Thoughts on the Pandemic

I began a paper journal when the quarantine lock down started.  I have maintained it on a daily basis and my notes and musings are now well into a second book.  It’s filled with details about the COVID-19 and is also a record of the anxieties and fears that have accompanied this strange time.

Because I find it reassuring (or perhaps because I am a weirdo), I’ve also made a record of the case numbers in New Jersey.  I can see the high point in April quite clearly.  In the last month, as the state begin to report it on the daily COVID-19 dashboard it maintains,  I’ve also begin to record the rate of transmission.  For a while, we were below 1, meaning that each case resulted in less than 1 additional positive test.  In the past week, my state’s rate of transmission has tipped upward.  Case numbers are still well below the thousands of daily cases we recorded in April, but thanks to a transmission rate above 1, we remain squarely in a very scary danger zone   Because we have a good contact tracing program, we know the source of these transmissions: large house parties on the Jersey shore.  It’s clear that even in hard-hit New Jersey, a place where virtually all of us know someone affected by this virus, it’s been difficult to get all of us to take the necessary cautions.

In mid-July, it looked like the Northeastern states could re-open in person school of some variety.  With each day that passes, I grow more anxious that we will be unable to manage that successfully.  The prospect of remote school is so unsettling…..we know that children will suffer and lose from it……and yet here we are.  

My fear is only eclipsed by my anger, a place I do not like to occupy.  I count myself among those who felt that getting to 2020 was a victory.  As the year began, I started to count down the last months of Trump in the White House.  But as the days remaining stretch before me with a pandemic in their wake, and a pandemic in our future, I am starting to fear the nature of the recovery from the Trump disaster that we can expect.

The cost of Trump isn’t just the more than 150,000 people who have died from this disease.  It the cost of the racism and lies, the failure to take responsibility and to lead, losses that will linger long after the disease has been vanquished.  I’ve always believed that in a democracy we get the government that we deserve.  But no one deserves this, a misery made worse by the vain and ignorant man some of us (though not a majority!) selected to be at the helm of our government.