New York City is the densest city in the US. The runner up is San Francisco. NYC has more than 10,000 COVID-19 deaths. As of Monday, San Francisco had 15. Not 15,000. Fifteen people. California got hit with COVID-19 first, but they didn't get hit hard. We explore why, and what places like New York can learn from their approach. On today's show, as states begin to weigh how to enter people back into the workforce, Thomas Fuller, San Francisco bureau chief for The New York Times, discusses how California is approaching the move and what New York can learn from the state and Moritz Kraemer, scholar and researcher of epidemiology at Oxford University, joins to discuss what we know about how the virus has spread worldwide.

What does science tell us about the smartest, safest steps to take to restart the country once we start coming down the other side of the flattened curve? And what could life look like during the reboot?

On today's show, Sharon Begley, senior science writer for STAT News, and author of Can't Just Stop: An Investigation of Compulsions, discusses when it will be safe to relax the COVID-19 lockdown, and how it should happen.

New York Times opinion columnist Thomas Friedman argues that Joe Biden should create a unity cabinet, appointing members across the political spectrum to serve in key positions, from Democrats on the Bernie Sanders left to Republicans on the Mitt Romney right. 

COVID-19 originated in China and exploded across the US. Today, a look at the leaders of those two countries: What have they done right to contain this pandemic, what have they done wrong, and what haven't they done at all? On today's show, Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer, Peabody, and Polk-prize-winning health and science writer, and author of multiple best-selling books on global health and epidemic diseases, including, The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance ( Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994) discusses her cover story from The New Republic’s May issue about how Presidents Trump and Xi set the stage for the coronavirus pandemic. 

Susan Page, Washington bureau chief of USA TODAY, talks about some of the things that might have flown under the radar during this public health crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has hit some groups harder than others. Why is this virus affecting healthcare workers, Black and Brown neighborhoods and poorer communities worse than others?

On today's show, Irwin Redlener, professor of pediatrics and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University, co-founder of the Children's Health Fund, and the author of The Future of Us: What the Dreams of Children Mean for Twenty-First-Century America (Columbia University Press, 2017), talks about the latest on the COVID-19 pandemic and issues of testing, medical volunteers and disparities in outcomes by sex, age, income and race.

As educators around the country hunker down for what looks like months more of social distance learning, graduations and standardized tests loom, and video-chat tools have raised some eyebrows.For insight, we turn to the issues faced by the New York City school district, the largest district in the country in the hardest-hit city in the world.

This marks the third week of distance learning for NYC schools. Jessica Gould, WNYC reporter, and Alex Zimmerman, education reporter at Chalkbeat New York, report on how it's going, including the news that the Department of Education will prohibit the use of Zoom after reports of insecure connections on the popular video chat site.

With some hopeful signs coming out of hard-hit Italy and Spain that social distancing measures are flattening the curve, New York, Detroit and the state of Louisiana are projected to reach peak infections in the coming week. Going into this critical moment, we look at the federal response to the pandemic. On today's show, White House reporter for the Associated Press and political analyst for MSNBC/NBC News, Jonathan Lemire talks about the federal response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including guidelines and relief proposals.

Somehow, this pandemic has become partisan. We've been hearing from callers and other reporting that ardent supporters of President Trump have been making a point of breaking social distancing guidelines to try to paint the crisis as an inflation of the media and Trump's political opponents. On soday's show, McKay Coppins, staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Wilderness: Deep Inside the Republican Party's Combative, Contentious, Chaotic Quest to Take Back the White House (Little Brown, 2015), talks about how some Conservatives and Republicans are defying social distancing measures as a political act.

National policy conflicts with state policy conflicts with world policy on wearing masks to protect from COVID-19. Should you make your own? And if so, how? On today's show, as calls mount for a change in official guidelines on masks for non-healthcare workers, science journalist Roxanne Khamsi discusses the reasons for (and against) everyone wearing masks to protecting themselves and others against COVID-19 and Amy Wilson, a Jersey City-based artist who teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies department at the School of Visual Arts and maker of "political crafts," talks about some of the patterns and considerations for making them at home.