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Welcome back to the breakdown.

It is Saturday, March 28th, and as with every Saturday, I am bringing you an extended

edition of all of this week's episodes in one for your long walks around the same 10 feet

that you've been walking around for weeks of self-quarantine now.

But either way, this is a convenient format I found for a bunch of people.

And I use it also to just kind of like reflect for myself on what we saw, what I learned.

I was trying to think about where I've found myself the last few Fridays. I feel like each of the last

couple Fridays I've had somewhat more optimism than I began the week with. Two Fridays ago,

it was because for the first time, finally, President Trump was acknowledging the seriousness of

coronavirus. We had seen the NBA shutdown. Tom Hanks got it, right? Like things shifted very quickly

that Wednesday. So I felt going into that weekend that at least there was some sense of urgency.

Last week, I felt like, again, there was more engagement, right? We were getting more serious about

the closures that needed to happen. This Friday, I find myself much more worried

than even I was at the beginning of the week. And I think that's for a couple reasons. The first is that

there has been a major narrative shift from this consensus around voluntary social distancing to a real politicizing of health outcomes

on the one hand and economic outcomes on the other, right, as though these are somehow independent

variables. And so what I mean by that is that you started to see at the beginning of the week

that instead of, again, broad-based support for

these closures, you had some people saying that the closures were going to do more harm to people

than the disease actually would, and that they should effectively just throw open the gates

...