One Small Voice: A simple mistake could ruin us all

by Lynn Mandaville

I’ve been poring over my accumulated pile of New Yorker magazines these last couple of days, concentrating on the most recent articles and opinions written about the COVID-19 pandemic.

In last week’s issue was a collection of essays written by various New Yorker contributors from around the country and in The Big Apple, exploring their personal observations and experiences with their individual quarantines.

One writer made reference to this period in our lives as consisting of The Before Times (prior to the big isolation) and The After Times (meaning, I guess, some nebulous future when we consider this thing over).

Which got me to thinking.  There was a Before Time.  I hope there will be an After Time.  But what shall we call the Now Time that falls in between?

It’s kind of a limbo, I guess, a precarious place of abnormality.  But there is such a surreal quality to it.  A Dali-esque quality of melting watches and disturbing symbolism.  An inane sense of non-sense, if you will, punctuated by our president’s daily pseudo-campaign rallies thinly veiled as COVID-19 press briefings.

I have tried to stop watching them, but I get drawn in every afternoon to watch the train wreck anyway.

Today, Thursday, April 23, our president, in his stream-of-consciousness ramblings, wandered into a new neighborhood of Crazy Town that left me slack-jawed in my chair, thinking that this between-time should be called the Bizarro Time, reminiscent of the Bizarro World of old Superman comics.  (Do you remember that cube-shaped planet, where everything was backwards and opposite and inside out?)

If you saw today’s fever dream, you first saw Bill Bryan, acting undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security, share slides with dubious data about how long the COVID-19 virus could live on surfaces when exposed to the elements of heat, humidity, bleach, and UV rays (sunshine).

I caught a mental glimpse of what was coming before the questions even came out of Trump’s mouth.

Heat, light, humidity…..Spring!   The magical time, Trump had once informed us, when the virus would just go away!  This is what he was leading up to!  Proof that he had been right about the virus all along.  His magical thinking coming true!

But that’s not the Bizarro part.

He actually asked the doctors (Fauci, Birx and Redfield) if there weren’t a way to introduce UV rays and disinfectant into the human body to kill the virus.  (To quote Army Bob, you can’t make this stuff up.)

You may attribute your own adjectives to this theater of the absurd.

I will say only that this is another grave instance of Trump being incredibly careless with his words.

Because he doesn’t think before he lets his thoughts escape his lips, he puts ideas out there that should never be uttered out loud.

The last time he did this, he let fly with his uneducated belief that the untested drug hydroxychloroquine should be given to the general public on demand rather than only by prescription by an attending physician who determined it might be advisable for treating this virus.  The unfortunate result was that a couple in Arizona misinterpreted his words to mean that they should take the drug to protect themselves against corona virus, and the wife died.

I fear tomorrow’s news feed may include an item about someone injecting himself with bleach, or inserting a UV suppository.

Today’s careless words suggested that such vague information, implied in slides prepared by a non-epidemiologist, about the viability of the disease under the application of certain elements, offered another simplistic and miraculous plan to ward off COVID-19.

I’m distressed that our president seems to think of this “bug” as the kind of enemy that can be vanquished once and for all in one fell swoop.  Like a carpenter ant infestation that can be wiped out by the application of one good dose of poison.

I’m distressed that our president will mistake the dropping off of the curve for the final demise of the infection, rather than just one downturn in the roller coaster that this pandemic promises to be.

His simplistic misunderstanding of what we are all up against could be the undoing of us all.

As I understand it, COVID-19 has no natural enemies. Without a vaccine, every human being who is exposed to the virus will get it.  The differences will be that some of us will never exhibit any symptoms (thus, rendering us asymptomatic carriers), most of us will have the sickness at one time or another to one degree or another and survive it, and some of us will die.  And until enough of us get it and a herd immunity emerges, people will continue to get the disease, ad infinitum, just like the seasonal flu.

Flattening the curve is just a means of warding off the unimaginable burden on hospitals and medical personnel, so it can be dealt with in manageable waves rather than as an overwhelming tsunami.

I’ve said it before, this is a time of great uncertainty and fear.

Most of us fear for our health, the health of our loved ones, our jobs, and our financial futures.  And as I’ve said before, we’re all in this together, including the president.

Donald Trump, however, unlike the rest of us, fears only for his re-election.

And though his fear is as great as ours, it renders him incapable of dealing with our shared crisis rationally.

I worry that my words here will be mistaken solely as political bias or, God forbid, TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome).

But anyone who thinks about this without emotion knows that I am not wrong about the president and what motivates him.

If I had a prayer to share tonight, it would be that President Trump would leave the management of this national nightmare to the professionals.  To the university credentialed doctors, and scientists, and epidemiologists.  That he would cease his stream-of-consciousness wishful thinking and opt, for once during his administration, to speak plain, unembellished truth to the American people.

Or, better yet, to speak not at all.