The Harvard historian Jill Lepore recounted recently in The New Yorker magazine that when democracies sink into crisis, the question “where are we going?” leaps to everyone’s mind as if we were waiting for a weather forecast to tell us how healthy our democracy was going to be tomorrow. Quoting Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, Lepore writes that “political problems are not external forces beyond our control; they are forces within our control. We need solely to make up our own minds and to act.”And so it is with the coronavirusepidemic. How big will this epidemic be? How many people will i…