A Nightmare Voyage, $69 Million Lost, and the Dissent of Atlanta’s Mayor
A handful of stories we’re reading about Covid-19 today
Published in
2 min readApr 30, 2020
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- The Diamond Princess cruise ship became a chilling symbol of the pandemic when it was quarantined for weeks in Japanese waters after its passengers tested positive for Covid-19. In a detailed feature for GQ, Doug Bock Clark chronicles the “nightmare voyage” of passengers trapped inside as the pandemic unfurled across the globe.
- Georgia may have reopened its doors, but Keisha Lance Bottoms, the mayor of Atlanta, isn’t having it. Writing in The Atlantic, she forcefully disagrees with the state governor’s decision and pushes back on the White House. “In a normal world, we could look to the president of the United States and receive sound, practical advice,” she writes. “Instead, we have to caution people not to ingest and inject their bodies with household cleaners.”
- A surreal scoop from Buzzfeed News reveals that a man who responded to President Trump’s tweet calling for ventilators was awarded $69 million from the state of New York to produce them, even though he had no experience in making medical supplies or government contracting. No ventilators were ever delivered to New York, and the state is now trying to get its money back.
- The coronavirus has reached the heart of the Amazon rainforest, wreaking havoc on the jungle-locked city of Manaus, Brazil. Devastating photos in this story from The Guardian show mass graves, where bodies are stacked in threes. The mayor of Manaus said the situation invoked the “tragic surrealism” of the reality-bending works of Gabriel García Márquez.
