Too many workers are still falling through cracks in the Covid rescue package, a former cabinet minister warned today as he called for the lockdown to be eased "as quickly as possible".

Asked by LBC's Nick Ferrari if he would join them, Mr Jenrick said: "No, I don't think I would do. But I'm not going to pass judgement on other people and what they're choosing to do.

Sir Keir Starmer has urged the Prime Minister to form a "national consensus" on the next phase of the Government's coronavirus response as ministers work on plans to ease the lockdown.

Lockdown measures may start to be lifted on Monday "if we possibly can", Boris Johnson has announced.

Matt Hancock has slammed Professor Neil Ferguson for his "extraordinary" breach of coronavirus lockdown rules, adding he was left "speechless" by his actions.

EXCLUSIVE: Independent candidate withdraws after difficult decision over job 'I really, really dreamed of'

He also said he "bitterly regrets" the crisis in care homes, where staff have hit out at a lack of testing and PPE. The latest figures show that nursing home fatalities are continuing to rise, standing at 2,794 in the week to April 24, despite deaths in all settings beginning to fall.

The Government has failed to meet its 100,000 coronavirus daily testing target for the fifth day running as criticism mounts on ministers to bolster supplies.

Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breaths before rolling under the waves.

Evidently it’s not uncommon for seals to swim the couple dozen miles between Bangor, Maine, and the Atlantic Ocean, but I’d never seen them here before. They were a balm to my buzzing thoughts: What happens next? Will I become a vector of death to my elderly mother? Is the economy going to implode? For a precious few minutes there were only the seals and mergansers and the fish who drew them there, arriving as the Penobscot’s winter icepack broke and flowed to sea, a ritual enacted ever since glaciers retreated from this continental shelf.

In the months ahead we can look to nature for these respites. The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, physical distance easily maintained, and no pandemic can suspend it. Nature offers not just escape but reassurance.

The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, and physical distance is easily maintained.

In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, with the Nazi threat vanquished but the Cold War looming, George Orwell welcomed spring’s arrival in London’s bombed-out heart. “After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen,” he wrote in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” “Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.”

So she does. And so the slumbering earth warms to life. Two nights before the seals, two nights before World Health Organization declared a pandemic, before the NBA shut down with teams on the floor and fans in the seats, before the fright went beyond viral into logarithmic, was the Worm Moon: the full moon named for the imminent stir of earthworms in thawing soil.

In burrows beneath leaf litter, hibernating toads prepare to open what Orwell called “the most beautiful eye of any living creature,” resembling “the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.” Nearly as beautiful are the eyes of painted turtles waiting on pond bottoms here in eastern Maine, the ice above now retreating from shore, mallard couples dabbling in newly open water.

The birds are the surest sign of spring’s imminence. Downtown the house finches are holding daily concerts. Starlings are starting to replace their gold-streaked winter plumes with more iridescent garb. In the street today I saw two male mockingbirds joust above the pavement, their white wing-bars fluttering territorial semaphores, abandoning the contest only when a car nearly ran them down. 

There are many quieter signs, too: pale tips of shrubs poised to grow, a spider rappelling off a low branch, fresh fox scat in the driveway. It’s red from apples preserved under snow and lined with the fur of field mice and meadow voles whose secret winter tunnels are now revealed in the grass. Somewhere soon mother fox will give birth, nursing her blind hairless charges in underground peace.

Eastern comma butterflies will gather on the trunks of those apple trees and sip their rising sap. Not long after the first orange-belted bumblebee queens will appear, inspecting potential nest sites under fallen leaves and decomposing logs. Warm rainy nights will bring salamanders and newts, just a few spotted glistening inches long, some of them decades old, out from woodland hidey-holes and down ancient paths to vernal pool bacchanals held amidst a chorus of spring peepers. Woodland ephemerals will bloom in sunshine unfiltered by still-bare treetops. My favorite are trout lilies, colonies of which illuminate forest floors with a sea of bright yellow blossoms, petals falling once the canopy unfurls.

