The Week Magazine May 6, 2022

How many deaths is freedom worth? It’s a calculation that’s rarely discussed but must be made—consciously, as a matter of policy, or tacitly, as a matter of indifference. As the country settles into uneasy coexistence with the coronavirus, will vaccination be required by employers and schools, or left to individual choice? Are mask mandates in public spaces gone forever, or will they return if there’s a major surge in fall and winter, or if dangerous new variants emerge? (See Controversy, p.6.) Should we stop fighting this persistent pathogen, and just let it rip? Cost-benefit analyses are tricky, but our choices can be made clearer through comparison: If the flu typically kills from 12,000 to 52,000 Americans a year, would 100,000 annual Covid deaths be an acceptable price for no mask…

What happened As the U.S. and other NATO nations stepped up the shipment of heavy arms to Ukraine, Biden administration officials said this week the goal had shifted to a decisive Ukrainian victory that would leave Russia’s military so “weakened” it could no longer menace its neighbors. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken delivered that message after a visit to Kyiv, where they met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pledged to help Ukraine drive Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s army from Ukrainian soil. “We believe they can win if they have the right equipment, the right support,” said Austin. The Biden administration officials announced that the U.S. would soon reopen its embassy in Kyiv, and Austin met with defense officials from 40 nation allies in…

What happened Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen to win re-election to the French presidency this week, though by a smaller margin than the resounding 66 percent he received in his 2017 face-off with the far-right leader. Nearly 59 percent of French voters chose the 44-year-old centrist in the runoff election after he squeaked ahead of 11 other candidates with 28 percent of the vote in April. Macron successfully painted Le Pen, the 53-year-old head of the anti-immigrant National Rally party, as an extremist stooge of Vladimir Putin, pointing to the $9.5 million loan she took from a Kremlin-connected bank in 2017 and her demands to withdraw French troops from NATO. Le Pen’s campaign zeroed in on soaring inflation and other pocketbook issues while maintaining support for policies such…

Bill Collins, who recently retired from the Des Moines Fire Department after a decades-long career, collects T-shirts from local stations when he takes trips with his family. Recognizing that he might not make it to all 50 states, Collins’ daughter, Allison Marois, put out a call for firefighters to submit shirts to be included in a quilt she’s making to celebrate her dad’s birthday. She received more than 100, from as far away as Iraq and Afghanistan. “I got very emotional,” Marois said. “[People are] helping someone they don’t even know.” A British teenager recently unearthed a safe stuffed with cash while using a magnet to trawl the floor of a Lincolnshire river with his father. But instead of keeping the $2,500 in Australian dollars—about $1,800 U.S.—he found inside, George…

“The plane had only just reached cruising altitude when the pilot made the announcement,” said Julia Reinstein and Katie Camero in BuzzFeed News. A federal judge in Florida last week struck down the Center for Disease Control’s mask mandate, meaning that passengers were no longer required to wear them on airplanes, trains, and buses. Some jubilant passengers “ripped off their face coverings, cheering the change.” But it was grim news for the 8 million–plus Americans who are immunocompromised or have health conditions that leave them especially vulnerable to Covid. For them, the end of pandemic precautions means a loss of freedom. It was a ludicrous ruling, said Steven Lubet in NBCNews.com, and rested “almost entirely on a tortured misreading of one word, ‘sanitation.’” Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle—a 35-year-old Trump…

Good week for: Lucile Randon, a 118-year-old French nun who became the world’s oldest living person after the death of Kane Tanaka, 119, of Japan. Randon is also the oldest known survivor of Covid. Whiz kids, after Elliott Tanner, 13, prepared to graduate from the University of Minnesota and begin a doctoral physics program. Elliott, his mom said, “started reading when he was maybe 2.” Gutting it out, after Minnesota state senate candidate Erin Maye Quade spoke at a Democratic convention while in labor, pausing to exhale and lean over during contractions. Quade did not get the nomination, but delivered a healthy baby girl hours later. Bad week for: A failure to communicate, after the Federal Aviation Administration failed to warn Capitol Police that a small plane would fly overhead so…