It would be hard to imagine a better system for spreading an infectious disease around the world than our current global neoliberal capitalist world order, other than – on a more modest scale – perhaps that into which the President and his Administration recently transformed all of our major airports. Imagine it: From all over a world stricken by pandemic, travelers arrive in a confined space where they are held in close quarters for long periods of time before being spun back out to many destinations all across the country. Is it any wonder, then, that “the US is on track to suffer the largest, most explosive #COVID19 epidemic in the world“?

And yet, somehow, according to a recent poll: “A majority of Americans now approve of [the President’s] handling of the coronavirus pandemic”; one can be sympathetic to people’s hardships and still feel that there must eventually come an end to the stupidity. So adept a manipulator is our President though, so utterly without conscience or scruple the Republicans, so totally inept the Democratic leadership, so pliant the corporate media, and it must be said, so god-damned gullible some large percentage of the population, that, for now, that end has not come just yet. Sadly, I suspect it will arrive within a few weeks when the tidal wave of suffering current breaking over New York City crashes down on the rest of the country like the Biblical plague Mike Pence may believe it is, and it – we can hope – becomes impossible for the President to continue to evade responsibility and pass the buck. When every last one of our states (and even the forgotten Districts and Territories) is being ravaged, will he still try to blame the various governors and mayors of the stricken places? Though, of course, by then, he may very well have died himself of COVID-19, given how cavalier he’s been about the risks posed by the disease.

As Laurie Garrett writes on Twitter: “The surge has begun, and NYC is Ground Zero.” Meanwhile, the Post reports: “Coronavirus [is] killing more than a person an hour in NYC”; we knew this was coming, or should have, (I myself wrote on Thursday, March 12th: “Next week will be one of the worst weeks of the century, thus far, in New York City. It is almost a mathematical certainty.”), and yet, how can we not be startled by the swiftness, the ferocity of it.

We just keep repeating: It happened so fast.

From India, my partner and I hear reports from relatives and friends of a vast undercount; a megalomaniacal Prime Minister eager to spin the facts; denialism, conspiracy theories, and quack prognostications circulating widely on WhatsApp. Across the US, the case seems little better as states and municipalities – with a few bright exceptions – mostly wait until it is too late to take any action at all, and then only take too little. We should’ve listened to the reports from Italy, but we didn’t, and now we will pay a very heavy price.

Demonstrably, the Mayor and the Governor are not doing a good job; if they were, we wouldn’t be inexorably descending into this nightmare, and no number of bold statements or stoic press conferences changes that fact, nor does the aforementioned gullibility of some people in the face of a political haircut on the television screen.

If I seem enraged, it’s because I am. It’s because I’m confident that I would’ve done a better job than any of the elected executives in question, but wasn’t in a position to. As I’m finding it hard not to simply give in to my anger and sorrow at this point, a selection of quotes follows that I hope will make my point for me.

From the epidemiologist Larry Brilliant – note that while “legendary” Sand Hill Road (venture capital) firm Sequoia sent a (now-public) note to their portfolio founders and CEOs entitled “Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020,” Brilliant declares:

The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn’t a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It’s really hard to get people to listen… 

Yes, this [advice regarding social distancing, self-isolating, and other best practices] is very good advice. But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime.

And from “Sean Petty, a pediatric emergency room nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx and the southern regional director for the New York State Nurses Association” from an interview with New York’s own Indypendent (the excellent COVID-19 coverage of which, I strongly recommend):

The situation is dire. We are already days and weeks behind the measures Italy has implemented in terms of preventing spread [Italy’s handling of the pandemic has led to some of the most disastrous outcomes seen to date around the world] and they have a better-prepared healthcare system that is massively overwhelmed… 

First and foremost, the federal government has known about the inevitability of this crisis hitting the United States for at least a month. Immediately, they could have developed the capacity for widespread rapid testing, ramped up domestic N95 mask production, increased bed capacity, and possibly even produced more ventilators. We could have made plans to shift healthcare workers where they might be needed most. They could have instructed local governments with clear protocols for closing schools and other public institutions and restricting gatherings. None of this happened in time…

The second biggest danger for healthcare workers is how they are treated when they do get exposed. And here, it’s not just Trump that is failing us. The lack of rapid testing means that nurses should be taken out of commission when they are exposed until they test negative or for 14-days. But Mayor Bill de Blasio and Governor Andrew Cuomo have not ensured that this is happening across the board…

In the public system where I work, nurses with known exposures to COVID-19 patients are being asked to come back to work unless they have a fever. This, of course, significantly increases the chances that they are asymptomatically and unknowingly spreading this virus among their coworkers and patients. Until Monday of this week, they also weren’t being tested. And even now — the test takes two to three days to come back, remember — people are still working with known exposure.

And Petty is right about many things, including what the Federal Government knew and when; according to the Washington Post, “U.S. intelligence reports from January and February warned about a likely pandemic” – that, around the same time that the CDC was disseminating a COVID-19 test kit that Business Insider reports “could not differentiate between the novel coronavirus and lab-grade water”.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Is there any other response? Of course there is, as I’ve written before, in trying to: 1) reduce the harm; 2) care for those urgently in need – medically or otherwise – as this crisis deepens; and 3) strategize, plan, and work towards the better world and different future that it is going to take us decades to build after we come through this. We haven’t hit rock bottom yet, but we are well on our way, and only some sense of the world we want to make – the world it has to be our lives’ works to create, a world which we may, like many freedom fighters before us, have to be willing to die to win – is going to carry us through this. Immense suffering, social fragmentation, and threats to our civil liberties are all likely on the way; how we navigate and towards which North Star will determine the shape of our future.