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers,” Orwell wrote, “but the earth is still going round the sun.”

At this point there’s no end of studies showing how nature is good for our health, how patients recover faster in hospital rooms with windows overlooking trees, how a mindful walk in the woods will lower stress and raise moods. All true, but at this moment something deeper and more urgent is offered. An affirmation of life.

Will the nightmare scenes out of Italy and Spain and now New York City spread across the land? How long will the pandemic last? Will it completely rend our already tattered social fabric? When can I again play hockey or go to a coffee shop or use a credit card machine without feeling like I’m risking my own and other lives? Who will die? Nobody knows for sure, but in a few weeks the swallows will arrive, and tonight above the fields at dusk I heard the cries of woodcock.

Secretive, ground-dwelling birds with limpid black eyes and long, slender beaks attuned to the frequencies of earthworm-rustles, their feathers blend perfectly with leaf litter and old grass. They rely on this camouflage, going still rather than fleeing a walker’s approach, taking wing only as a last resort.

When they do, their flight is notable for its slowness and the quavering whistle of their wings. At no other time than in spring do they dare draw attention, much less put on a show: calling out, with an urgent nasal buzz best described as a peent, and flying straight upward before spiraling against a darkening sky.

Brandon Keim is a freelance nature and science journalist. The author of The Eye of the Sandpiper: Stories from the Living World, he’s now writing Meet the Neighbors, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company, about what it means to think of wild animals as fellow persons—and what that means for the future of nature.

Lead image: Tim Zurowski / Shutterstock

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You probably know my robot. I’ve been inventing autonomous machines for over 30 years and one of them, Roomba from iRobot, is quite popular. During my career, I’ve learned a lot about what makes robots valuable, and formed some strong opinions about what we can expect from them in the future. I can also tell you why, contrary to popular apocalyptic Hollywood images, robots won’t be taking over the world anytime soon. But that’s getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.

My love affair with robots began in the early 1980s when I joined the research staff at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. Physics was my college major but after a short time at the lab the potential of the developing technology seduced me. I became a roboticist.

Such an exhilarating place to work! A host of brilliant people were researching deep problems and fascinating algorithms. Amazingly clever mechanisms were being developed, and it was all converging in clever and capable mobile robots. The future seemed obvious. So, I made a bold prediction and told all my friends, “In three to five years, robots will be everywhere doing all sorts of jobs.”

But I was wrong.

Again and again in those early years, news stories teased: “Big Company X has demonstrated a prototype of Consumer Robot Y. X says Y will be available for sale next year.” But somehow next year didn’t arrive. Through the 1980s and 1990s, robots never managed to find their way out of the laboratory. This was distressing to a committed robot enthusiast. Why hadn’t all the journal papers, clever prototypes, and breathless news stories culminated in a robot I could buy in a store?

Let me answer with the story of the first consumer robot that did achieve marketplace stardom.

RUG WARRIOR: Joe Jones built his “Rug Warrior” (above) in 1989. He calls it “the earliest conceptual ancestor of Roomba.” It included bump sensors and a carpet sweeper mechanism made from a bottle brush. It picked up simulated dirt at a demonstration but, Jones says, “was not robust enough to actually clean my apartment as I had hoped.”Courtesy of Joe Jones

In the summer of 1999, while working at iRobot, a colleague, Paul Sandin, and I wrote a proposal titled “DustPuppy, A Near-Term, Breakthrough Product with High Earnings Potential.” We described an inexpensive little robot, DustPuppy, that would clean consumers’ floors by itself. Management liked the idea and gave us $10,000 and two weeks to build a prototype.

Using a cylindrical brush, switches, sensors, motors, and a commonplace microprocessor, we assembled our vision. At the end of an intense fortnight we had it—a crude version of a robot that conveyed a cleaning mechanism around the floor and—mostly—didn’t get stuck. Management saw the same promise in DustPuppy as Paul and me.

