How's life? History Essay Research Coursework Paper

Hi Class,
How is your life? Would anyone want to start a new thread on our discussion board to talk about his or her life and the plans for the future in this age of pandemic?
I attach three assignments for this week. But I really hope that we can use our discussion board as a supporting group to share each other’s experiences and thoughts.
None of you expected to come to college facing this kind of situation. Unfortunately, it just happened. I have two concerns to share. First, I am not sure if we have been a half way through. Taking the Spanish Flu as an example. It hit the world in three waves. First, in spring 1918, then in the fall. Finally in winter-spring 1919. The second wave was the hardest. The covid-19 looks like reaching its peak now. But may it just be the first wave? Does it have the second or even the third wave coming?
Then, here is my second concern, probably more relevant to your life. In three weeks, about 17 million Americans filed unemployment benefit. The unemployment rate can reach above 20% or even 30%. This is something we have never experienced in our life time. Many of you, probably most of you, will enter the job market in this situation. This is a severe challenge for everyone.
Even after we go back to the normal, I would expect a profoundly transformed world. You probably need some different kinds of skills for your jobs. What are they and how should we prepare?
All those issues are so real for us and deserve a serious discussion. I hope you at least keep those questions in mind when you do your reading assignments.
As for our assignment, “How epidemics change civilizations” is an interview with one of the best experts on this issue, Frank Snowden. I hope you pay special attention to his discussion on how pandemics and quarantine gave rise to our modern state structure, the so-called “state-making” process. In order to contain the disease, the state enlarged its power significantly. What is the consequence of the extension of the reach of the government?
The other two articles were published over the last weekend. They tell and analyze how our government failed. I quote from one of the articles:
“The US now has about 62 deaths per million people. Meanwhile, according to Johns Hopkins University data, Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan all have less than 1 death per million; and China, South Korea and Singapore have each under 5 deaths per million. India, too, took decisive actions, with a complete national lockdown beginning on March 24, when there still had been only 10 deaths in a country of 1.3 billion people. As of today, India has only 289 reported deaths, or 0.2 cases per million, and the hospitals are not jammed with patients as in the US.”

We should put those numbers into a perspective. The number from China is highly unreliable. I expect the real number is much higher. India is a very poor country that probably does not have means to count its number accurately and it is still far away from its peak. Nevertheless, we see the remarkable gap between the U.S. and other countries. And our number still keeps growing much faster than most of other countries. What went wrong with our system and leadership? This is something we should focus on.

I don’t want to limit your discussion with particular prompts this time. Rather, I encourage you to share your experiences and thoughts on anything related to these particular days.

Thanks for your effort so far. I am looking forward to hearing from you.