10,000 More

Incredibly, another 10,000 Americans died this week from Covid19. And, bizarrely, the overmatched narcissist tacitly in charge decided that a new three-pronged strategy should be deployed. 

Prong One: stop the damn testing! When we test, we find people who have the disease. If we don't test we won't find people with the disease.

Prong Two: stop counting all those who have died from the disease! That tens of thousands have died makes the President look bad. A lower number will make the President look good?

Prong Three: start opening up the country! Sure, the scientists who warned that hundreds of thousands of Americans could die if we didn't adequately implement controls to stem the disease think that this is suicidal. But, a desperate man is willing to gamble the lives of even more Americans in the naive hope that the economy will magically revive. 

The economy will not magically revive. And, in all likelihood, the economy will not survive another round of the coronavirus running rampant and unmanaged across the nation. 

All of this is insane. And exhausting. 

We are not rising to meet this existential challenge as well as we might. Talk about an understatement. No country has done worse in acting to staunch the virus. It's appalling, and tragic. 

I feel so lucky that no one I know or love has been stricken. But, I have a growing fear that this is all borrowed time. I have a new supply of disposable masks to help ensure that I don't infect anyone. I only hope my fellow citizens will take the same simple action. 

There were more stories from around the country this week, with photographs, documenting that an alarming subset of citizens won't act to help one another stay uninfected. It's a level of hubris that's hard to fathom. 

This Week in Neo-Medievalia

This is the week that the anti-scientific community, the naive, the societally selfish and the defiantly ignorant apparently decided to ramp up their protests against trying to staunch the spread of the coronavirus around the world. 

We had a few hundred gather in front of the statehouse in Boston to rail against the injustice of it all. I think it was this week, too, that, in Michigan, a woman who took umbrage at being told she must wear a mask to enter a Dollar Store, huffed off and then brought back her gun-toting father, who shot dead the security person who tried to enforce the mask requirement. 

Meanwhile the sad and incompetent charlatan tacitly in charge of our federal government is decrying the need for any vaccine and is back to asserting that the virus will just go away. That is indisputably true, if one takes the decadal-long view. In the interim, how many more people will die? We're cruising past 80,000 in the US now. 

Most of us are still doing our best to hunker down, to try to limit the chance that we will contract and/or spread Covid19. This is not to minimize that doing this has come at great collateral cost. Most significantly, in the loss of 30 million people's jobs. 

Of course, while America has the financial ability to see our fellow citizens through the pandemic's corresponding economic disaster, we won't. While peer countries are paying citizens with lost incomes an ongoing stipend, we have thrown trillions out into the wind---meaning that those of us who still have jobs have received the same one-time $1,200 cash payment as those who are unemployed. And, large corporations have raked in millions from the funds designated to help small businesses survive and pay their employees. 

It's maddening and embarrassing that our country's leadership is so inept during this crisis. Thus far, I've not been touched personally by the tragedy that is being abetted by our federal government. Though I worry that my number must come up, in this perverse lottery of survival that re-opening the country for business without adequate testing or plans for response to future recurrences of viral outbreaks will exacerbate. 

We're going with a strategy of luck, indifference, and acceptance that many thousands more must die. Maybe enough of us will refuse to play the role of "warriors" and will stay the course to limit the carnage. If we use the tools available in the twenty-first century, perhaps we can avoid the worst of this contagion's potential medieval miseries. Perhaps. 

For Some Sickening Perspective in the Era of Covid-19

Many of us have a sense that our economic priorities and, more specifically, our national budgetary allocations are disproportionately skewed toward addressing military threats. 

Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN from 2013 to 2017, quantifies this in an essay in Time, April 27/May4: 

"Since 2010, the U.S. has been spending an average of $180 billion annually on counterterrorism efforts---compared with less than $2 billion on pandemic and emerging infectious-disease programs. In a reflection of how skewed the U.S. national-security budget is toward the military over other tools in the national-security toolbox, Congress appropriated $685 billion in 2019 for the Pentagon, compared with around $7 billion for the CDC."

A Voice of Sanity

We would do well to heed Mikhail Gorbachev's exhortation (from his essay in Time, April27/May4):

"I'll never tire of repeating: we need to demilitarize world affairs, international politics and political thinking. 

. . . I call upon them (world leaders) to cut military spending by 10% to 15%. This is the least we should do now, as a first step toward a new consciousness, a new civilization."

Spoiler alert: we won't. 

But that doesn't change the simple and compelling fact that we should. 

Covid-19, or When the Whole World Was Hit By a Truck

It's May. After the first April in recorded weather history in Boston when the temperature never made it to 65F, this first weekend of the third month of the Coronavirus shutdown in the US is beautiful in southern New England---warm, with summery cumulus drifting past my window and being reflected in the blue glass of the Hancock. Another siren in the distance. 

In reality, we haven't even reached two months since the shutdown began in mid-March. Nearly 70,000 Americans have died. Though these tragedies are not widespread enough to stop a proportion of us from whining about the horrific inconvenience of having to practice social distancing to staunch the spread of the virus. This was the week when a subset of troglodytes showed up with assault weapons at the state capitol building in Michigan and threw a fit. 

Everyone in Massachusetts is now supposed to wear a mask when venturing out. I'm using a pair of bandanas that I used to use for wiping sweat away while hiking in the mountains. Though I am not going out much. When I do and when I return, I wash my bandana in the bathroom sink with lots of hot, soapy water and then, after rinsing, hang my "mask" on the hook on the back of my bathroom door to dry. 

I am truly one of the lucky members of society. I have work that I can do from home for which I get paid; thirty million of us don't have any work now, and our systems for getting these people money to live on is haphazard at best. We can take care of one another financially through this, but will we? Those who have to still work outside the house---all of the medical staff treating so many ill patients, the grocery store workers helping to keep us fed, etc.---are at risk in ways that the rest of us only vaguely and inadequately appreciate. 

This was the week, too, when video was posted on social media of at least a hundred unmasked people crossing an intersection at a traffic light in Atlanta. Are these time travelers from 2015? Willful naïveté and, as many have commented, a culture of entitled selfishness are ugly characteristics of today's American society. 

Many brilliant people are working to find treatments to mitigate the virus, including development of vaccines to prevent it. But, we are not there yet. Having already endured the economic calamity caused by responding to the virus, it seems a simple concept to grasp that we risk compounding the impact by pretending the danger has passed. 

And, yet here we are, in various states, like Texas, as an example, where unmasked, overweight customers are photographed at a table ordering food from a waitperson with only a paper mask on for protection. That more people will die because some people insist that they have a right to go eat a slab of ribs at a restaurant is surreal, embarrassing, unconscionable.

I've always been amazed by people who suffer some sudden, catastrophic injury---say quadriplegia from an auto accident---or being struck down by a debilitating illness---perhaps Parkinson's. Their lives are never the same afterwards. I have often thought that the mental torment of remembering how life used to be must be especially hard to manage. And, yet, these people have no choice. They adapt and move forward. We are all those people now in a sense. Our lives before Covid-19 are gone. But, if we're lucky enough to stay healthy, the adjustment to our post-Covid-19 lives,  while challenging, is imminently manageable. Stay home whenever you can, wear a mask when you go out, and accept the reality of needing to adapt.