There’s a scene in Michael Lewis’ book, The Fifth Risk, about President Donald Trump’s takeover of the federal government that I can’t forget. It takes place in the offices of the Department of Energy on November 9, 2016, the day after Trump unexpectedly beat Hillary Clinton to win the presidential election. Most people don’t know what the Department of Energy does—Lewis didn’t before starting work on this book—but one of its central missions is safeguarding the U.S. nuclear arsenal and combating nuclear proliferation, so it’s pretty important. If you’re running for president, you, or at least someone who works for you, should know what the Department of Energy (DOE) does.

So, on the morning of November 9, department staffers awaited the arrival of Trump emissaries, as they did when President Obama was elected, and President Bush before him, and President Clinton before him, and so on. They had already cleared 30 desks and 30 parking space... This is what people who work in the federal government do when a new president is elected; they pivot, and they work for a new president.

Then a funny thing happened. Nobody came. Not on the first day, not the second. Even stranger, the same was true across the federal government. The people who actually did the work of the government agencies—Energy, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and so on—waited for their new leadership, but it simply…didn’t show up.

Over the next weeks and months, as the Trump people slowly inched their way into the offices of government agencies, they typically arrived either ignorant of the work of that agency or hostile to it, frequently both.

Germany's low fatality rate is because of his country's ability to test early and often. He estimates Germany has been testing around 120,000 people a week for COVID-19 during the monthlong period from late February to now, when it's reached epidemic proportions in the country, the most extensive testing regimen in the world.

In other words, Germany's equivalent to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — the Robert Koch Institute — makes recommendations but does not call the shots on testing for the entire country. Germany's 16 federal states make their own decisions on coronavirus testing because each of them is responsible for their own health care systems.

When Drosten's university medical center developed what became the test recommended by the World Health Organization, they rolled these tests out to their colleagues throughout Germany in January.

"And they of course rolled this out to labs they know in the periphery and to hospital labs in the area where they are situated," Drosten said. "This created a situation where, let's say, by the beginning or middle of February, testing was already in place, broadly."