Gleaming new tent hospitals sit empty on two suburban New York college campuses, never having treated a single coronavirus patient. Convention centers that were turned into temporary hospitals in other cities went mostly unused. And a Navy hospital ship that offered help in Manhattan is soon to depart.

When virus infections slowed down or fell short of worst-case predictions, the globe was left dotted with dozens of barely used or unused field hospitals. Some public officials say that's a good problem to have — despite spending potentially billions of dollars to erect the care centers — because it's a sign the deadly disease was not nearly as cataclysmic as it might have been.

Many of the facilities will now be kept on standby for a possible second wave of infections. Some could even be repurposed as testing sites or recovery centers.

Democratic candidate Joe Biden's campaign says the sexual assault claim against him was disproven by a New York Times probe. Originally criticized for going too soft on Biden, the Times now says it never wrote off the allegation.

Tara Reade, who worked for Biden's Senate office in 1993, claims that Biden cornered her in the basement of a Capitol Hill office building and forced himself on her, penetrating her with his fingers against her will. Biden's campaign has dismissed the allegations, and has circulated the talking points it's using to counter them.

Those talking points, revealed by Buzzfeed News on Tuesday, instruct campaign surrogates to refer back to a New York Times article published earlier this month, which the Biden campaign claims "found no pattern of sexual misconduct by Mr. Biden," and concluded "this incident did not happen."

These points have been repeated almost verbatim by Biden's supporters in recent days. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams - angling for a slot as Biden's running mate - trotted them out in a CNN interview on Tuesday, saying "The New York Times did a deep investigation and they found that the accusation was not credible. I believe Joe Biden."

The New York Times, however, says that Biden's campaign is misrepresenting its article. "Our investigation made no conclusion either way," the Times's vice president of communications, Danielle Rhoades-Ha told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday. Team Biden's talking points "inaccurately" suggest that the alleged incident "did not happen," the statement added.

Received this letter from Wyoming Doc today, which I post with his permission:

Over the last few days, I along with some 5 million other Americans watched a video of 2 ER doctors in California discussing our current status and situation regarding COVID. They had their own spin on the government's own numbers. They said a few things that I categorically disagree with. I disagree with lots of things I read and see. That is part of having a human mind that can think critically. The ER docs' overall take was that the current lockdown approach was not helping and very likely making things worse — not only with the viral epidemic, but certainly with our economy.

I will confirm for you that for the last three weeks, my number of COVID patients has been absolutely dwarfed by the number of patients with acute anxiety, depression, wife beating, child beating, suicidal ideation, and any number of young grown men crying like babies on televisits or in my office. Large numbers of people are losing their livelihood, and they are freaking out. We are headed for a severe tragedy in this society, and its name is not COVID.

I will also tell you that I am on a conference call every day with some of the pre-eminent epidemiologists and infectious disease doctors in this country. Just Monday, one of the brightest epidemiologic minds in this nation basically stated - and I am paraphrasing - "I am certainly not minimizing this virus. This thing is evil. But it, like its cousins, is not really amenable to our current approaches. The immunity response is looking more and more like it is variable and incomplete. Therefore vaccines and immunity testing are going to be very unreliable if not impossible with our current abilities. That may change in the future, but who knows how long that will take. More importantly, a fundamental aspect of public health — herd immunity — may be very different with this current virus than we have experienced before. This virus is most definitely not measles. We just do not know the extent yet, but things are certainly not going to be what we are used to. Because of this, the current lockdown approach may not be of any help at all; it may actually be making things worse. We just do not know — and the stakes are enormous. We absolutely have a tiger by the tail. We are walking through the undiscovered country."

When the first cases of the new coronavirus surfaced in Ohio's prisons, the director in charge felt like she was fighting a ghost.

"We weren't always able to pinpoint where all the cases were coming from," said Annette Chambers-Smith, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. As the virus spread, they began mass testing.

They started with the Marion Correctional Institution, which houses 2,500 prisoners in north central Ohio, many of them older with pre-existing health conditions. After testing 2,300 inmates for the coronavirus, they were shocked. Of the 2,028 who tested positive, close to 95% had no symptoms.

When major decisions must be made amid high scientific uncertainty, as is the case with Covid-19, we can't afford to silence or demonize professional colleagues with heterodox views. Even worse, we can't allow questions of science, medicine, and public health to become captives of tribalized politics. Today, more than ever, we need vigorous academic debate.

To be clear, Americans have no obligation to take every scientist's idea seriously. Misinformation about Covid-19 is abundant. From snake-oil cures to conspiracy theories about the origin of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, the internet is awash with baseless, often harmful ideas. We denounce these: Some ideas and people can and should be dismissed.

At the same time, we are concerned by a chilling attitude among some scholars and academics, who are wrongly ascribing legitimate disagreements about Covid-19 to ignorance or to questionable political or other motivations.

