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How the U.S. Stacks Up to Other Countries in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases (Dylan Scott and Rani Molla, Vox)
The United States case numbers are more in line with Italy and Iran than Singapore and Hong Kong.

Sorry, America, the Full Lockdown Is Coming (Laura Garrett, Foreign Policy)
Politicians won’t admit it yet, but it’s time to prepare—physically and psychologically—for a sudden stop to all life outside your home.

Why Do Politicians Keep Breathing Life into the False Conspiracy Theory That the Coronavirus Is a Bioweapon? (Matt Field, John Krzyzaniak, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)
You’ve probably heard the rumor: The new coronavirus is a bioweapon. Some malicious country—perhaps the United States, maybe China, depending on who’s talking or tweeting—purposefully unleashed the virus that causes Covid-19 on the world. You might have also heard that the idea was widely dismissed by disease and defense experts. A good bioweapon, some note, wouldn’t spread as easily and indiscriminately as the new coronavirus does. But for political opportunists and conspiracy theorists, the rising number of Covid-19 infections, the growing ranks of the dead, and the mass disruptions to the daily rhythms of life have created fertile conspiratorial ground.
Current and former government officials, including former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lijian Zhao, and US Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas have given credence to some version of the theory in the last month.
In the United States, Cotton isn’t fully letting up on his suggestion last month that the virus was a Chinese military creation. In a Fox News interview in February, he appeared to suggest just that, before walking back the idea, sort of. (In a series of tweets, he said the bioweapon theory was just one of several hypotheses.) Bioweapon or not, Cotton still believes someone is responsible for the pandemic, someone Chinese. In a statement Thursday announcing that he’d be temporarily closing his Senate office, he called the virus the “Wuhan coronavirus” five times, vowing, “We will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world.” In a later clarifying tweet, he said that, yes, he meant China.

Trump’s New Fixation on Using a Racist Name for the Coronavirus Is Dangerous (Dylan Scott, Vox)
The president is stoking xenophobia with his rhetoric about the coronavirus.
Two days ago, President Donald Trump suddenly stopped referring to the Covid-19 coronavirus by its common name, which experts and laypeople and the president himself had been using for months, and started using a racist designation: the “Chinese virus.”
The world has been trying to move past the racist disease-naming conventions of the past in recent years, making it all the more telling that Trump has revived them in a moment of crisis. He might be annoyed that Chinese officials and media have, for their part, tried to blame the virus on America. He might want to deflect blame onto anybody else given the harsh criticism his administration has faced for being slow to respond to the outbreak.
But whatever the reason, it appears the term he’s been using — with all of its potentially dangerous consequences, particularly for Asian Americans — is now the preferred nomenclature of the White House.

Coronavirus Hits Terrorists Hardest from ISIS to Iran – Analysis (Yonah Jeremy Bob, Jerusalem Post)
After sanctions and military threats, the coronavirus may be the first factor that can slow Iran’s march toward a nuclear weapon.

Facing Coronavirus Pandemic, U.S. Confronts Cyberattacks (Ali Dukakis, James Gordon Meek, Mike Levine, Luke Barr, and Josh Margolin, ABC News)
Federal officials told ABC News that outside actors are trying to sow panic.

Tattoo Recognition Score Card: How Institutions Handled Unethical Biometric Surveillance Dataset (Matthew Guariglia, Dave Maass, and Aaron Mackey, EFF)
In response to an EFF campaign started last year, roughly a third  of institutions that we believe requested problematic and exploitive data as part of a government automated tattoo recognition challenge deleted the data or reported that they had never received or used it.

The Government Might Want Your Phone Location Data to Fight Coronavirus. Here’s Why That Could Be Okay. (Sara Morrison, Vox)
Privacy advocates want restrictions on how much phone location data the government gets from tech companies.