The New Yorker:

On Friday, March 6th, DJ Jazzy Jeff was spinning records for a packed house at Whiskey Jacques bar, in Ketchum, Idaho. The party capped a week of festivities in Ketchum and the neighboring Sun Valley for the annual Black Summit of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (N.B.S.), the largest African-American ski and snowboard association in the world. Nearly seven hundred Brotherhood members had made the journey from their homes across the United States, or in some cases from London, for their forty-seventh annual mountain meet-up. The mayor of Sun Valley welcomed the Brotherhood with pomp and ceremony, including keys to the city and a proclamation of March 6th as National Brotherhood of Skiers Day.

By the following week, upward of a hundred and twenty-six members of the Brotherhood had come down with symptoms of the coronavirus. Twenty tested positive for COVID-19, and eight were hospitalized, including three in intensive-care units. On March 30th, DJ Jazzy Jeff announced that he was suffering from pneumonia and associated coronavirus symptoms. In the days since, two longtime N.B.S. members, Nathaniel Jackson, of Pasadena, and Charles Jackson, of Los Angeles, who shared a room while in Sun Valley, have died of the illness.

At least twice in March, President Trump invoked Idaho as an example of a certain kind of American place: wide open, capable, impervious to a health-care crisis. “Parts of our country are very lightly affected. Very small numbers,” Trump said, on March 24th. “You look at Nebraska, you look at Idaho, you look at Iowa, you look at many—I could name many countries that are handling it very, very well and that are not affected to the same extent, or, frankly, not even nearly to the extent of New York.” Five days later, Trump ticked off the same triumvirate of “countries.” “I said, ‘How about Nebraska? How about Idaho? How about Iowa?’ And you know what? Those people are so great—the whole Midwest,” he said, missing Idaho on the map by a thousand miles or so.

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