Easing the UK's Covid-19 lockdown is being presented as a case of greedy capitalists who want workers to go back to making profits at great risk to themselves. In fact the wealthiest will do best of all from a prolonged shutdown.

It's 'the capitalists' versus 'the people'. Or at least that's how some opponents of an easing or lifting of the UK Covid-19 lockdown are portraying it. If you want the shutdown to come to an end and life to return to 'normal' before a vaccine is found (which could be 2021 or even later), then you're a heartless so-and-so who is willing to sacrifice the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of workers just to get the economy going again.

Where does one begin deconstructing this extremely flawed analysis? For a start, it treats a lockdown as a zero sum game. On the one side we have a lockdown, which saves people's lives, and on the other we have an end to the lockdown which will kill large numbers of people.

While researchers across the planet race to find a vaccine for COVID-19, a new poll suggests Canadians are divided over whether getting it should be mandatory or voluntary — setting up a potentially prickly public health debate if a vaccine becomes available.

The federal government has committed tens of millions of dollars to help find or create a vaccine for the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19, the respiratory illness that has infected at least 48,000 Canadians and killed more than 2,700.

Yet the poll conducted by Leger and the Association for Canadian Studies found that while 60 per cent of respondents believe people should be required to get the vaccine once it is ready, the other 40 per cent think it should be voluntary.

To grasp the urgency of lifting the ubiquitous economic shutdowns, visit New York City's Central Park, ideally in the morning. At 5:45 am, it is occupied by maybe 100 runners and cyclists, spread over 843 acres. A large portion of these early-bird exercisers wear masks. Are they trying to protect anyone they might encounter from their own unsuspected coronavirus infection? Perhaps. But if you yourself run towards an oncoming runner on a vector that will keep you at least three yards away when you pass each other, he is likely to lunge sideways in terror if your face is not covered. The masked cyclists, who speed around the park's inner road, apparently think that there are enough virus particles suspended in the billions of square feet of fresh air circulating across the park to enter their mucous membranes and to sicken them.

These are delusional beliefs, yet they demonstrate the degree of paranoia that has infected the population. Every day the lockdown continues, its implicit message that we are all going to die if we engage in normal life is reinforced. Polls show an increasing number of Americans opting to continue the economic quarantine indefinitely lest they be 'unsafe'. The longer that belief is reinforced, the less likely it will be that consumers will patronize reopened restaurants or board airplanes in sufficient numbers to bring the economy back to life.

The latest report on new unemployment claims was abysmal, coming in at 4.4 million last week, some 100,000 more than surveyed economists had expected. The continuous claims came in at just under 16 million, an all-time record. Mainstream labor economists estimate that, all things considered, the actual unemployment rate now (which is only officially reported with a lag) is above 20 percent — a rate not seen since the darkest days of the Great Depression. Indeed, all of the job gains since the Great Recession have been wiped out in just a matter of weeks.

What's worse, even though the official unemployment rate is probably not quite as high as it was in 1933 (when it averaged 24.9 percent), there are reasons to believe that our labor market is currently in even worse shape economically than it was at the lowest depths of the Great Depression. Furthermore, once we take into account insights from Austrian capital theory, we can see why Keynesian hopes for a rapid recovery — and calls for longer lockdowns due to health concerns — are misguided.

Why the Current Unemployment Is Worse Than the Great Depression

In the first place, there is a technical reason that the government's official unemployment figures for 1933 are misleading: at that time, people who held "make work" jobs funded by government relief efforts were counted as unemployed. (In my opinion, this was the correct judgment.) If instead we use adjusted figures (according to Darby 1976) then annual unemployment during the Depression peaked at 22.5% in 1932. In other words, if we count unemployment in the 1930s the way we count it today, then arguably the "official" rate is already the worst in US history, period.

However, besides this technical issue, there is a much more fundamental difference between unemployment in the early 1930s and today: back then, the people out of work had been laid off. Yet today, the people out of work are in lockdown.

Besides video games and Netflix, books are the only things any of us have left to keep us sane besides conversations with our significant others on Facetime. Yes, there's plenty to do — plenty of options to fill the time in between trips to the grocery store and reading news about the Chinese coronavirus, and books fill a void that otherwise goes unfilled, leaving only anxiety to take its place.

Books are essential in lockdown, but the New Zealand government doesn't think so. Under the onerous orders of Jacinda Ardern, a leader praised for her ability to lead the country through this global struggle under the auspices of "sympathy, love, and integrity" according to The Guardian, New Zealand has banned the sale of books as non-essential items.

Instead, the premier advises New Zealanders to keep a diary to help with contact tracing, as if they don't have enough on their minds already that they need to log their every move and rack their brains with anxiety with fears that they might be infected, or worse — infected someone they care about.

Under some of the toughest coronavirus restrictions that would make Michigan's Dolores Umbridge-like governor look like a kindly grandmother in a Disney movie, Ardern's government has banned all non-essential shopping and online delivery, and it has done so since 26 March. That's a long time to go without entertainment.