Welcome to Talking Feds, a round table that brings together prominent former federal officials

and special guests for a dynamic discussion of the most important legal topics of the day.

I'm Harry Littman. If last week marked the time when the coronavirus went from a whisper

to a scream, that scream that elevated sense of something unknown, unprecedented,

and possibly terrifying, this week became the looping soundtrack to life generally.

The virus seems well on its way to spreading into every corner of daily life,

affecting massive dislocations and goods and services that we barely conceive of before they

hit home. No American has failed to experience the virus in some fashion in the last few days.

March madness, opening day of the baseball season, and the Boston marathon for the first time in

a hundred twenty-four years have all been postponed or canceled. Universities from Harvard to UCLA

and primary and high schools throughout the country, including all of them in seven different

states and major cities have closed. Conferences and meetings are being canceled by the score.

Yesterday a rumour spread in Lower Manhattan that the city was going to be locked down,

and within hours panicked urban nights had cleaned out the shells of local supermarkets.

The days and hours themselves are wrenched from normal life, and just as we convene this panel,

President Trump, who previously liked in the virus to a seasonal flu that few would get,

has declared a national emergency. On the other hand, only a very small percentage of Americans

have yet experienced the truly massive dislocations in daily life that look perhaps to be around

the corner for millions of us and to endure for possibly months. So the breathlessness of

current events has to be tempered by knowing that much worse is on the immediate horizon,

at least for large sectors of the population. We are only at the beginning of this very, very crazy

time. And of course the virus also casts a long and deep shadow over the presidential election season,

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