WELL, YES: “We have to accept that the spread of novel coronavirus is one of the negative consequences of globalization and the global mobility of people it brings with it.”

BOOKWORM ROOM: All Things Wuhan.

MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Joe Biden Took Four Days to Set Up a Lousy Videoconference and I Didn’t Even Get a T-Shirt.

HMM: The US’s COVID-19 Death Rate Is Far Below the Rates in Italy and Spain. I wouldn’t get too excited about this. My guess is that it’s a combination of (1) Lag, since the disease got here later thanks to the early travel ban with China, and people usually don’t die until three or four weeks after they’re infected; and (2) the US having more ICU beds per capita, so that it will take us longer to hit the saturation threshold above which the mortality rate goes way up (I think this is the big difference, actually). I’d love to be wrong, but I think that’s what’s going on.

JERRY BROWN’S “ROAD DIET” COMES TO NEW YORK: NYC outlines street closures to promote ‘social distancing’ during Coronavirus shutdown.

THIS ISN’T ABOUT LAWYERS, IT’S FROM DISTILLER MAGAZINE: The State of Our Bar Community is Dire.

QUESTION ASKED: Has Japan cracked Coronavirus?

Although as Glenn would say, don’t get cocky: Sudden spike in new Tokyo virus cases brings dire warning for Japan.

JIM GERAGHTY: The Comprehensive Timeline of China’s COVID-19 Lies.

Indispensible.

CONGRESS IS MOVING AT THE SPEED OF PELOSI: Pelosi: We’ll take up the bill on Friday after recalling the House.

Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines to understand how they would be covering Congress’s Pangaea-esque pace if it were led by a Republican:

UPDATE (Charlie): You all do realize they could pass it by unanimous consent without recalling the house?

THE CAMPAIGN ADS PRACTICALLY WRITE THEMSELVES: Senate Passes Coronavirus Bill, Proving Pelosi Gambled With Americans’ Lives and Lost.

WHAT’S ONE WEEK OF MANEUVERING IN AN ECONOMIC CRISIS? Senate Passes Coronavirus Bill, Proving Pelosi Gambled With Americans’ Lives and Lost.

Somehow, Pelosi and the Democrats have got to pay for this.

ALL DUE CREDIT: In the Same Poll Where Trump Triumphs on COVID-19 Response, the Media Come In Dead Last.

COMMUNIST CHINA’S VIRAL PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGN: My latest Creators Syndicate column.

CORONAVIRUS BILL TEXT AND TITLE-BY-TITLE SUMMARY: Go here for the complete bill text. Go here for the title-by-title summary. Prediction: Lots of “gems” buried in this bill won’t be discovered for months.

HIGH ENERGY LASER SYSTEM: A photo of the High Energy Laser System Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range. Has the laser of the future arrived? Maybe. Israel’s Laser Dome is a candidate.

ISRAEL WHO?

Yesterday: “The WHO has become another pointless organization pandering to the world’s worst actors.”

FOR THE LEFT, DOXXING IS A WAY OF LIFE: Threat to reveal anonymous donor behind Antonin Scalia Law School sparks controversy. What’s notable here is that the university administration — not the law school administration — seems to be siding with the lefty doxxers.

AMERICA NEEDS THESE FIVE PARADIGM SHIFTS ASAP: See especially points four and five. If Republican leaders don’t figure this out soon …

THIS IS WHY TRUMP HAS BEEN WORRYING ABOUT GETTING THE ECONOMY STARTED BACK UP: U.S. jobless claims skyrocket to 3.283 million.

MICHAEL LIND: The Pandemic is an Alien Invasion.

As in a 1950s science fiction movie, the war against the alien invaders will be won by the combined forces of mobilized science and industry. The role of economic policy is secondary and has two purposes: providing wartime resources to science and industry and cushioning the collateral economic damage done by the government’s order that everyone hide from the aliens.

That’s not what we’re doing now. In battling the coronavirus, America’s political leadership is making two harmful mistakes. One mistake is focusing on the indirect economic consequences of the measures taken to slow the pandemic while neglecting the urgent need to contain and neutralize this lethal microbe. The other mistake is trying to deal with the crisis by means of ordinary legislation, rather than delegating authority temporarily to a bipartisan agency which can carry out fiscal policy quickly, backed up by the Fed with monetary policy.

Too few opportunities for corruption and graft.

9/11 HASN’T MADE US PREPARED: New York City has identified about twenty thousand cases of Coronavirus (pdf file). That’s everyone who has tested positive. It’s not clear how many of those patients require hospitalization, but it’s almost certainly less than 20% (and probably more like 5%). Let’s use the 20% figure as the worst-case scenario. The media, social and traditional, is telling us that New York City’s hospital system is buckling. If so, it’s buckling under the pressure of at most four thousand new, hospitalized patients. New York, as we know, is, along with Washington, DC, the primary obvious potential terrorist target in the U.S. I would have thought with the threat of biological terrorism, dirty bombs, etc., we’d have contingency plans to expand hospitals capacity by tens of thousands quickly. Apparently not. If four thousand or fewer new hospital patients in a week or so can bring down the entire NYC hospital system, we have a serious preparedness problem.

SOME MUCH-NEEDED COMMON SENSE ON REMOTE VOTING BY CONGRESS: Here’s why a virtual Congress creates more problems than it solves.

UNEMPLOYMENT CLAIMS SKYROCKET: I’m going to lose it if I hear one more left-wing pundit suggest that being concerned about the economic toll of widespread shutdowns reflects concern about “protecting corporate profits” instead of worrying about human suffering.