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September 29, 2020

A Gazette Editorial

At the rate we’re going we’re gonna run out of grim COVID-19 milestones before the year’s even over. One hundred thousand in May, Two hundred thousand earlier this month, and now, COVID-19 has taken a million lives worldwide. Stalin supposedly said, “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” Maybe he was right. Already social distancing and face covering feel quite routine for most of us here in NYC. We lost 20 thousand New Yorkers.

Yet we can remember a time, just a few months ago, when an Inwood “hola!” always came with a quick hug or some other physical contact. Then came March and April when streets and subways emptied out and the ICUs and morgues filled up. The City slowly returned to life, warily, as Spring turned to Summer. But it never came all the way back.

Restaurants remained closed until outdoor dining began in late June. And the Mets – the Opera, the Museum, and the baseball team stayed dark. Schools had closed early and there were a few months to make plans and work out the kinks before reopening in September. Of course that didn’t happen and here we are on the verge of what feels like the likely collapse of the school year that’s just getting underway. And our truce with the novel coronavirus turned out to be short lived: hot spots of new infection have reappeared in Brooklyn, Queens and in the suburbs North of the City. Are we better prepared now than we were in the Spring? It sure doesn’t feel like it.

We’ve been thinking a lot about another pandemic since this one came to town. In the early 1980s we were working for EMS. That’s when the first reports of a strange new illness first surfaced. It went on to become the worst plague anybody could remember, and in those first few years it was an almost total mystery. Gay men were getting sick and the experts didn’t know why. As they felt their way through the advancing nightmare different hypotheses were proposed and investigated. Was the amyl nitrite that some inhaled the culprit? Could you catch it from sitting on a toilet seat? It took awhile before they narrowed it down to bloodborne transmission and added intravenous drug use as a risk. And then it was actually the ‘works’ and not the drugs that were causing the sickness to spread.

Meanwhile, hemophiliacs continued getting transfusions to manage their condition and before we knew it, large numbers of them had acquired this novel virus. Blood banks that hadn’t yet begun testing donors or supply had been unknowingly infecting many recipients. It wasn’t well understood yet how the disease spread and prematurely stigmatizing a group by declining their donations was a big issue as was the likely negative impact of an association with a frightening new disease on the blood banking business. Neither consideration was primarily motivated by halting the spread.

And here we are four decades later trying to figure out another new virus. The ‘catch it from a toilet seat’ AIDS  counterpart of COVID-19 had us madly wiping down doorknobs and takeout food containers before we settled on it being mostly spread by droplets of spittle ejected while speaking, singing, sneezing, or coughing within 6 feet of another human being. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the novel coronavirus. We’re only 9 months into it. At this point, AIDS didn’t even have a name yet. Well, it did but then they had to change it early on.

Why do we bring this up now? Because what we’ve been through this year has been a medical disaster in America. With 4% of the world’s population but 25% of its COVID-19 mortality we have badly mismanaged this pandemic. The reason is simple: rather than honestly assess our ignorance of how this thing behaves, we’ve lurched from good ideas (wear a mask; wash your hands a lot) to idiotic ones (carry on as if it was a hoax; inject disinfectants). At every turn, proponents of the idiotic ideas sought to discredit medical experts whose decades of relevant experience was our best chance to minimize morbidity and mortality. Instead we got quasi religious zealot sloganeering like ‘the cure can’t be worse than the disease!’ and ‘Liberate Michigan!’

The warnings of a second wave were pooh-poohed by the know nothing chorus of denialists. And now, thanks to their colossal stupidity, we’re looking at a reprise of the deadly Spring. The ‘hoax’ argument was led by none other than our President who assured his cult that it was nbd and attacked anyone who disagreed. His loyal suckups echoed his 180 degrees wrong messaging and refused to wear masks in his presence, prematurely reopened for business-as-usual in their states, jammed barefaced into his hate rallies, and even brought the infection to the erstwhile pristine Dakota territories.

Our nearly quarter of a million deaths didn’t have to happen. If our President wasn’t so preoccupied with the Dow and his own re-election he’d have leveled with us like he did with Bob Woodward last Winter. “It goes through the air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

Now the tax deadbeat huckster wants to roll the dice and send America’s next generation back into their classrooms. Our President seems to think that if children don’t drop dead before finals their COVID-19 risk is zero. An entire generation is the bet so his Potemkin economy can limp across the November finish line. Of course anyone who’s given it even a moment’s thought understands that there are harms to children that are both gradual and cumulative. Lead and asbestos are just two examples that nobody, except Trump if there was something in it for him, would argue are harmless or risk free.

If the next generation turns out to have been exposed to an avoidable health hazard as hemophiliacs were in the 1980s we’ll all know who’s responsible.