Good morning. 
Saturday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of fifty-eight. Sunrise is 6:05 AM and sunset 7:41 PM, for 13h 35m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand two hundred fifty-seventh day.
On this day in 1943, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto is killed when his aircraft is shot down by U.S. fighters over Bougainville Island.
Recommended for reading in full —
Austin Carr and Chris Palmeri report Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going (‘More than 1,500 people on the company’s cruise ships have been diagnosed with Covid-19, and dozens have died’):
Carnival’s ships have become a floating testament to the viciousness of the new coronavirus and raised questions about corporate negligence and fleet safety. President and Chief Executive Officer Arnold Donald says his company’s response was reasonable under the circumstances. “This is a generational global event—it’s unprecedented,” he says. “Nothing’s perfect, OK? They will say, ‘Wow, these things Carnival did great. These things, 20/20 hindsight, they could’ve done better.’?”
Donald says that if his company failed to prepare for the pandemic, it failed in the same way that many national and local governments failed, and should be judged accordingly. “Each ship is a mini-city,” he says, and Carnival’s response shouldn’t be condemned before “analyzing what New York did to deal with the crisis, what the vice president’s task force did, what the Italians, Chinese, South Koreans, and Japanese did. We’re a small part of the real story. We’re being pulled along by it.”
In the view of the CDC, however, Carnival helped fuel the crisis. “Maybe that excuse flies after the Diamond Princess, or maybe after the Grand Princess,” says Cindy Friedman, the experienced epidemiologist who leads the CDC’s cruise ship task force. “I have a hard time believing they’re just a victim of happenstance.”
While it would have been tough to get everyone aboard the ships back to their home ports without infecting more people, Friedman says several of the plagued Carnival ships didn’t even begin their voyages until well after the company knew it was risky to do so. She says its actions created a “huge strain” on the country. “Nobody should be going on cruise ships during this pandemic, full stop,” she says.
Michael Gerson writes The dangerous conservative campaign against expertise:
The main failures we have seen in the coronavirus response have not been caused by excessive confidence in experts. Our problems have been rooted in the failure of political leaders to treat the warnings of experts with sufficient seriousness, and to act on those warnings with sufficient urgency. It was the president who publicly dismissed the disease as a minor annoyance when other members of his administration knew that to be untrue. It was the president who characterized pandemic awareness as a political conspiracy during wasted weeks. It was the president who spouted misinformation about the disease and its treatment while horrified experts stood beside him.
From the beginning, flattening the curve was going to require heroic measures to achieve mixed results. That is the nature of reality, not a commentary on public health expertise. The experts have earned our trust. And continued progress depends on believing them.