People underestimate the importance of dilligence as a virtue. No doubt it has something to do with how supremely mundane it seems. It is defined as "the constant and earnest effort to accomplish what is undertaken."... Understood, however, as the prerequisite of great accomplishment, diligence stands as one of the most difficult challenges facing any group of people who take on tasks of risk and consequence. It sets a high, seemingly impossible, expectation for performance and human behavior.

Courage is strength in the face of knowledge of what is to be feared or hoped. Wisdom is prudent strength.

No travel ban or quarantine will seal a country completely. Even if travel could be reduced by eighty per cent-itself a feat-models predict that new transmissions would be delayed only a few weeks. Worse, it would only drive an increase in the number of cases at the source. Health-care workers who have fallen ill would not be able to get out for treatment, and the international health personnel needed to quell the outbreak would no longer be able to go in.

And in stories, endings matter.

Our ideas of what our priorities are shift as we come face-to-face with some of the struggles.

What is the alternative to understanding the complexity of the world?

If the conversation people think is coming is the 'death panel' conversation, that's a total failure.