Editorials category, Page 65

Easter isn’t a celebration of rabbits and chocolate. It isn’t about the lilies and jelly beans and ham. It isn’t even about the church service with meaningful sermons and little kids in crisp new pastel outfits. That’s all an important part of the annual rite of spring. It’s just not...

Laurel: To a bunny’s best helpers. Easter is one of those milestone holidays for many kids, like Christmas or birthdays. For some, it could be hard to reconcile a quarantine celebration without egg hunts and family parties. But volunteers in South Greensburg helped the Easter bunny out by making sure...

Hero. A person admired because of courageous acts or selfless endeavors. We all know what a hero is. It’s the firefighter who rescues a kid from a burning building or the soldier who falls on a grenade. It’s a police officer who stops a bank robbery. We recognize the heroes...

Passover will not be dimmed by the coronavirus. It cannot. A holiday that remembers biblical plagues cannot be bullied by a pandemic. Starting Wednesday at sundown, Passover is the eight-day Jewish celebration that commemorates the Hebrew slaves winning their freedom in Egypt. It begins with the Seder. It is an...

Let’s face it: It’s hard to pretend that anything is normal right now. If this were normal, kids would be playing Little League baseball and high school girls would be trying on prom gowns. People would be enjoying the mild spring weather by shopping for plants for the yard. And...

The comparisons are inevitable. Coronavirus is a contagious respiratory illness you can pick up from a doorknob or a stray sneeze. Some infected people show no symptoms. Others come down with what ranges from a bad to a monstrous cold. An alarming number of people need hospital treatment. Many die....

The numbers are exploding as more people are affected by the coronavirus epidemic. Not just the number of people who are diagnosed with the disease, now topping a million worldwide and 266,000 in the United States. Not just the number of people who have died — some 7,000 nationally and...

Good news came out of Pittsburgh on Thursday. It came in the form of a fingertip-sized innovation with miniature needles made of sugar and virus proteins. It might be the vaccine that protects millions from the novel coronavirus pandemic. And it has been developed at the University of Pittsburgh School...

Laurel: To the right prescription. Match Day is something medical students look forward to from their first day of class. It’s the day they find out the hospitals where they will do their residency years. It’s a celebratory day, with students getting their assignments all together. At Pitt, it’s a...

The Pennsylvania economy is a butterfly in a jar, held in place but still fluttering. The jar is the shutdown ordered by Gov. Tom Wolf in response to the coronavirus pandemic. They’re an effort to mitigate the risk to human life posed by a disease that the latest federal estimates...

When the chips are down, you listen to the people who know what they are talking about. The firefighters say this is the way out of the fire? Go that way. The police say get down during a bank robbery? Lie on the floor. So what do you do when...

Another 30 days. As we sit in our homes or in our eerily empty offices or in stores that are long on lines and short on basics, it might be hard to imagine. As we deal with kids doing classwork via conference calls or visit our doctors on video chats,...

Bad situations can bring out the best in people. It can also bring out the worst. People are scared and unsure in the coronavirus pandemic. They don’t know what’s coming next on the economic roller coaster, and they are nervous about grocery shopping and opening doors. And let’s just admit...

It’s up to us all now. The Pennsylvania Department of Health is not untangling the webs that tie one covid-19 infection to another anymore. The disturbing thing is that isn’t just happening now. “Contact tracing stopped last week, as the number of cases alone, without doing follow-up contact, became challenging...

Don’t call it a stimulus. The bill passed by Congress and signed by President Trump will pump $2.2 trillion from Washington into the pockets of Americans and the checkbooks of businesses and the coffers of cities and states. For people who have rent to pay and groceries to buy —...

Laurel: To reaching out while staying in. Carla Chugani of Dormont isn’t letting social distancing keep her from helping people during the coronavirus pandemic. She’s doing it by creating her own free food pantry on her porch, in the style of Little Free Libraries. Stocked with things like nonperishable foods,...

Pennsylvania was so close to mattering in the presidential primary this year. Things were tight on the Democratic side nationwide, and maybe the Keystone State would be key in making a choice between putting former Vice President Joe Biden or Sen. Bernie Sanders on the ballot for the fall. And...

A worldwide medical crisis requires you to trust others and use common sense in a way that can sometimes be hard for us. Especially when the two ideas are at odds and it’s up to us all to make smart decisions. If we ignore the good advice — or exercise...

Newspapers know the value of having people on the same page. That’s why when there isn’t enough room for a full story on the front, we tell you exactly what page you will find the rest, rather than just letting you hunt around randomly. We give you a key to...

There are almost 19,000 manufacturers in Pennsylvania. There are more than 570,400 employees who work to package potato chips and create Slinky toys and assemble Zippo lighters. Pennsylvanians work with powdered metals and electronics, chemicals and glass and steel. While Pennsylvania is being shuttered against the coronavirus, with Gov. Tom...

“Elective surgery.” The term sounds almost frivolous. It conjures up images of nose jobs and breast implants. There is no reason to get a tummy tuck during a pandemic, right? So when government officials are recommending that hospitals discontinue elective surgery, that may sound reasonable. “This will free up bed...

There is no business that isn’t life-sustaining. Every business in Pittsburgh, and Greensburg, and the Alle-Kiski Valley, in Pennsylvania and beyond. They all sustain life. Maybe they don’t all serve the food that fuels a body, but they provide the paychecks that put food on the table. And so it...

Laurel: To a different kind of greens. It’s nice to know that as some golf courses close down, that doesn’t necessarily mean the landscape will change dramatically — becoming a sea of subdivided homes or vast expanses of pavement. The Timber Ridge Golf Club in East Huntingdon has found new...

Three parishioners at one East Liberty church have tested positive for coronavirus. The Eastminster Presbyterian Church’s Pastor Paul Roberts and two other members have covid-19, providing sobering evidence of how even the places we feel safest have to be approached with caution in the midst of a pandemic. It’s also...

What does “essential” mean? It’s a question everyone needs to ask after Gov. Tom Wolf’s announcement Monday that essential businesses in Pennsylvania need to close in response to the coronavirus pandemic. “We strongly urge nonessential businesses across the commonwealth to do their part by temporarily closing as we work to...