We called our robot DustPuppy for a reason. This was to be the world’s first significant consumer robot and the team’s first attempt at a consumer product. The risk was that customers might expect too much and that we might deliver too little. We were sure that—like a puppy—our robot would try very hard to please but that also—like a puppy—it might sometimes mess up. Calling it DustPuppy was our way of setting expectations and hoping for patience if our robot wasn’t perfect out of the gate. Alas, iRobot employed a firm to find a more commercial name. Many consumer tests later, DustPuppy became Roomba. The thinking was the robot’s random motion makes it appear to be dancing around the room—doing the Rumba.

Paul and I knew building a robotic floor cleaner entails fierce challenges not apparent to the uninitiated. Familiar solutions that work well for people can prove problematic when applied to a robot.

Your manual vacuum likely draws 1,400 watts or 1.9 horsepower from the wall socket. In a Roomba-sized robot, that sort of mechanism would exhaust the battery in about a minute. Make the robot bigger, to accommodate a larger battery, and the robot won’t fit under the furniture. Also, batteries are expensive—the cost of a big one might scuttle sales. We needed innovation.

Melville Bissell, who patented the carpet sweeper in 1876, helped us out. We borrowed from his invention to solve Roomba’s energy problem. A carpet sweeper picks up dirt very efficiently. Although you supply all the power, you won’t work up a sweat pushing one around. (If you supplied the entire 1.9 horsepower a conventional vacuum needs, you’d do a lot of sweating!)

When designers festoon their robots with anthropomorphic features, they are making a promise no robot can keep.

We realized that our energy-efficient carpet sweeper would not clean as quickly or as deeply as a powerful vacuum. But we thought, if the robot spends enough time doing its job, it can clean the surface dirt just as well. And if the robot runs every day, the surface dirt won’t work into the carpet. Roomba matches a human-operated vacuum by doing the task in a different way.

Any robot vacuum must do two things: 1) not get stuck, and 2) visit every part of the floor. The first imperative we satisfied in part by making Roomba round with its drive wheels on the diameter. The huge advantage of this shape is that Roomba can always spin in place to escape from an object. No other shape enables such a simple, reliable strategy. The second imperative, visiting everywhere, requires a less obvious plan.

You move systematically while cleaning, only revisiting a spot if that spot is especially dirty. Conventional wisdom says our robot should do the same—drive in a boustrophedon pattern. (This cool word means writing lines in alternate directions, left to right, right to left, like an ox turns in plowing.) How to accomplish this? We received advice like, “Just program the robot to remember where it’s been and not go there again.”

Such statements reveal a touching faith that software unaided can solve any technical problem. But try this exercise (in a safe place, please!). While standing at a marked starting point, pick another point, say, six feet to your left. Now keep your eyes closed while you walk in a big circle around the central point. How close did you come to returning to your starting point? Just like you, a robot can’t position itself in the world without appropriate sensors. Better solutions are available today, but circa 2000 a position-sensing system would have added over $1,000 to Roomba’s cost. So, boustrophedon paths weren’t an option. We had to make Roomba do its job without knowing where it was.

I design robots using a control scheme called behavior-based programming. This approach is robot-appropriate because it’s fast, responsive, and runs on low-cost computer hardware. A behavior-based program structures a robot’s control scheme as a set of simple, understandable behaviors.

Remember that Roomba’s imperative is to apply its cleaning mechanism to all parts of the floor and not get stuck. The program that accomplishes this needs a minimum of two behaviors. Call them Cruise and Escape. Cruise is single-minded. It ignores all sensor inputs and constantly outputs a signal telling the robot’s motors to drive forward.

Escape watches the robot’s front bumper. Whenever the robot collides with something, one or both of the switches attached to the bumper activate. If the left switch closes, Escape knows there’s been a collision on the left, so it tells the motors to spin the robot to the right. A collision on the right means spin left. If both switches close at once, an arbitrary decision is made. When neither switch is closed Escape sends no signal to the motors.

