Post 28 - April 8, 2020
Day 28…
Really? We are STILL doing this?
Wuhan’s 11 million residents were released from total lockdown this morning after 76 days.
Social distancing measures are still very much in effect there.
Masks are mandatory. Everybody MUST wear them outside.
Travel restrictions still very much in place.
This morning the only thing that changed was that they are now actually allowed to leave their homes because for the first time since this started there, 76 days ago, nobody died yesterday.
Here in NY, we may be experiencing the beginning of our peak.
You’d never know it from looking out the window.
I’m guessing wherever you are it’s just the same outside.
Quiet.
A friend of mine who lives near a hospital just posted that a 2nd white refrigerator truck is now parked outside.
Temporary morgue.
But for the rest of us, we’re looking at charts on TV or on the internet.
In 1918 during the Spanish Flu pandemic people who were quarantined at home did not have TV.
Not invented yet.
People did not have radios in their homes - that only started a few years later.
What people had, but only some people, were telephones.
The old candlestick- type phones.
Often those phones were party lines - if you were lucky enough (and economically secure enough) to have a phone, you probably shared the phone with the rest of the people in your building.
And people had newspapers.
Many papers were following the Federal government’s blackout on spreading news about the flu ostensibly to maintain morale in the country following World War 1.
Those that weren’t actually listed the sick and the dead daily.
“Manager Stanley of the Chambersburg news agency and his whole family are prostrated by flu at their home, corner of Lincoln Way West and Franklin Street.”
“Mr. W.H. Gass, the faithful mail carrier on route five, is laid up with influenza at his home on Tusculum Avenue.”
“Will Ferrell of Dewitt died of flu Dec. 19. He was 42.
When lockdown orders went into place during the 1918 pandemic, that meant that people were really alone and really isolated.
No updates on the TV 24-7.
No Zoom meetings.
You think we feel disconnected now?
I can’t imagine what it was like back then especially when you couple that with how much less was known about, well, everything.
News of the day:
a) The President fired Glenn Fine the official who was leading the office of the inspector general for the Pentagon. Just coincidentally he was also the independent overseer of the $2 trillion coronavirus spending bill. This appears to be a blatant move on the President’s part to control where that money goes, himself.
b) The President is threatening to withhold funding to the World Health Organization for not alerting the world earlier about the virus. Blatant lie. No basis in reality.
c) The President and his family, it turns out, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, own stock in a company that produces Hydroxychloroquine, the drug that he has been promoting, with no definitive scientific back-up, as a cure to the virus.
d) A day ago, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Moldy resigned after a profanity-laced address to the crew of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt where he called Captain Brett Crozier “either too stupid or too naïve” for writing a letter pleading for help dealing with mounting coronavirus cases among the crew of his tightly packed ship.
He accused Crozier of leaking the letter to the press.
Captain Brett Crozier has now been diagnosed with COVID-19, himself.
e) The now conservative-majority US Supreme Court voted, right down party lines, to force Wisconsin voters to show up in person to vote yesterday rather than mail-in. That insured low voter turn-out despite all of the people who stood in line for hours while maintaining social distancing.
That’s only about 36 hours of news.
Corruption, mismanagement, incompetence is what we are getting from our Federal leadership.
As I write this, Senator Bernie Sanders is dropping out of the Presidential race.
Vice-President Joe Biden is now the presumptive Democratic nominee.
If we want to change how we are being led, the path forward now appears clear.
But that’s for later.
For now, we are home and, yes, we are still doing this.
For some this is a far greater hardship than it is for others.
We can connect with each other.
The internet makes our experience during this pandemic radically different from the experience of people during the 1918 pandemic.
We can “see” each other when we choose to.
Imagine not being able to do even that?
As much as I am mourning what we’ve lost, I am extremely grateful for what we have.
Each other.