Ross Douthat: With coronavirus, reasonable panic and reasonable hopes

For far too long, America’s response to the coronavirus lacked what you might call rational panic. From the experts to the markets to the president and his cable-television court, an irrational calm prevailed when a general freak-out might have prepared us for the crisis.Today, at last, we have panic in surplus — however unevenly distributed and still-insufficient in some places. But now we need something else to leaven it: Along with rational panic, we need sources of rational hope.