TEST FLOORS: “Roomba needed to function on many floor types and to transition smoothly from one type to another,” says Joe Jones. “We built this test floor to verify that Roomba would work in this way.” The sample floors include wood, various carpets, and tiles.Courtesy of Joe Jones

Occasionally Cruise and Escape try to send commands to the motors at the same time. When this happens, a bit of code called an arbiter decides which behavior succeeds—the highest priority behavior outputting a command wins. In our example, Escape is assigned the higher priority.

Watching the robot, we see a complex behavior emerge from these simple rules. The robot moves across the floor until it bumps into something. Then it stops moving forward and turns in place until the path is clear. It then resumes forward motion. Given time, this random motion lets the robot cover, and clean, the entire floor.

Did you guess so little was going on in the first Roomba’s brain? When observers tell me what Roomba is thinking they invariably imagine great complexity—imbuing the robot with intentions and intricate plans that are neither present nor necessary. Every robot I build is as simple and simple-minded as I can make it. Anything superfluous, even intelligence, works against marketplace success.

The full cleaning task contains some extra subtleties. These require more than just two behaviors for efficient operation. But the principle holds, the robot includes only the minimum components and code required for the task.

A few months from product launch, we demonstrated one of our prototypes to a focus group. The setup was classical: A facilitator presented Roomba to a cross section of potential customers while the engineers watched from a darkened room behind a one-way mirror.

The session was going well, people seemed to like the robot and it picked up test dirt effectively. Then the facilitator mentioned that Roomba used a carpet sweeper mechanism and did not include a vacuum.

The mood changed. Our test group revised the price they’d be willing to pay for Roomba, cutting in half their estimate from only minutes earlier. We designers were perplexed. We solved our energy problem by eschewing a vacuum in favor of a carpet sweeper—and it worked! Why wasn’t that enough for the focus group?

Did you guess so little was going on in Roomba’s brain? Every robot I build is as simple-minded as I can make it.

Decades of advertising have trained consumers that a vacuum drawing lots of amps means effective cleaning. We wanted customers to judge our new technology using a more appropriate metric. But there was no realistic way to accomplish that. Instead, our project manager declared, “Roomba must have a vacuum, even if it does nothing.”

No one on the team wanted a gratuitous component—even if it solved our marketing problem. We figured we could afford three watts to run a vacuum motor. But a typical vacuum burns 1,400 watts. What could we do with just three?

Using the guts of an old heat gun, some cardboard, and packing tape, I found a way. It turned out that if I made a very narrow inlet, I could achieve the same air-flow velocity as a regular vacuum but, because the volume was miniscule, it used only a tiny bit of power. We had a vacuum that actually contributed to cleaning.

DUST PUPPY: Before the marketers stepped in with the name “Roomba,” Joe Jones and his colleague Paul Sandin called their floor cleaner, “DustPuppy.” “Our robot would try very hard to please,” Jones writes. But like a puppy, “it might sometimes mess up.” Above, Sandin examines a prototype, with designer Steve Hickey (black shirt) and intern Ben Trueman.Courtesy of Joe Jones

There’s a moment in the manufacturing process called “commit to tooling” when the design must freeze so molds for the plastic can be cut. Fumble that deadline and you may miss your launch date, wreaking havoc on your sales.

About two weeks before “commit,” our project manager said, “Let’s test the latest prototype.” We put some surrogate dirt on the floor and let Roomba run over it. The dirt remained undisturbed.

Panic ensued. Earlier prototypes had seemed to work, and we thought we understood the cleaning mechanism. But maybe not. I returned to the lab and tried to identify the problem. This involved spreading crushed Cheerios on a glass tabletop and looking up from underneath as our cleaning mechanism operated.

Our concept of Mr. Bissell’s carpet sweeper went like this: As the brush turns against the floor, bristle tips pick up dirt particles. The brush rotates inside a conforming shroud carrying the dirt to the back where a toothed structure combs it from the brush. The dirt then falls into the collection bin.

