BoomerCafé, like most publications, believes the more we all understand the coronavirus— especially if we’re in the most vulnerable part of the population— the safer we are from it. That’s why our co-founder and executive editor Greg Dobbs has written more about it today… and included a useful document at the end.
Did you ever take the scary specter of Friday the 13th seriously? If not, maybe coronavirus will change that.
Personally, I never did. Geez, I’ve climbed mounds of loose rubble during earthquakes’ aftershocks, and walked into in the dens of terrorists, and run toward gunfire, not away from it. Sinister superstitions about Friday the 13th were always for someone else, not me.
Greg covered the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, a dangerous assignment for a journalist.
Until this one, last week. This one was different.
It was the Friday the 13th that came true. Not just in my life, but in all of ours.
No more handshakes. No more sports. No more religious congregation for those who want it. No more travel if we can help it.
And in more communities by the day, no more schooling. Which for many poor kids means no more hot lunch. And for many parents, no way to go to work while caring for kids now homebound.
And… no more toilet paper.
A brother-in-law has a metaphor for this new age of constricted human contact: “When you hug somebody,” he said to me, “you’re also hugging everybody they’ve hugged.”
He has to think about that more than most. By the end of the weekend, four members of his family had just gotten off different airplanes. They have a beautiful house, but would I like to spend time there today?!? Now, not so much.
Maybe once— a whole two weeks ago, for instance— that would be irrational. Now, with more than 6,500 deaths and 165,000 infections worldwide (as of this writing), not so much.
It seems like only yesterday when I went with a handful of other guys to the home of a friend— a prominent oncologist who understands pathogens better than most— and he greeted us with elbow bumps. We all shared a laugh. Now, not so much.
And we won’t be laughing soon. A professor in the College of Public Health at Oregon State University has written a paper in which she observes, “Emerging consensus is that containment might have been possible a few weeks ago, but is no longer realistic.” Neither containment, nor calm counteraction.
As The New York Times succinctly put it on Sunday, “The United States began a new week… in a profoundly different place than it was seven days ago.”
Despite a call for “social distancing,” confusion reigns at Chicago O’Hare Airport.
So different, that Italy just reported 368 deaths in a single 24-hour period. 368! That’s like a jumbo jet going down. Yet there are so many alarming angles to the coronavirus, Italy wasn’t even a headline story. Nor is the spread of the virus on the uncontained continent of Africa, population 1.3-billion. Infections are now reported in half its 54 countries, most with meager medical facilities and paltry public education to warn people about staying safe. You can bet “social distancing” isn’t a household phrase over there.
Then there’s the crippling impact of the virus on the stock market. And the economy overall. If household names like Nike and Apple have closed their stores, others can’t be far behind.
Greg Dobbs
There are countless examples of the free fall out there and here is only one, but it is mine: I work in a unit that skis the slopes at Vail and assists ski patrol when snowboarders and skiers are hurt or otherwise need help. On Friday the 13th, I got an employee email that explained cautionary new restrictions for how we use our locker room and how we interact at our early morning briefings. Within hours, more emails laid out new rules for restaurants on the mountain (they would serve only pre-packaged food), and for loading chairlifts (everyone had the option to ride a 6-person lift or an 8-person gondola alone). Just hours after that, the final email: Vail Resorts, the largest ski company in the world, was closing every one of its mountains in North America, effective immediately.
But the free fall didn’t stop: the other huge conglomerate of ski resorts in America then announced the same thing. And after that, Colorado’s governor ordered the few unaffiliated ski resorts in the state— which has more skiing than any other— to shut down too.
If you’re not a skier, you might think, so what?! But the impact is on far more than skiers. Every store, every restaurant, every company and service even remotely related is all but out of business for now. Most employ workers on the lower end of the pay scale. People living paycheck to paycheck. Many already shared apartments in shifts, some sleep in their cars. That’s hard when they’re drawing pay. Now it will be worse.
Colorado’s big city paper, The Denver Post, calls it all an “emotional whiplash.” Multiply the whiplash by 50 states and you are just starting to do the math.
Not to mention the run on toilet paper.
Of course some of this— not all, to be sure— but the speed and scope of this pandemic might have been impeded if our president hadn’t responded at the outset with incomprehension and denial. Just three weeks ago he cluelessly claimed, “The fifteen (cases in the U.S.) within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” Day after day, he retarded the American response to an issue of life and death. As conservative columnist Bret Stephens wrote in The New York Times, “A leader who cannot be believed will not be followed.”
Especially since the coronavirus has exposed what Stephens calls Trump’s falsehoods: “That experts are unnecessary; that hunches are a substitute for knowledge; that every criticism is a hoax.” It disproves the conceit, Stephens writes, “that having an epic narcissist in the White House is a riskless proposition at a time of extreme risk.”
Thank goodness there are less selfish and more focused heads. First among them, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the respected director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who offers a prescription that might actually help us if we take the medicine: “A return to our daily routine will depend on what we do.”
That’s another way of saying, once we get past the stage of surrealism, we have to accept a state of realism: Staying home. Social distancing. Avoiding contact. Slowing the spread.
So maybe there is something to Friday the 13th. This one hasn’t ended.
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There are plenty of informed papers making their way around the internet about the coronavirus. We chose this one to pass on to you, by Peter Piot, co-discoverer of the Ebola virus and Director of The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. It is not just about how we should respond to the coronavirus, but it’s about the virus itself, and how it works.
The important thing is to stay intelligently informed and not give in to panic but keep a level head. Kindness spreads too and we need to all be in this and heed the experts and yes stop hoarding the toilet paper!
Your brother-in-law’s comment brings back the memory of the shampoo commercial “and she told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on and so on and so on” exponentially… That’s what we’re facing.