GOOD NEWS: Recovered patients who tested positive for Covid-19 likely not reinfected. Encouraging findings from South Korea, among other good news at Lockdown Skeptics.

MUSTN’T LET PEOPLE THINK FOR THEMSELVES: The Trust Deficit. Faced with disaster, authorities too often suffer “elite panic,” worrying about more an unruly public than about the crisis at hand.

THE CITY THAT SOMETIMES SLEEPS: New York’s Darkened Future.  The subway system has never shut down at night — until now. Another bad move by Cuomo and di Blasio.

REDISCOVERING THE LABORATORY: The Pandemic Has Produced a Radical Experiment in Federalism. Varying state responses will provide the thing we most right now: information.

FASTER, PLEASE: A Challenge to Accept. The FDA should allow testing Covid-19 vaccines through deliberate human infection.

IF YOU CAN’T FIND A CRIME, CREATE ONE: Much of the FBI’s Treatment of Mike Flynn Was Business as Usual, and That’s the Scandal. This sleazy tactic needs to be outlawed.

THE 1918 PANDEMIC DIDN’T SHUT DOWN BROADWAY OR SILENCE CARUSO: The Show Must Go On! Most of New York’s theaters and the Metropolitan Opera didn’t close during the Spanish flu pandemic. Here’s how they can reopen this year.

THE SKY ISN’T FALLING IN SWEDEN OR GERMANY: Lockdown Skeptics. Toby Young’s daily roundup features more evidence that it’s time to ease the lockdowns — and that they didn’t do much good in the first place.

NO GAIN, MORE PAIN: Golden State Lockdown. Even with infections dropping, the Bay Area extends its shelter-in-place order.

NO POMP AND CIRCUMSTANCE: You Thought You Were Free, but History Found You. The 2020 commencement speech you’ll never hear, from Caitlin Flanagan.

ZOOM IS JUST THE BEGINNING: Silicon vs. Viruses. Ever since a NASA engineer coined the term “telecommute” in the 1970s, tech prophets have consistently overestimated how many people would choose to work remotely. But this pandemic could be a tipping point — and encourage a host of technologies that will make us a lot better prepared for the next pandemic.

THE FDA STRIKES AGAIN: My Brother’s Life-saving Discovery. John Stossel’s brother, the late Dr. Thomas Stossel of Harvard, found a protein in the blood that reduces inflammation and could potentially be a breakthrough in treating many diseases, including Covid-19. A biotech company has spent $50 million to develop a treatment and has demonstrated its safety in humans. But the treatment is still years — and hundreds of millions of dollars — away from receiving FDA approval for patients to try.  The company is hoping the pandemic will prompt the FDA to speed up the process.

SEX, ART AND MONEY: Corrupted by Commerce? Does putting a price on the good things in life corrupt our appreciation of them? Not according to the prostitutes and art dealers studied by Stanford’s Steve Clowney.

OPENING THE ECONOMY — AND THE STREETS: A Plan for Ending New York’s Shutdown. Arpit Gupta suggests starting by bringing people under 45 back to work. He also proposes closing a lot of streets to give pedestrians more room for social distancing, which strikes me as a good idea. Even though I often drive in Manhattan and am a devout defender of the automobile everywhere else in America,  I think New York has given away too much valuable space to cars, and there’s no need to keep doing it with traffic so much lighter these days.

IT ALWAYS HELPS TO BE LUCKY: Germany’s Covid-19 Story. A combination of good fortune and widespread public compliance helped Germany weather the first wave of infections better than other countries.

IT’S THE TESTING, STUPID: New Jersey’s Corona Debacle.  Governor Phil Murphy has failed to provide sufficient testing for residents, setting back the state’s timetable for restarting the economy. But to give him his due: he did manage to shut down a drive-in tulip farm where the visitors never got out of their cars.

TOO MANY COOKS: When Crisis Planning Doesn’t Work. Why didn’t Washington have a plan to deal effectively with a pandemic? Because its bureaucracies had been ordered to create so many different plans that no one could keep track of them.

THE FDA STRIKES AGAIN: Suffocating Progress. FDA regulations block usage of a feature in Apple Watches that would help millions of users monitor their blood-oxygen levels.

NICOTINE TO THE RESCUE: Smoke fags, save lives. Christopher Snowdon has fun pondering the low rate of Covid-19 infections among smokers (and the mistaken prediction from Public Health England that smokers would suffer higher casualties):

Let us consider for a moment the policy implications of nicotine being the only tried and tested prophylactic for Covid-19. We could issue Lucky Strikes on prescription. We could #ClapForOurCigarettes every Thursday evening. The case for closing down Public Health England would be stronger than ever. We could open the pubs, but only to smokers and vapers. We might allow a few non-smokers in to enjoy the possible benefits of passive exposure, but only if they stand two metres apart.

France is already testing nicotine patches as protection for patients and health-care workers.

IF ONLY THIS PROFESSOR HAD BEEN HOMESCHOOLED: Harvard vs. the Family. A Harvard law professor distorts research findings to justify her campaign to ban homeschooling.

HINDSIGHT IS ALWAYS 20/20: Blame Game. The press wants to blame Trump for warnings that he missed about the pandemic, but it’s easy to point to Democrats and journalists who missed the warnings, too. After every disaster, our hindsight bias leads to a search for scapegoats. But finding scapegoats won’t solve the crisis — or prevent the next one.

UNTIL THERE’S A VACCINE: Alleviation Before Cure. An epidemiologist’s primer on what treatments might work.

IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME CONVENIENT ALTERNATIVE: How Public Transit Makes the Nation More Vulnerable to Disasters Like Covid-19.  Instead of subsidizing mass transit, we should encourage a transportation system that’s resilient during pandemics, terrorist attacks and other disasters: the automobile.

BAD RULES ARE FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: Trumping Poverty. The economist Casey Mulligan calculates how much the poor have benefited from Trump’s rollback of regulations.

THE DOCTOR WILL ZOOM YOU NOW: Has Telehealth’s Time Arrived? It can lead to better health care long after the pandemic.