That sedate description couldn’t have been more wrong. In fact, as the brush turns against the floor, a flicking action launches dirt particles into a frenetic, chaotic cloud. Some particles bounce back onto the floor, some bounce deep into the brush, some find the collection bin. The solution was to extend the shroud around the brush a little farther on the back side—that redirected the dirt that bounced out such that the brush had a second chance to pick it up. Roomba cleaned again and we could begin cutting molds with a day or two to spare.

Roomba launched in September 2002. Its success rapidly eclipsed the dreams of all involved.

Did Roomba’s nascent reign end the long robot drought? Was my hordes-of-robots-in-service-to-humanity dream about to come true?

In the years since iRobot released Roomba, many other robot companies have cast their die. Here are a few: Anki, Aria Insights, Blue Workforce, Hease Robotics, Jibo, Keecker, Kuri, Laundroid, Reach Robotics, Rethink Robotics, and Unbounded Robotics. Besides robots and millions of dollars of venture capitalist investment, what do all of these companies have in common? None are in business today.

The commercial failure of robots and robot companies is not a new phenomenon. Before Roomba, the pace was slower, but the failure rate no less disappointing. This dismal situation set me looking for ways around the fatal missteps roboticists seemed determined to make. I settled on three principles that we followed while developing Roomba.

1. Perform a Valuable Task

When a robot does a specific job, say, mowing your lawn or cleaning your grill, its value is clear and long-lasting. But over the years, I’ve seen many cool, cute, engaging robots that promised great, albeit vague, value while performing no discernable task. Often the most embarrassing question I could ask the designer of such a robot was, “What does your robot do?” In this case the blurted answer, “Everything!” is synonymous with “Nothing.” The first principle for a successful robot is: Do something people want done. When a robot’s only attribute is cuteness, value evaporates as novelty fades.

2. Do the Task Today

Many robots emerge from research labs. In the lab, researchers aspire to be first to achieve some impressive result; cost and reliability matter little. But cost and reliability are paramount for real-world products. Bleeding edge technologies are rarely inexpensive, reliable, or timely. Second principle: Use established technology. A research project on the critical path to robot completion can delay delivery indefinitely.

3. Do the Task for Less

People have jobs they want done and states they want achieved—a clean floor, a mowed lawn, fresh folded clothes in the dresser. The result matters, the method doesn’t. If a robot cannot provide the lowest cost, least arduous solution, customers won’t buy it. Third principle: A robotic solution must be cost-competitive with existing solutions. People will not pay more to have a robot do the job.

A few robots have succeeded impressively: Roomba, Kiva Systems (warehouse robots), and Husqvarna’s Automower (lawn mower). But I started this article with the question, why aren’t successful robots everywhere? Maybe the answer is becoming clearer.

Robot success is opportunistic. Not every application has a viable robotic solution. The state of the art means only select applications offer: a large market; existing technology that supports autonomy; a robotic approach that outcompetes other solutions.

There’s one more subtle aspect. Robots and people may accomplish the same task in completely different ways. This makes deciding which tasks are robot-appropriate both difficult and, from my perspective, great fun. Every potential task must be reimagined from the ground up.

My latest robot, Tertill, prevents weeds from growing in home gardens. A human gardener pulls weeds up by the roots. Why? Because this optimizes the gardeners time. Leaving roots behind isn’t a moral failure, it just means weeds will rapidly re-sprout forcing the gardener to spend more time weeding.

Tertill does not pull weeds but attacks them in two other ways. It cuts the tops off weeds and it uses the scrubbing action of the wheels to kill weeds as they sprout from seeds. These tactics work because the robot, unlike the gardener, lives in the garden. Tertill returns every day to prevent rooted weeds from photosynthesizing so roots eventually die; weed seeds that are constantly disturbed don’t sprout.

