The Last Supper During Wuhan Virus

Second developer flew 82 tonnes of medical supplies to China

A second Chinese property company based in Sydney flew more than 80 tonnes of medical supplies on a corporate jet to Wuhan in late February, at the time coronavirus was devastating the regional city

ALL OF IT IMPORTANT:  All Things Wuhan.

A prescient article from 2018: The Next Pandemic Will Be Arriving Shortly. "As a result, in 2018, it is impossible to reconcile the redirection of funds away from preparing for pandemics with these realities on the ground

During the battle of Belleau Wood, a legendary Marine sergeant reportedly exhorted his men to charge by saying, “Come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?” That’s not the sort of language you ordinarily hear in church, but don’t you notice the similarity of sentiment? There are some things worth dying for.

And certainly there are some things worth taking a risk for. As much as we admire bravery in the face of danger, we despise timidity. No doubt you would be safer if you spent your life cowering at home, but what could you accomplish? “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once,” Shakespeare tells us. To risk nothing is to accomplish nothing.

Today’s must-read is What I Learned When My Husband Got Sick With Coronavirus by NY Times editor Jessica Lustig. If you’re on the fence about whether COVID-19 is worth all this fuss, Lustig’s account of caring for her gravely ill husband in a Brooklyn apartment while trying to keep herself and their daughter from getting sick should help straighten out your thinking.   

Now we live in a world in which I have planned with his doctor which emergency room we should head to if T suddenly gets worse, a world in which I am suddenly afraid we won’t have enough of the few things tempering the raging fever and soaking sweats and severe aches wracking him — the Advil and Tylenol that the doctors advise us to layer, one after the other, and that I scroll through websites searching for, seeing “out of stock” again and again. We are living inside the news stories of testing, quarantine, shortages and the disease’s progression. A friend scours the nearby stores and drops off a bunch of bodega packets of Tylenol. Another finds a bottle at a more remote pharmacy and drops it off, a golden prize I treasure against the feverish nights to come. 

His doctor calls three days later to say the test is positive. I find T lying on his side, reading an article about the surge in confirmed cases in New York State. He is reading stories of people being hospitalized, people being put on ventilators to breathe, people dying, sick with the same virus that is attacking him from the inside now.

This is a rough read, no doubt about it. I started crying at the part about his father’s sweater.

Designer Jure Tovrljan redesigned some company logos for these coronavirus times.

While it predates the COVID-19 pandemic and its accompanying social distancing by several years, José Manuel Ballester’s Concealed Spaces projectreimagines iconic works of art without the people in them (like what’s happeningto our public spaces right now). No one showed up for Leonardo’s Last Supper

Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps just as delightful without people:

And Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus has been rescheduled:

Ben Greenman, Andy Baio, and Paco Conde & Roberto Fernandez have some suggestions for new album covers: