turned the Javits Center into a hospital. We didn’t need it. We brought in a giant Navy ship to treat New Yorkers. We didn’t need it.

We were told we were moments away from running out of ventilators. We weren’t, and now the United States has built so many, we are giving them away to other countries.

Meanwhile, the Big Apple is ­dying. Its streets are empty. The bars and jazz clubs, restaurants and coffeehouses sit barren. Beloved haunts, storied rooms, perfect-slice joints are shuttered, many for good. The sweat equity of countless small-business owners is evaporating. ­Instead of getting people back to work providing for their families, our mayor talks about a fantasyland New Deal for the post-coronavirus era.

Open the city. All of it. Right now. Broadway shows, beaches, Yankees games, the schools, the top of the freakin’ Empire State building. Everything. New Yorkers have already learned to socially distance. Businesses can adjust. The elderly and infirm can continue to be isolated.

I have no idea of what New York should or should not do but I think the figures speak for themselves. The NYC metro area is home to about 20 million people, about 6% of the U. S. population, and it is probably more detached from the economy and affairs of the rest of the country more now than at any time in its history. As Mama Rose puts it in the musical Gypsy New York is the center of New York. And that was written more than 60 years ago.

Something between a third and half of all of the cases and deaths in the entire United States have been in the NYC metro area. The prevalence and morbidity of the disease there is an order of magnitude greater than what most of the country is experiencing.

3,000 miles away, the Los Angeles metro area is home to 13 million people. The Washington, DC metro area is home to another 6 million people. Together those three metro areas account for roughly 12% of the population of the U. S. but for at least 90% of the national opinion-making apparatus. For that to continue is unhealthy. It is distorting.

I do not for a second believe that SARS-CoV-2 is a bioweapon but that’s an idea I do not believe will be allowed to die. This morning I saw this study from Australia being cited as proof positive that it was, indeed, engineered in a Chinese lab.

I found the cited study interesting and informative and even suggestive but I still don’t think it proves the virus was intended as a weapon.

However, consider this. If the Chinese authorities had intended to conduct a probing attack, they could hardly have done better than SARS-CoV-2. We have revealed all of our weaknesses and weakened ourselves tremendously in the process.

At City Journal Larry Salzman analyzes the prospects for suing our way out of state lockdowns. The prospects are, at best, mixed but here’s the bottom line:

To date, most rulings in cases challenging the lockdowns have favored the government. But the longer the lockdowns go on and the less necessary that they seem, the more scrutiny we can expect courts to apply. As the Supreme Court put it in its Jacobson ruling, more than a century ago, a law that “purport[s] to have been enacted to protect the public health” but “has no real or substantial relation to those objects” must be found unconstitutional.

I would also think that the longer the lockdowns last, the more burden the state should have to bear to show that such a broad application of emergency powers is warranted.

Holding your breath can only be maintained for so long.

I also think that the failure of governors to seek the support of the states’ legislatures is a major omission. Legislatures have many purposes. Among them are to share the political pain and to signify the consent of the people.

The editors of the Chicago Tribune urge Gov. Pritzker to take bolder steps to reopening Illinois:

Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s decision to allow Illinois restaurants to offer outdoor dining beginning May 29 is a start — a slow start to respond real-time to the coronavirus’s declining rate of infection. It will give some restaurants some business.

Pritzker is showing flexibility and that’s good. But it’s not nearly enough: How many restaurants across Chicago and Illinois can even take advantage of his new rule allowing alfresco dining? Not many, if any, in struggling neighborhoods, or even working-class ones, where sidewalk cafes and patios with kitchens are scarce. The vast majority of restaurants statewide will be stuck waiting a month or longer to open under his phased-in plan, which we described May 6 as moving the goal posts.

The governor needs to take more steps — prudent ones, not rash — to restore business activity in response to progress being made against the coronavirus. He should be making these decisions based on events as they are transpiring, not the overly cautious recovery plan that largely depends on a vaccine.

We also have urged Mayor Lori Lightfoot to get Chicago safely moving toward normalcy by reopening the lakefront and joining in Pritzker’s decision to give restaurants and small businesses options.

Mayor Lightfoot on the other hand has said that even should the State of Illinois allow outdoor dining, Chicago won’t as CBS Chicago reports:

CHICAGO (CBS) — Despite Governor JB Pritzker’s announcement that restaurants will soon be able to open in Illinois as part of the COVID-19 Phase 3 plan, there’s been a major blow to Chicago restaurant owners: they won’t be opening in May according to Mayor Lori Lightfoot.

“We’re close but we’re not there yet,” Lightfoot said. “We are hard at work looking at ways to get our restaurant industry back up. I was heartened by what the governor said yesterday, but again got to do it safely.”

At this time Wednesday, restaurant owners were eagerly looking forward to reopening next week.

CBS 2’s Vince Gerasole has reaction from restaurant owners. They say it’s a huge let down for Chicago’s restaurant community, which was already spacing out tables and calling back staff.

But Mayor Lightfoot has the power to place outdoor dining on hold in the city.

In bridge that’s called “cross-ruffing”. I don’t have the figures at my finger tips but I’d guess that a third or more of all the restaurants in Illinois are in the City of Chicago. How do you reopen without, you know, reopening?