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I’ve been inundated lately with emails and calls and texts from friends and family from far away: Everyone’s been hearing reports about New York City, where I live, being a coronavirus war zone— one where everything’s closed and people are fighting over the few remaining rolls of toilet paper left. And it all reminds me a little bit of a long-ago Tran- script story about my father Jerome and his twin brother, Gerald, when they were stationed in New Guinea during World War II. My father told the Transcript that while everybody back home was worried about the two of them, think- ing that they got up every day and faced death in the form of front-line warfare, they actually spent their days playing baseball and cracking open coconuts and hanging out with local headhunters. This, of course, is the perfect illustration of the way my dad went about life: If he had been the sort to adopt a hifalutin Latin motto, as many colleges and royal families do, it would have been no lite in sublime tolli— Don’t worry about it. Better yet: Whatever the Latin version of Don’t make anybody else worry about it might be.
But it’s worry time in New York City at the moment. Three weeks ago, my wife and I and most of our friends were at work. When I was at home that night, our CEO sent the entire staff an email instructing us all to work from home for the foreseeable future. (I’m glad I grabbed my laptop as I ran out of the office that day.) A few days later, the mayor cancelled school— ostensibly for a month or so, but pretty much everybody suspects that nobody’s going back to class for the remainder of the school year. A few days after that, a curfew was imposed—only essential trips out of the house allowed. (Thankfully, taking your five-year- old son and eight-year-old daughter out to the enormous park at the end of our block to run around for a while still counts as essential—for the moment: Apparently some people have been gathering in too-close-for-comfort proximity, and there’s talk about closing the parks.)
The whole “toilet paper shortage” of weeks ago, in my experience, was a bit of a joke: Sure, there were empty shelves at Costco— but my corner deli was, as per usual, fully stocked with anything and everything we needed. (Did we buy an extra roll or two just to be safe? You bet we did.) What’s not a joke: Our area’s current shortage in life-saving ventilators. We need 20,000; Donald Trump—only after Governor Cuomo shamed him about this on national television—has promised to send 4,000. Regarding other urgently needed supplies, Trump has sent New York 2% of what we requested; Florida—a swing state crucial to his reelection, got 200% of what they requested. Just today we learned that when a Trump administration official reached out to his Thai- land counterpart to ask for their help in donating needed supplies, the Thai official told him something startling: A US shipment of the same supplies was already en route to Bangkok— along with 16 tons of urgently needed supplies that Trump sent to China.... back in February.
We’re apparently still somewhere between ten days and two weeks away from the peak of this virus’s surge in the city, yet as of today (Tuesday night, March 31 as I write this) we’ve now passed 1,000 deaths from COVID-19. There are refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals to store dead bodies. People are already dying while waiting to be admit- ted to emergency rooms. 41,000 New Yorkers are currently carrying the virus, but it’s estimated that somewhere between 50% and 80% of the entire city will get it eventually. I know a handful of people suffering from it— so far, none of them in serious condition. But every- body’s scared. People have been wearing masks on the streets for weeks, but every day you see more and more masks but fewer and fewer people. Like so much of the rest of the country, bars and restaurants have been closed for some time. You see more people walk- ing in the streets to avoid getting close to people on sidewalks. The other day my daughter, who’s eight, caught a snippet on the news of someone saying something about how going outside was dangerous— so now my daughter has panic attacks at the thought of leaving our apartment. And since we live a mere block from a large Brooklyn hospital, the constant sound seeping into our apartment from the outside is that of the wailing of ambulance sirens.
Yesterday, one of the Navy’s floating hospitals – a massive ship – docked on the west side of Manhattan to help ease the burden on our local hospitals, which are already bursting at the seams. Quickly built field hospitals are taking over part of Central Park. But where to go from here? What to do? The very fact that we’re dealing with a pandemic renders most ideas or suggestions moot: Either the virus spreads, or it doesn’t. “Social distancing” and bunkering in at home, as tedious and useless as both of those things may seem at times, are really the only hope. But hope for what? Certainly not the hope of stopping the virus. No: Our best hope now, as expressed by the President of the United States, is that only 100,000 to 250,000 Americans die from this—in other words, somewhere between two and four times the number of American dead from the Vietnam War.
At times like this, people like to say things like “this is beyond politics” or “let’s forget about politics.” I understand the sentiment. And while nobody’s say- ing that Donald Trump caused this virus, there are thousands and thousands of people all over the country— my friends and coworkers and neighbors, and yours too— who are going to either live or die in the coming weeks and months depending on what Donald Trump and other politicians, from sea to shining sea, decide to do. A few governors— all of them Republican, it should be noted— are still refusing to shut down schools and to tell their citizens to keep their distance. The pastor of a Florida megachurch had a warrant out for his arrest after urging every- one to his service on Sunday, intentionally flouting social-distancing orders. Fox News will likely be facing massive lawsuits for the way it repeatedly dismissed concerns about the seriousness of COVID-19.
And then there’s the economy— already in shreds and likely to stay that way for some time. Taken together with the death toll from the virus, it adds up to the worst crisis to face the world since World War II, according to United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Congress just passed the biggest bail-out bill it’s ever voted on just a few days ago – $2.2 trillion – but the talk is already about how big the next bill will have to be. Every day I hear of more and more of my friends being temporarily furloughed, permanently laid-off, their hours or their paychecks reduced, their businesses in tatters.
Why didn’t we do something about this months ago, in January, when Trump was first told about a catastrophic pandemic virus headed our way? Simple: Trump wanted to sweep the whole thing under the rug, because he knew that if the stock market tanks, his reelection hopes do too. And again, yes: The virus is — or will be soon — attacking more or less every country in the world. But by every current indication, the United States is handling it worse than any other country in the world. Our curve on the graph is rising higher, faster, and deadlier than anybody else’s.
On Jan. 22, Trump was asked: “Are there worries about a pandemic at this point?” He answered: “No. Not at all. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”
Today, more than 186,000 people around the country are infected with COVID-19. At least 3,600 have died. By the time you read this, those numbers are likely to be much, much higher.
Politics matters. Expertise matters. Planning matters. Telling the truth to Americans matters. And when you’re more concerned about getting re-elected than you are about saving thousands of Americans from dying? Yeah. That matters too.
Corey Seymour is a proud NRHS graduate who went on to study political science, economics and literature at UND and Georgetown University. A former writer and editor on the National Affairs Desk at “Rolling Stone” and at many other magazines, he now works as a senior editor at “Vogue” in New York. Write him at Nodakseymour@gmail. com.