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If the Trump administration has its way, the Affordable Care Act will be gone long before COVID-19. Late last month, the Justice Department laid out its case for declaring the law unconstitutional and striking it down. That raises the question, what would the COVID-19 pandemic look like in a post-ACA world? To start, over 20 million Americans who are getting insurance through provisions in the ACA would lose their coverage. Uninsured Americans avoid getting care when they are sick. In the age of COVID, that means their disease doesn’t get diagnosed, and they keep spreading it. They suffer, and we suffer. (David Blumenthal, 7/8)

For most people, a vaccine against the coronavirus can’t come soon enough, as it will be the only tolerable way to achieve herd immunity. So it’s encouraging that more than 100 drug candidates in 12 countries are in development, and eight are already entering clinical trials. To accelerate the process, some people are heroically volunteering to expose themselves to infection. With luck, some of us can get our shots next year. And yet, there’s still a danger that humanity will fail in its quest to control Covid-19. The culprit wouldn’t necessarily be the medical complexity, fiendish as it is, of engineering a vaccine. It could also be the ensuing politics surrounding inoculation. The fights will be intense, irrational and sometimes nasty. (Andreas Kluth, 7/8)

On Tuesday, President Trump formally began the process of pulling the United States out of the World Health Organization, having accused the organization of not holding the Chinese government to account for its handling of the coronavirus. The withdrawal would not go into effect until next July. But the prospect of losing the United States as a member, far and away the W.H.O.’s largest donor, is a big blow to the organization, and comes just a day after 239 scientists in 39 countries wrote an open letter claiming its guidance on airborne transmission was outdated. (Spencer Bokat-Lindell, 7/7)

If there’s a cruel way to handle an immigration issue, the nation can rest assured that the Trump administration will find it. The latest chapter in President Trump’s book, “How to Close Down a Nation to Foreigners” (and no, that’s not a real book), is a pending order that international students enrolled in U.S. colleges must attend in-person classes or leave the country. Never mind that the colleges themselves are still trying to figure out how to start the upcoming academic year as the pace of the coronavirus outbreak seems to be accelerating. (Scott Martelle, 7/7)

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that the 50 state approach toward solving the pandemic isn’t working.  Other countries have successfully controlled the spread. Yet today the United States has the dubious honor of reporting 25 percent of the world’s COVID-19 cases when we represent just four percent of the world’s population. Our response has failed because we’ve acted as a collection of 50 separate countries in how we’ve addressed COVID-19. We’ve had more cases and more deaths than any other country in the world. Today Americans continue to be banned from visiting European countries where travelers from other countries, including China where the pandemic started, may soon be welcome. (Lyndon Haviland, 7/7)

When Gov. Greg Abbott recently paused the reopening of Texas to slow the spread of the coronavirus, he also enacted new emergency health and safety standards for child care operations. That was a good move, but additional steps are needed if child care centers are going to be available when parents need to return to work. This is no easy task. Many child care centers are barely holding on during the pandemic as parents stay home or worry about the risk of infection. Of course, the hard reality is that unless parents have more child care options that they can trust, many will not go back to work, and that will hurt the economy. (7/8)

Complacency is among the most potent forces that have aided the pandemic’s lethal advance — the pleasant and false idea that a modest infection rate or downward trend is here to stay. That’s what prompted what turned out to be premature reopenings across the country, triggering spikes in the novel coronavirus’s prevalence from coast to coast. Now there’s cause to worry that the Washington area, specifically the Virginia suburbs, may be the latest region where complacency will afford the virus a new opening. (7/7)