I am old. People who read this column are well aware of my antiquity, and I’ve never tried to hide it. Better than the alternative, I’d joke. The way a lot of old people do. It goes with old-people territory.
But now I’m old and afraid.
It’s COVID-19, the damned novel coronavirus, this monster that sneaked out of some city in China a few months ago and now is sickening – and terrifying – the world. Well, at least the world that doesn’t include young spring-breaking college students who are living it up on Florida’s beaches even as Florida’s elderly – and there are a lot of them – huddle in their apartments and order in Chinese food.
We’re not in Florida, but we’re still pretty much huddling in our house for the foreseeable future or at least until someone we can really trust declares an all-clear. Where is Walter Cronkite when we really need him?
We huddle with resources, of course. We come from prudent people, growing up in the boondocks where distances from grocery stores were long and power outages were common. Keeping a supply of whatever we think we might need is natural. Our stash just needed a little freshening up with a dawn raid on a barely awake supermarket.
We even still have a few foodstuffs left over from Y2K, that famously uneventful Major Event we all prepared for 20 years ago, convinced by the experts that all sorts of horrors awaited us when millions of clocks failed to make the leap to a new century. In fact, the clocks leapt and nothing much happened.
Interestingly, as if to remind us of that not-so-monumental calendar change, a can of tomatoes from that era quietly exploded on the shelf just this January. For the record, it looked pretty inedible.
Now we hide and huddle awaiting a possible new global catastrophe – this virus – and many of us watch with additional horror as our savings start to vanish in a tanking stock market and our newspaper headlines and our TV news readers solemnly tell us that we old people are especially vulnerable to the virus, COVID-19. It kills us in disconcertingly large numbers.
Which some might say isn’t so bad if we’re all going broke anyway.
About now, a lot of us old folks begin to feel like we’re Joe Btfsplk, a character in the old Al Capp comic strip Li’l Abner. He is well-meaning, but is the world’s worst jinx, bringing disastrous misfortune to everyone around him. A small, dark rain cloud perpetually hovers over his head to symbolize his bad luck.
Ask your grandparents, kids. Or look it up on Wikipedia.
Anyway, all this disagreeable news is making us – and a lot of others – pretty cranky people. People not to be messed with. By anyone, including our president.
Back in January Donald Trump learned that a new disease – this nasty coronavirus – had found its way out of Korea and was headed our way. And he pooh-poohed it. He minimized its lethality, said those dastardly Democrats were at it again, making a big fuss about virtually nothing.
Our president – our leader – told Americans, at least by example, that they should live their lives as always and as he went on entertaining lavishly at his Mar-a-Lago estate. He held one bash barely a week ago when he hosted a bunch of Brazilians who, as it happened, proved to have COVID-19. No concern, he insisted to reporters. Worry? Not him!
But increasingly other, less-privileged Americans were becoming more uneasy, alarmed as their hospitals were filled with more and more seriously ill people. Just last Thursday 13 new cases were announced in New Hampshire, bringing to 44 the number of Granite Stater victims known so far, and here as elsewhere we’ve barely begun testing. Two of the group have been hospitalized.
Then, just days ago, our prez abruptly got religion. Apparently someone finally convinced him that yes, Americans – some even Republicans – do really care about this. He suddenly seemed to believe that in fact this is a dangerous situation for the country he presides over as president. And, importantly, wants to keep presiding over after Nov. 3 of this year.
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, it wonderfully concentrates the mind of a man to realize suddenly that he might be in danger of losing his re-election.
But we’ve lost valuable time we can’t get back. South Korea discovered the new coronavirus when Americans did, and that country took it seriously from the start with massive testing and prompt treatment.
As of last Thursday, according to Science magazine, South Korea had tested more than 270,000 people for the virus and treated many thousands. We had tested barely any. And we don’t yet have the capacity to test anywhere near that number, nor the facilities to treat as many as might need it.
This is the United States. We are the richest, most educated and most powerful nation the Earth has ever seen. We’ve won two world wars. We’ve sent men to the moon, for heaven’s sake! What on earth is wrong with us in 2020?
Yes, I’m old. And angry. And – I hope – coronavirus-free. So far.
(“Monitor” columnist Katy Burns lives in Bow.)