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Slack.com slash DHQ. Hello, welcome to another episode of the weeds. I'm Dylan Matthews. We're

doing things a little bit differently on the show this week and over the course of the

next few Fridays. Because as it turns out, we have learned a lot about policy and public

health over the course of the last almost two years. So we're getting into the weeds

of some of those lessons in a series we're calling America's public health experiment.

We hope you enjoy it. In 2020, the world changed forever.

We have a new name for the coronavirus. The World Health Organization has officially called

it COVID-19. Since Friday, the number of known infections across Asia has more than quadrupled.

COVID-19 can be characterized as a pandemic and nobody was prepared.

A SARS-like virus, which has infected hundreds in China, has now reached the United States.

In the past two weeks, the number of cases of COVID-19 outside China has increased

certainfold. And the number of affected countries has tripled.

Here in the United States, the response to COVID-19 was historic both in its successes

and in its failures. Our inconsistent patchwork of social distancing rules made it really

hard to get any sort of control over the spread of the virus.

Ohio shutting down public schools for three weeks, Maryland schools closed for two. California

now banning all gatherings of 250 people or more. And New York City's mayor declaring

...