–The stock market plunged 7% within five minutes of this morning’s open. The day of reckoning has at last arrived. Meanwhile, President Trump is in Florida preparing for a campaign fundraiser this evening. I hope Nero left him his playlist.

–It’s cute that Stanford and Princeton have told their students not to attend class. Meanwhile this virus has been incubating for at least one to two months stateside. Lots of barn doors finally closing after millions of horses were let out to roam wild in the streets. Containment is a swell idea, but at this point it’s far too late.

–Seeing as how there’s no vaccine for the coronavirus and that in most cases it is not fatal, I’m not sure what the inclination is for the average American to learn whether or not he or she has it. Is it a FOMO thing? If you’re sick, stay in bed and do what you’d always do. There’s nothing a hospital is really going to be able to do other than put you in closer to proximity with more sick people. If I’m wrong on this, please tell me. It’s not as if there’s a magic pill that will make you better. We’ve all been sick. Who cares if there’s a trendy pandemic attached to what you have? It’s the same difference at this point. Bed rest, proximity to a flushing toilet, maybe some chicken broth and perhaps watching Searching For Sugarman on Netflix if you’ve not yet seen it.

–Loathe as I am to do so, and I realize that his reasons for saying what he is saying are based solely in self-interest, Donald Trump does have a point about the relative (and I stress “relative”) danger of the coronavirus. Look, containment is pretty much out of the question at this point. And no vaccine is on the way probably in this calendar year. So the next issue becomes just how dire is it if you contract the coronavirus? And the answer, at least to this point, is probably not so dire if you are under the age of 70 years old. So at what point do we consider coronavirus as sort of a built-in cost of being alive, not unlike commuting or air travel or anything else that we gotta do to make a living but that comes fraught with potential disaster. Sure, there’s a much higher likelihood of dying from coronavirus than from dying in an airline crash, but the point is that both are very low odds.

Is the hysteria well-founded in terms of our ability to contain it? I’d say yes. Is it well-founded in terms of its overall effect on the young and middle-aged? I think not.

–If you are a fan of Shakespearian tragedy, or dramatic irony, you have to love what’s going on here. A few quotes come to mind, the first from Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park: “Nature finds a way.” The second from the title of Charles Blow’s op-ed in today’s New York Times: “You can’t gaslight a virus.”

So Donald Trump and MAGA have finally found an opponent they cannot ridicule, or accuse of promoting Fake News, or make fun of its size. It’s a totally agnostic, unassailable foe that is also lethal. Perfect.

Now here’s how the final chapter of the tragedy should play out. Someone finally approaches our Dear Leader, who is having coughing fits (while his Surgeon General maintains he’s the healthiest 73 year-old in America, healthier in fact than the SG), and explains to him that the stock market is tanking and Americans are panicking. Advises him that for the good of the nation the very best thing he can do is step down and calm both the markets and the populace.

And what do you think Dear Leader does? I think we all know the answer to that. Fade out with Slim Pickens riding a giant coronavirus globule into the Capitol rotunda and then it explodes. Fade to black.