WARNING: Graphic language ahead (Mom, don’t read this one).
NOTE: Resorting to profanity often weakens an argument. Agreed but, I channeled Lewis Black while writing this. It was … satisfying,
Late last week, a person close to me posted one of those memes that compares Covid-19 to the seasonal flu. You’ve probably seen it. Here. I’ll show you.
I don’t normally engage with this kind of post. I’m not a social media troll and it does no good. Further, I don’t like it when someone barges into my timeline with MAGA-inspired propaganda so I avoid posting my own agitprop on their’s.
Just scroll on by.
But, in addition to the false equivalency, you will notice this post called out “the media” for scaring people about Covid-19. That pissed me off so, I posted this in gentle response: “Covid-19 has killed at least 65,000 in six weeks. If you aren’t worried, you aren’t paying attention.”
I’da left it at that but I got a response that, among other things (including his own worries, to be fair), implored us to get things opened up because, “… the shut down is going to cause worse problems than the virus.”
Don’t fuckin’ tell me about business. Some of my best friends run brick-and-mortar businesses here in Taylor and elsewhere. They are meeting this with all the creativity and perseverance they possess but some of them won’t come out the other side.
My major contract is with a newspaper. A NEWSPAPER. Most small suburban newspapers were on rocky ground before this but, in late March, advertising simply … evaporated. Most newspapers have furloughed staff or cut their hours. We are no different. We went from three FTEs in the newsroom to one. I’ve gone without pay since the first of April.
I absolutely get the “economy” argument.
This kind of post frustrates me because it downplays the danger and, along the way, blames my chosen profession for fear mongering. Fuck that. I’m tired of that narrative. It paints every journalist and reporter with the same brush and is patently untrue, especially at the local level. If the press seems a bit hysterical, it’s because of the dearth of concrete information — and the conflicting nature of the information we do get.
Another person close to me suggests that the infection and fatality numbers are inflated, that doctors and public health officials have ascribed Covid-19 as the cause of death for all sorts of unrelated things.
That pisses me the fuck off, too. Look, I’m a 63-year old lung cancer survivor with COPD. My COPD isn’t debilitating or anything. In fact, I seldom notice it unless I over-exert or my doctor brings it up. But, I ask you: if I catch this shit then die (which, given the above, it as likely as not) what killed me? The COPD or the coronavirus?
I’ve been on my own kind of front line reporting this shit. (I’m safe because I do it all from home.) I SEE how state and county officials in Texas play fast and loose with the numbers.
We don’t know the fucking infection rate because we haven’t fucking tested enough! If anything, this shit is under reported, not inflated. I suspect Texas officials like it that way.
Community spread is a very real and dangerous thing. Nursing homes (and even worse, meat packing plants) are perfect incubators for this virus. If this shit gets loose in rural America, this is where it will originate.
Here’s a sample: we learned last week that a nursing home in Round Rock was a hotspot where 50 people tested positive. Aside from the impact on those people, not that big a deal, right? 200-bed nursing home, a quarter of the population tests positive. Sad, but not too surprising and at least it’s all contained, right?
Well, 18 of those positive tests were to staff … who go home every day. Go shopping. Maybe stop at a convenience store or pick up curb-side on the way home. All but one of those people were asymptomatic when they were tested. They didn’t know they were infected. So … how many others did those people infect? How many did the people they infected did it spread to? We don’t know and we don’t really have the resources to find out. Not in WilCo.
Now, drop that scenario in someplace like Cameron, Texas … there’s a similar nursing home there. Most small towns have something like that. But there is no hospital in Cameron, only one clinic (no doctors) and a barely-existent public health infrastructure (I know … I lived there for 15 years). At least Cameron’s close to Temple but … how much havoc could that hotspot wreck in a small town before someone discovers it?
If you are working safely and being responsible, good on you. TOO MANY PEOPLE FUCKING AREN’T! One of our reporters went out to see how “opening weekend” was going and he said he was stunned by how few people kept any kind of social distance or wore masks. Social media posts that downplay how serious this is simply enable this behavior. You might even say they are criminally negligent.
Don’t even get me going on the shining, whiny examples of white (usually male) privilege that are the armed “open it up” protests storming the country. That shit’s fucking asinine. On so many fucking levels.
I absolutely understand the desire to “open it up.” I haven’t seen my grandkids in six weeks. I need a hair cut. The company I work for is rapidly going broke but newspapers can’t just … stop. Not now.
So please … just … stop.
(Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.)
The Ragged Edge 