Had Tertill copied the human solution, the required root extraction mechanism and visual identification system would have increased development time, added cost, and reduced reliability. Without reimagining the task, there would be no solution.

Robots have a hard-enough time doing their jobs at all. Burdening them with unnecessary features and expectations worsens the problem. That’s one reason I’m always vexed when designers festoon their robots with anthropomorphic features—they make a promise no robot can keep. Anthropomorphic features and behaviors hint that the robot has the same sort of inner life as people. But it doesn’t. Instead the robot has a limited bag of human-mimicking tricks. Once the owner has seen all the tricks, the robot’s novelty is exhausted and along with it the reason for switching on the robot. Only robots that perform useful tasks remain in service after the novelty wears off.

No commercially successful robot I’m aware of has superfluous extras. This includes computation cycles—cycles it might use to contemplate world domination. All of the robot’s resources are devoted to accomplishing the task for which it was designed, or else it wouldn’t be successful. Working robots don’t have time to take over the world.

Robots have been slow to appear because each one requires a rare confluence of market, task, technology, and innovation. (And luck. I only described some of the things that nearly killed Roomba.) But as technology advances and costs decline, the toolbox for robot designers constantly expands. Thus, more types of robots will cross the threshold of economic viability. Still, we can expect one constant. Each new, successful robot will represent a minimum—the simplest, lowest-cost solution to a problem people want solved. The growing set of tools that let us attack ever more interesting problems make this an exciting time to practice robotics.

Joe Jones is cofounder and CTO of Franklin Robotics. A graduate of MIT, he holds more than 70 patents.

Lead image: Christa Mrgan / Flickr

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The coronavirus news from Mozambique is mixed, as it is in much of sub-Saharan Africa. Many experts fear chaos is inevitable.Photograph by gaborbasch / Shutterstock

We called Greg Carr the other day to talk about the spread of the coronavirus in Africa. Carr, who has been featured in Nautilus, is the founder of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a partnership with the Mozambique government to revive Gorongosa National Park, that environmental treasure trove at the southern end of the Rift Valley. The 1,500 square-mile park, about the size of Rhode Island, was first given animal refuge status in the 1920s by the Portuguese, and for years was a favorite of European tourists. But in 1983 civil war broke out and the park became a no-man’s land. The place was poached to death, closed up and didn’t reopen until 1992.

Renewal began in 2004 and in 2008 the government signed a restoration agreement with Carr’s foundation. The agreement, which lasts through 2043, envisions a “human rights park” that will restore both ecosystems and economic vitality. After 11 years of rebuilding infrastructure, reintroducing animals, including hippos and wildebeests, and working with local communities, Gorongosa is thriving again. The park now serves as a model for future conservation. Today some 200,000 people live around the park in a “sustainable development zone” that includes education, employment opportunities, and health service. About 700 people have full time jobs in the park; another 300, part time. Naturalist E.O. Wilson calls Gorongosa “a window on eternity.”

“If there’s one thing the rest of the world can learn from Africans, it would be their resilience.”

Carr is a 60-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist who grew up in Idaho and in his mid twenties co-founded Boston Technology, a voice mail company. By the time he turned 40 he had amassed his fortune and couldn’t see the fun in doing it all over again, and so turned to philanthropy. These days he’s in Idaho Falls, on the phone six hours a day, getting the latest reports from his staff in the park, now closed until further notice.

The coronavirus news from Mozambique is mixed, as it is in much of sub-Saharan Africa. With the exception of South Africa, with over 7,500 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 148 deaths, some countries below the Equator have fewer than 100 cases. As of May 6, there were just 81 cases in Mozambique and no deaths. If these numbers don’t blow up, the quick explanation might hold that the median age in Sub Saharan Africa is under 20, just 17.6 in Mozambique; population density is low (103 people per square mile); and there’s relatively limited direct contact with heavily infected countries in other parts of the world. 

