‘There’s been no winter this winter.” The Boston Globe headline summed up the situation. It may be sort of winterish – just below freezing – as I write this Friday morning, and there’s still an attractive if thin layer of snow softening much of the bleak winter landscape.
But if the forecast is accurate much of that will be gone in the next week, with temperatures in the upper 40s and 50s – April, even May weather!
And it’s wreaking havoc with tradition. The Tamworth Outing Club’s annual dog sled race on Lake Chocorua has been canceled, as it has in the last few years – the ice is too thin and waterlogged for the mushers to get through safely.
The same thin ice everywhere is causing ice fishing derbies to be canceled because the ice won’t support the bob houses. Any rational person would say that this is climate change in action, although you won’t catch our omniscient president holding such outlandish views.
And it’s not only the weather that’s miserable.
There’s a not-so-little matter of illness. And a possible global pandemic, which is not – historically, at least – a good thing. Think of the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed perhaps 100 million people worldwide, including over 500,000 in the United States.
The new plague is something called a coronavirus, newly dubbed COVID-19, apparently also – like flu – highly contagious and moving rapidly around the globe, with new cases in new countries being announced daily. Its lethality rate is presumed to be similar to that of flu – or perhaps higher.
Since its origin in China – where it got a toehold because initially authorities tried to keep it under wraps – it has spread to different parts of Asia and, more recently, to western Europe.
And now it’s here, in the good old U.S. of A.
This is causing all sorts of upheaval not only in the world of medicine but in the world of politics, particularly presidential politics. Which is bad news for our germophobic president, Donald Trump, who is relentlessly focusing on his re-election campaign and avoiding anything smacking of bad news.
A lethal illness possibly sweeping the nation doesn’t fit into his plans. It means Trump – whose whole brief political career has thus far been based on his dismissing (sometimes literally) and belittling experts of any kind – now finds his and his government’s survival dependent on the same experts he loathes.
This led to a fairly funny press conference late last week in which Trump was relentlessly – almost comically – optimistic. Everything, everything was just going fine.
“We’ve had tremendous success, tremendous success beyond what many people would have thought,” he bragged. “We’ve done, really, an extraordinary job.” “This is going to end. Hopefully it will be sooner than later.” “The risk to the American people remains very low.” And very soon, he assured us, we will have a vaccine to protect us.
Well, maybe. And maybe not. Listen to Anthony Fauci, an immunologist and longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Well, if we can listen to him.
For years Fauci has been quick to clear up misconceptions about various illnesses and helped to allay public anxiety about them. He’s been a fixture on every medical reporter’s speed dial or its digital equivalent, someone who reacted quickly and could be relied on as a straight shooter. And he was a key adviser on infectious diseases to presidents from Reagan to Obama.
Now, he’s been ordered – ordered! – not to talk to the public (that’s, of course, you and me) without prior clearance.
This happened, apparently when Fauci had the temerity to contradict our supreme leader and his excessively rosy prognosis. The doctor said that we are almost certainly on the brink of a global pandemic – that would include this country, of course – and that development and production of a viable vaccine against the disease is well over a year away.
Well, that didn’t go down so well in the halls of Washington power.
And so from now on Fauci – or anyone else authoritative who has anything to say about this virus – will have to go through a White House handler. And the said leader of the crack White House team will be none other than our very own vice president, Mike Pence.
“He’s got a certain talent for this,” Trump said of his subordinate.
Is that, you ask, the same Mike Pence who as governor of Indiana refused to authorize a needle-exchange program, thus giving rise to a state HIV crisis? Yep, the same guy. “A certain talent,” indeed.
And, finally, February brought us a once-promising Democratic presidential primary which now appears to be teetering on Monty Python-ish farce.
And so it went in the miserable month of February. Which now is, mercifully, over. The other day I read of two guys who have come up with a spiffy new calendar which corrects all the faults of the one we follow now. Well, almost all.
It unfortunately still includes February.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)