From Bloomberg: Washington Needs to Embrace Its Role as Ultimate Risk Manager. Get over it, Mitch McConnell. Our government has to manage the risk of a pandemic, and it needs to get better at it.

The actions that the federal, state and local governments in the U.S. have taken to stop the spread of the new coronavirus and to mitigate the resulting economic fallout have been tagged with the term “unprecedented” a lot over the past few weeks. In sheer scale and speed, they are. But government’s role as risk manager in a crisis isn’t new at all. It dates to the beginnings of the nation.