Still, many experts fear chaos is inevitable. Underlying conditions in Mozambique include implacable poverty and a 60-year history of colonial and civil wars. On another front, in early April, in northern Mozambique, an Isis group shot or beheaded 52 young people because they refused to be recruited. Add a 48 percent literacy rate for women, 60 percent for men. The country also suffers the world’s eighth-highest incidence of HIV; 1.5 million people have contracted the virus and nearly 40,000 people have died. Finally, a large number of Mozambicans go to South Africa for work and then return. Testing is rare in the entire country.

In March, CDC Africa sent out a national directive requiring social distancing. “People are going to pay more attention to that in the cities than they are in rural Mozambique, at least until the virus really comes,” Carr said the other day. “Now, if you live in rural Mozambique, you don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘I’m isolating at home.’ People have to go out every day, to get food and water, from 40 to 60 liters a day, they have to tend to their farms. The idea of social distancing is a bit impossible for these folks.” He added, “Schools are closed and we are making our own masks for people. We all know there’s no treatment per se or certainly vaccine. If this hits, we’ll only be able to offer people Tylenol and soup.”

Cases in Mozambique could shoot up as mine workers continue to return home from their jobs in South Africa. “In my opinion,” said Carr, “Mozambique does not have the capacity to deal with this type of pandemic, as there are few qualified health personnel and the high level of poverty leads people to resist isolating themselves, as they look for alternatives to take care of their families. Our Gorongosa teams are in the field, spreading prevention messages, distributing masks and water purification.” 

Berta Barros, head nurse at Gorongosa, told Carr recently she has three main worries: lack of COVID-19 test kits, lack of healthcare professionals to respond to sick patients, and shortage of medications for treatment. “Mozambique has a population close to 30 million and we only have 34 ventilators,” Barros said. “It’s beyond impossible to work and choose who to save.”

Carr often talks about Mozambique as though he was Mozambican. “We’re very practical people,” he’ll say. “We’re not really theoretical. We’re just going to work our way through this.” He shies away from broad, open-ended questions about Africa, much less cultural comparisons and grand conclusions. “Africa is more than 1 billion people in 54 countries with, what, 2,500 languages? To make a statement like, ‘Africa is this…’ Frankly, I just think a lot of it is complete baloney.”

At the same time, says Carr, “If there’s one thing the rest of the world can learn from Africans, it would be their resilience. We’ve had five years of war in Mozambique and then last year we had a cyclone that killed nearly 1,000 people. I didn’t even mention the two droughts we had in the last seven years and the armyworm that came through and ate everybody’s maize. These people had their homes washed away in a flood last year, lost everything. So they rebuild their homes and then someone says, ‘Hey, there might be a virus coming through.’ It’s just one thing after another.”

What impact might the pandemic have on animals in the park? What effect will it have on just recovered antelope populations, for example, and the inevitable increase in poaching as tourism subsides? How many resources will need to be taken away from the war on other diseases to fight this? Impossible to say. But an anecdote came to Carr’s mind that suggests the vagaries of death in Southern Africa. “I got a call from a dear friend of mine yesterday, a Mozambique good friend, who said her aunt had just died. I said, ‘Wow, do you think it was COVID?’ She goes, ‘No, she’d been suffering for a while with a bad kidney.’ Life is tough in Africa. Do we know for sure this woman didn’t also have COVID and that contributed? Maybe. The truth about Africa is that disaster is hardly news. Malaria is the most prolific killer. And when they turn 50, people die and often no one knows exactly what the cause was. It’s just the way life is.”

Mark MacNamara is an Asheville, North Carolina-based writer. His articles for Nautilus include “We Need to Talk About Peat” and “The Artist of the Unbreakable Code.”

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If both can make a dough rise, why does your dough recipe call for both?

And let's move beyond the tiresome ideological battle lines of “private bad, public good.” It's not that simple.

