Within the past two hours, the NBA suspended its season and actor (Did I really need that modifier?) Tom Hanks announced that he and his wife, Rita Wilson, have the coronavirus.
Does the coronavirus have your attention now?
Everything is about to change.
I typed that on Wednesday morning. Now, late Wednesday night, it feels inevitable. If the NBA suspended its season, would the NCAA tourney and Major League Baseball and the NHL and XFL continue on? It would seem folly.
Schools are closing. That marathon you signed up for? Ain’t happening. Nor is that concert you have tickets for. At least not this month. The reverberating effects on the economy, on your career or your academic career or your personal life, it’s way too early to even gauge those.
Just understand: things are about to change, and if it’s only for the rest of March we should consider ourselves fortunate.
And I haven’t even mentioned death yet.
— I thought about a pair of HBO programs that I’ve mentioned here before but don’t mind me if I do so again. The first is The Leftovers, where the premise is that an unexplained phenomenon results in 2% of the global population simply vanishing. The two main differences are that people of all ages vanish discriminately and that they indeed vanish, as opposed to die. No one knows where their bodies are.
Still, 2% of the global population. Let’s hope it doesn’t get that far. But if it did, that would mean—and I explicitly did not consult anyone from the New York Times to do this math for me—about 151 million people dying. And let’s say it’s not 2% but one-tenth that total. That’s still 15 million people. Basically the equivalent of the entire tri-state metropolitan area in New York City (which, if it were actually we who perished, would probably thrill Donald Trump and MAGA).
Anyway, that’s a significant number of humans. World War II killed an estimated 70 million people, but that was only the most catastrophic event in recent human history.
Wall Street is not reacting to the nearly 5,000 dead so far. It’s girding itself for days when the number of dead jumps by a thousand or two in one day.
Will it get that dire? I honestly don’t know. But I believe that the steps being taken now will curb the spread greatly. And I believe if today was not the day, then very soon everyone’s going to come around to realizing what the Dr. Fauci’s of the world already knew: that Donald Trump and his cronies have been attempting to bail out the Titanic using a measuring cup.
The other HBO program to watch is Chernobyl, particularly the first two episodes. It’s a nuclear meltdown, not a virus, but the parallels are striking: governmental leadership that is more interested than suppressing information than saving lives; leaders far more concerned about assessing blame than they are with solving the crisis; leaders who arrogantly disregard the dire warnings of scientists until it’s almost too late…in the meantime thousands of innocent people die.
Roughly 20,000 Soviets died in the wake of Chernobyl, as did the Soviet Union itself… which gave rise to a Wild West political vacuum in Russia… which opened the door for Vladimir Putin to come in and use threats and a secret police force to take power for himself.
How many Americans will die? I honestly don’t know. Let’s hope this is much ado about nothing. We’ll all know a lot more three weeks from now, when the calendar turns to April. But I think many Americans finally began taking this pandemic thing seriously today.
— By the way, President Trump neither looked or sounded good this evening on TV. Granted, it’s the most stressful time of his presidency. But what happens if one of these older Republican politicians who have been so cavalier about the coronavirus dies from this? Will it still just be the flu to them? Science and nature have a peculiar way of putting the folly and pride of man in its place, as anyone who’s ever tried to stand in front of a large wave and dared it to knock him down knows.
Also, something to think about: no one famous has died yet. And maybe no one will. But, sad as it is to say, this pandemic won’t be real to many Americans until someone who could conceivably appear on the cover of US Weekly perishes.
— I was thinking about Hillary Clinton today. Imagine if she’d won. First of all, America wouldn’t have squandered the last six months obsessing over impeachment (I imagine the chances of her being caught in flagrante delicto would be rather minute) and she probably would’ve been pro-active on this. Oh, to wonder…
–Finally, at least for this evening, I think time will demonstrat that the White House’s hubris and negligence are going to increase the death toll exponentially. And the irony here is that almost all of those casualties are going to be the elderly. And I’m going to wonder how just many of those people America will bury are avid Fox News viewers. At least two-thirds is my guess. A different president wouldn’t have stopped the coronavirus. But a different president would have been responsible for a much swifter response and a far smaller body count. And probably wouldn’t have used every single on-camera appearance to pat himself or herself on the back and reminding everyone what a good job they were doing.