Also: A special series on the Amazon.
Because it’s 2020, we got only a day and an hour of October before the October surprise. The president and first lady have tested positive for the coronavirus. |
One of the first things I wondered was: Could President Trump have infected Joe Biden during the debate this week? A president with the virus is scary enough. Both candidates, both in their 70s, sickened a month before the election would be a nightmare. |
“Yes,” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me this morning, when I asked him that question. “He definitely could have been infected and contagious at the debates. Yes, we need to worry about Biden too.” |
Everyone tested negative before participating. But Melinda Wenner Moyer, a science writer who has been working on an Op-Ed for me about coronavirus tests, says we often put too much faith in those results. |
“A negative test tells us one thing only,” she says. “That in the moment we were tested, the swab didn’t pick up any viral particles. It doesn’t tell us the virus isn’t there at all, or that it won’t be there in a day or two or even in a few hours.” |
When Melinda pitched the piece (which will go online later today), I thought the stakes were high enough. People might be planning to get tested so they could travel to see family for Thanksgiving; a negative result could make them overconfident. Infections could spread. |
I didn’t expect to be worrying about this. But I’m trying not to panic. Plenty of people who test positive end up just fine. Even if the president was already incubating the virus, there’s a good chance he wasn’t contagious yet. The candidates stood more than six feet apart. |
Finally, it’s helpful to remember that we’re not the first nation whose leader has tested positive. Boris Johnson had it. So did Jair Bolsonaro. And speaking of Brazil … that brings me to what I’d been planning to talk to you about before the Trump news broke: the Amazon. |
A year and a half ago my colleague Isvett Verde emailed the writer Chris Feliciano Arnold: “Seems like the situation in the Amazon has gone from bad to worse.” Did he want to write something? |
I dug that email out of the recesses of my inbox because I was trying to remember how long we’d been working on this project. The essay they started talking about that day eventually became the centerpiece for a series of Op-Eds we published this morning, a package we’re calling “The Amazon Has Seen Our Future.” |
Why the Amazon, when so much else is going on in the news? Its forests absorb a significant amount of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. While the West Coast’s late summer wildfires were lighting up headlines, twice as many fires were burning in Brazil. Who knows what’s in the ashes they left behind — undiscovered species of frog and fern, fungi that could be used to treat the next pandemic? Above all, the Amazon is home to more than 30 million people, some of them in sleek skyscrapers with riverside views, others poisoned by oil spills and raped by wildcat loggers. |
One of the challenges of putting together this series was that so much has been written about this region already. For decades there have been celebrity concerts and Saturday morning cartoons devoted to saving the rainforest. But the rainforest hasn’t been saved. These campaigns may have raised awareness, Chris says, but “they tended to bundle the flora and the fauna with the people, portraying Indigenous communities as species from a distant past that needed to be protected, rather than present tense human beings with ambitions for the future.” |
So we tried to approach the subject from a different angle: the human one. We asked experts on and from the region to tell us what life is like there, and how to make it better. |
 | | A lone Brazil nut tree remains in a deforested area in the Amazon.Lalo de Almeida for The New York Times |
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Manuela Picq describes the evangelical missionaries who kept trying to reach the last isolated tribes, even in the midst of the pandemic. Heriberto Araújo reported on the region’s crisis of child sex abuse. The ecologist Philip Fearnside wrote about hydroelectric dams and the damage they do. And the Indigenous activists Sônia Guajajara and Valéria Paye Pereira told us what their people already know about how to protect this land. |
There’s a lot more in the series. I hope you’ll spend some time exploring it, and thinking about this place that has inspired so many dreams and delusions. |
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Here’s what we’re focusing on today: |
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