Ottawa Fire Services received a 911 call from the homeowner at 6183 Carp Rd., reporting a detached garage was on fire. That was followed by a number of 911 calls reported heavy smoke coming from the area of Carp and Styles Side roads. While on route to the scene, crews spotted the heavy smoke and […]

A new meme imagines a walking down all sorts of aisles after coronavirus-related lockdowns end

Nintendo is no longer repairing the Wii video game console, which was released in 2006 and let players swing controllers to impact action on screen.

Plague Inc. is an app and online game in which users play the role of a disease set on infecting the world with a pathogen.

Free-to-play online games such as "Fortnite" will probably earn about $88 billion globally in 2020. Activision's new "Call of Duty" enters the fray.

Nintendo says it is working with public health authorities after one of their employees tested positive for the coronavirus.

Nintendo plans to release remastered versions of classic titles in the Mario catalog for Nintendo Switch in 2020.

While we wait to get our first official glimpse of the PlayStation 5, Sony is sharing the first details on the video game console's controller.

Google is launching a series of Doodles starting Monday celebrating some of their most popular interactive games available on its main search page.

Coronavirus lockdowns and extended social distancing has more people playing video games to stay connected and pass the time.

From love triangles to the bond between mothers and daughters, performers step into the relationships minefield

• Hottest front-room seats: the best theatre and dance online

The beady-eyed character of Iseult Golden’s monologue could be an Alan Bennett creation: steely and unsentimental, she speaks her mind smartingly in a video message to her daughter who refuses to talk to her. Her tone is spiky at first but Marion O’Dwyer’s wry, understated delivery gives the drama a quietly pained depth. Part of the Abbey theatre’s monumental series Dear Ireland, it captures the bristling complexities of love between mothers and daughters in eight bittersweet minutes.

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Despite everything, the Tory party is sticking to the ideology of the free market, rather than saving lives and jobs

“How on earth did it come to this?” Keir Starmer’s question could skewer Boris Johnson at every PMQs from now on. It encompasses all the damage the government did in the last decade, as well as all it has failed to do to protect the country from Covid-19. The list of derelictions in the early stage of the crisis is long, the testing and the protective equipment still shamefully inadequate. Have lessons been learned? The auguries are not good.

Related: Picnics and sunbathing on cards as PM expected to allow more time outside

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Clarity on lifting Covid-19 rules needed, from increasing time outdoors to schools returning

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Boris Johnson will address the nation on Sunday to set out a road map for how England might leave the Covid-19 lockdown. Any immediate changes have been billed as modest and incremental, but people are expecting more details on how life could differ over the next few weeks. Here are the questions the prime minister needs to answer:

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The government must be cautious in both the decisions it takes and the messages it sends

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The end is not in sight. With an estimated 20,000 new infections a day, and with experts warning that the reproduction rate of coronavirus may be rising again, any premature loosening of the lockdown will only prolong the crisis. When the prime minister speaks on Sunday evening, it is essential that he makes it clear that people should still be staying at home, not relaxing their guard.

Though so many other countries had been hit, the government did not act soon enough to either contain the threat or prepare for it. Those failures have made a longer and tougher lockdown necessary. It was slow to take the pandemic seriously, slow to impose stringent social distancing, and slow to pursue equipment, testing and tracing, as the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, noted this week.

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It was intended as an interim measure to protect people during the pandemic, but now that doctors across Canada have embraced virtual care, some clinicians and patients would like to see it continue.

A U of S researcher says there is no evidence that COVID-19 jumped to humans from bats.

A small flock of shorebirds contaminated with oil after touching down on a northern Alberta tailings pond is expected to be released back into the wild within a week.

Handful of stars will be interviewed live from their living rooms

'If I'm not acting, I'm not sure who I am,' the True Blood star said

'I'm very hurt and angry that she had to go through all that pain alone'

He called Exotic 'unbelievably cruel'

Saturday's instalment of 'SNL at home' brilliantly acknowledged the gravity of our times while poking fun at quarantine culture

Live shows will begin this month

Protective gear from The Crown, The Young Pope and Vikings have also been sent to key workers