Evening roundup

The evening closing of the browser tabs brings the following worthies:

• Farah Hancock at Newsroom continues to push the government for more detail on the Covid cases. This stuff is important. 


• More voluntary initiatives to get PPE to the front lines: 3D-printed face shields. 


• Tyler Cowen lays out just what a mess American universities are looking at for the coming year, predicting a fair few families will opt for a gap year. If we could get quarantine sorted out, NZ could put on a credible alternative. 


• Any sane version of pandemic rules would have aged care facilities protected against entry of Covid. Meanwhile, in the UK, Councils are withholding funding from care homes refusing to take in Covid patients. 


• Danyl McLaughlin writes in defence of Covid-19 contrarians.

  I trust the prime minister a lot more than her critics do. But I also believe that a lot of her cabinet ministers are incompetent, and others are highly unscrupulous, and that this government makes operational and policy blunders on a scale we haven’t seen in our last few decades of technocratic centrism (as I was writing this the news broke that the entire lockdown may have been illegal). And they’re currently making huge decisions based on incomplete information because there is no expert consensus or reliable data available.
  
  So I think there’s value to disrespectful questions and politicised critiques, and even some of the contrarianism, even if a lot of it is misguided or in bad faith, or simply wrong. And I think we need a space for those critiques in our mainstream politics and media instead of shouting it down and leaving it to circulate on the shadowy fringes of the internet.