What I Don’t Hear About the Pandemic

The enemy. CDC image from Wikimedia Commons.

“We have to learn to live with this.” So said Gov. Kim Reynolds, R-Iowa, on April 27 when she announced that 77 Iowa counties would start seeing their businesses open.

A columnist for The Gazette, Lyz Lenz, compared her to Lord Farquaad from the movie Shrek in a column about how the governor’s actions show that Iowans apparently aren’t all in this together. The attitude of too many seems to be that meatpacking workers are expendable. Reynolds is a Hamburger Helper Republican, in the camp of President Let Them Eat Meat Trump, whose only use of his presidential powers to intervene in the industrial production part of the economy in an emergency is to make it harder for states or local governments to shut down meat plants for worker safety.

VP Mike Pence visits the Mayo Clinic without a mask. Iowa opens up most of its counties before the pandemic starts to slow down. President Trump continues to wage war, primarily on the media, via tweet storms that do nothing to unite the country and solve the pandemic.

And I’m getting tired.

You know what? My governor, whom I mostly disagree with on everything, does have a point. We do have to learn to live with the COVID-19 virus, and we have to learn to economically function, somehow. A vaccine may or may not be coming in a year or so. But we don’t know for sure when or even if it will arrive, and any vaccine won’t be here soon enough to set our lives aright in the meantime.

So, we have to live with this virus. We have to function. Yet, that should not mean that we sacrifice lives for the economy or for the production of animal protein.

What do I want? I want the media and our leaders to focus on what the sane solution is. Because I think there is one.

And it’s New Zealand. That little tiny country that is less than double the size of Iowa has pretty much crushed the pandemic—without breakthrough medical treatments and without a vaccine.

Leader of the free world.
New Zealand government image from Wikimedia Commons.

Because the Achilles Heel of COVID-19 is that, even if evidence seems to point to an origin in bat viruses, and even if the virus can jump species to cats and dogs, its primary reservoir now is human beings. If we track it, isolate it, keep it from jumping from human-to-human, what then? In a fortnight, it mostly dies out. We can New Zealand it into oblivion if we’re competent and strategic and do the right things, which are mostly not the right-wing things.

I realize there is some need to understand the history of this pandemic. We need to know if it came from a wet market or poor handling of viruses in a Chinese lab. Dark, irrational conspiracy theories about bio-weapons catch hold partly because the Chinese government is not allowing enough science on the origin of COVID-19.

Still, while I think we need the answer, it’s not our most pressing need. Because the Hamburger Helper wing of the GOP is using the origin mystery to justify xenophobia and to change the subject from how badly and chaotically our government responded and is still responding.

There’s no reason that the United States needs to be the hot spot of a respiratory virus from eastern Asia, except government incompetence. And true, while I mostly blame the tangerine tribble at the top, he’s not the full problem, either. The CDC’s test debacle of 2020 doesn’t make government bureaucracy look intelligent and efficient.

But even if Trump is not the entire problem, he sure knows how to pour gasoline on a fire.

And that’s not what I want. I don’t want states having to sneak around and bargain for supplies and hide them from the feds because who knows when the feds will swoop in and confiscate states’ stuff. I don’t want idiots poisoning themselves because they are dumb enough to listen to a discredited, impeached president who doesn’t know anything but is sure willing to share it. I don’t want that president spending his time being bitter, bumbling and muttering dark theories from the corners of his sick mind.

I want New Zealand.

I know, we’re not a small island nation. We can’t obliterate the pandemic as easily as that tiny nation has already almost done. And even in New Zealand, it’s likely COVID-19 will be back, because even the kiwis can’t completely isolate themselves from the rest of the planet.

But we can get our testing act together. We can start quickly building contact tracing infrastructure. We can mandate, rather than lamely suggest, practices to protect food workers, healthcare workers and old people in nursing homes.

If we had the will, and the leadership, we could crush this thing.

COVID-19 can’t live without our help. Right now, idiots among us are protesting stay-at-home orders due to fear, frustration and fakery (some of the protests appear to be right-wing AstroTurf).

And I want more media stories that ignore the dumpster fire political show and focus on how we “live with it.” How we learn to treat this virus, this quiet foe, as the foe that it is.

Mr. President, if you think you’re a wartime leader, start acting like it. If you want a model, her name is Jacinda Arden.

Or maybe another female role model is in order: Buffy the Vampire Slayer. During quarantine, I’ve been re-watching episode of that show—and in most episodes, some surprise demon always appears, the Buffy gang has to scramble and get information and some secret is unlocked that lets Buffy save the day.

I do all my image shopping at Wikimedia Commons, safely, at a social distance.

Sarah Michelle Gellar
at the Dubai International Film Festival 2004.
User "Saudi" on Wikimedia Commons.

She doesn’t just trust her gut. She doesn’t drink Lysol. And if she were running the show, I think we’d all be in better shape. If Jacinda, with her cozy sweatshirts and comforting Facebook talks is not your style, maybe Buffy, with her zingers, is more what you have in mind.

But while Buffy might have been impetuous at times, she learned in each show the importance of listening and teamwork.

And besides knowing that Americans can beat this pandemic before a vaccine arrives to permanently knock it down (we hope), another thing I want is for us to recognize that this is a global, human struggle. When I say “we” can beat the pandemic, I want the “we” to include more that white Americans. All you homo sapiens can carry this virus, but all of you can help beat it, too.

Sure, find out what mistakes the Chinese government made. But don’t blame Chinese people. Just because our orange-skinned president is a buffoon, it’s not true that all Americans are as cray as that. And no one citizen of a country is responsible for all the real or imagined mistakes of that country’s governments—so if you abuse or mistreat any Asian looking person due to your own fears, shame on you.

We need to do better. We need to be better. We need to live with this virus, but not by tossing up our hands and opening stuff up with no plan. We need the intelligence of Willow and the faith of Xander and the maturity of Giles.We do not need the greed and raw incompetence of Donald, nor the corruption of Kim.

We need to understand our enemy and outsmart it.

Sadly, I don’t see enough signs that we’re doing that. And don’t let President (or Governor) Hamburger Helper off the hook for making a hash of things since this crisis began.