Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I immediately throw up a red flag on anything that suggests "I'm going to tell you what they don't want you to hear." I also take things from the "opinion" section with grains of salt.

That said, if we move toward "here is accumulated, verifiable data to suggest something" and away from "I want to sell my book that I wrote 20 years before this incident and is only relevant because I want to make money on the crisis," that is a good thing.

 

I'll take with a grain of salt anything on this coming from the WSJ editorial page.

 

Four years ago this week is when the USA shut down. A not-so-happy anniversary.

 

IMO if Trump wins the election, it will be because the pandemic was so traumatic it has become a national suppressed memory, a very good break for the guy who was in charge during it.

 

I keep hoping that the end of Trump will be like Jim Carey opening the door at the end of The Truman Show, with folks going, OK, what else is on? and moving on with their lives. But this ain't a TV show.

 

It was four years ago today I saw my first class for the last time.

 

Four years ago today I was driving up to Tennessee with a carload of donated supplies for tornado relief in my hometown. Somewhere south of Columbia I picked up a random high school baseball game, which may have been the only sporting event on the air in North America by that point. I stuck with it as long as the signal lasted.

 

Four years ago tomorrow was the last time I actually came in to the office to work a journalistic shift.

Been back a great number of times since, but the rest of the work has been easily performed at home.

 

Now that we're four years past - do you think the COVID era will become a theme for parties?

 

Play a game of hoard the TP? The person who can collect the most by the end of the party wins?

 

Four years ago on February 14th, two unrelated conversations let me know things were about to tip into unfamiliar territory and normal might not be coming back.

A friend who works for his state arts commission told me about a colleague who did regular cultural exchange work in China and was suddenly sent home with what felt like a cold on steroids. The CDC handwaved him when he contacted them. He and the state agency decided he would do dramaturgy research from home.

The second conversation was with a friend who is an MD in Europe. He was seeing some things that made him very uneasy. He told me he hoped saner minds would prevail in the US if this was anything like some of the pathogenic spreads we'd encountered in the past. He told me to be prepared to hunker down because he expected it to be badly handled given who was running the show. A week? Two weeks(?) later, he told me about the superspreader event in Italy and asked me if I was still covering hockey.

By 2021, over 400,000 people in the US died from COVID. I have no doubt people would have died anyway, but not at that scale. 44 of those people were friends, relatives, and former coworkers. I am still sad about this, but there is a part of me that feels like my time is better spent trying to get people to be less afraid of science. Okay, maybe it needs to be more basic than that. Maybe this is about trying to help along a resurgence of critical thinking.