I grew up in Boise, Idaho – a small but proper and, at least in my childhood, parochial city (although, like everyplace, it had its radicals and its visionaries, by many of whom I was lucky to be surrounded). As a small but proper city, Boise generally didn’t have bears in its streets, but if one ventured into the hills and mountains surrounding Idaho’s capitol, one was liable to encounter a bear, or at least had to behave as if such an encounter was immanently possible.

Wondering WTF bears have to do with anything? Let’s imagine that you and 49 other friends have gone camping. (It’s colonized land and you are settlers, which is why you go camping in the first place, but set that aside. And actually, you and 55 of your friends have gone camping, but for complex reasons we won’t get into here, you treat six of them like they’re varyingly less-than-human.) Say that you’re very conscious of the risk of bears, so you ring your entire campsite with netting and hang bells from the net-work to alert you to the approach of any potential grizzly. But your tent happens to be among the biggest and most food-packed and bear-appealing of all the 50 (that is, 56) tents, and it sits right next to the makeshift entryway in the protective netting you’ve now set up, and before going to bed, for no good reason, you leave the entryway wide open. No netting, no bells, no nothing. Then you settle down for a long, deep night of sleep. You slumber almost as if you, yourself, were a bear in hibernation.

Then boom, it hits you: You’re awake and there’s a bear in your tent! How had your elaborate bear-protection system failed you? Was it because you left the metaphorical door wide open so the big ursine could come right in? And what do you do now?

You, in this instance, are, of course, Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, and if you are our fearless Governor, you engage the bear in manly mano-a-mano combat. To be fair to Cuomo, one should really say that the campsite’s superintendent or steward left the entryway open, and that bears are, after all, intelligent, capable, and at times – at least by a human – nearly unstoppable animals.

Still, is hand-to-hand combat with the bear very wise?

Strong Man, or Strongman?

Regular readers will recall that I’ve been highly critical of the Governor’s handling of our current crisis (also of the Mayor’s and most especially of the President’s), and it was with annoyance that I took note of a recent wave of hagiographical puff pieces celebrating the Governor’s leadership, referring to him, for example, as “the Control Freak We Need Right Now” (all of these courtesy of Tech:NYC’s COVID-19 Digest).

I’d argue that what we needed was adequate preparation, foresight, and a coherent program (a la South Korea) of anti-pandemic measures, not machismo and narcissism, and when the Governor goes on MSNBC to speak with his brother – a news anchor – and indulges in some brotherly bickering about childhood whatever in the midst of a global crisis, or names a new bill to protect elders after his own mother, I’m as disgusted as I was when he named the new Tappan Zee Bridge after his own father. It’s why, among other reasons, I backed the highly-imperfect candidacy of Cynthia Nixon, and why I’m at times inclined to label Cuomo the party machine nepotist crypto-Republican par excellence. (I could go on and one, about his backhanded support for the buildout of fracked gas infrastructure in New York State, his perfunctory disbanding of the ethics / anti-corruption panel that was investigating him, his long alliance with the IDC that allowed him to stymie a progressive agenda in New York for years while centralizing power in his person…). But we are here to talk about the COVID-19 pandemic, and, in spite of all my frustrations with Governor Cuomo, I’m deeply thankful that his megalomania is fueling a massive and rapid ramp up in testing. According to his own proclamations, New York State now has the highest rate of per capita testing of any state/territory/country in the world, which is a substantial achievement and a good first step.

He may not have been fully responsible for letting the bear in, though he certainly shouldn’t have been sleeping either, but now that the bear is here, he’s starting to put on a good show.

Where From Here?

Even the toughest Cuomo can only survive so long with a bear in a tent though.

Thankfully, the most coronaviral writer of all, Tomas Pueyo, has another piece out to guide our perplexed executive. Following up on his very-widely-read Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now, Pueyo makes the case for a suppression rather than a mitigation strategy, and suggests that handled correctly (again, a la South Korea), lockdown measures – to which he refers as “the hammer” – need only last weeks (that is, perhaps a month to a month and a half) and that, thereafter, with the right combination of disease surveillance, testing, contact tracing, case isolation, and precautionary quarantine, we could hope to prevent epidemic explosion of the disease indefinitely while we await what we hope will be the creation of a vaccine; this process, by which we largely return to normal life while all making adjustments in our behavior and being prepared to modulate back up more drastic society-wide measures as the situation demands (that is, if epidemic spread of the disease threatens to resume), Pueyo calls “the dance” – hence the piece’s title, The Hammer and the Dance. The key takeaway / his key claim (bearing in mind that he is, like I am, not an epidemiologist or a health professional) is that mitigation strategies currently being employed in countries including the US and the UK are almost certain to lead to breakdown of healthcare systems, huge numbers of infections, and – in the US alone – tens of millions of deaths – whereas, he argues, suppression strategies like those employed in South Korea, China, and, to some extent, now in France and Spain, can bring the disease’s spread more fully under control, and then allow for measured responses going forward that will prevent catastrophic healthcare system breakdown and, in the US, potentially keep fatality rates in the tens of thousands. His conclusions largely mirror those of the recent Imperial College London study, with one important exception; where that study concluded that even a suppression strategy simply delays the inevitable peak in cases and healthcare system breakdown (while simultaneously inflicting massive social and economic harm on the population at large), Pueyo argues that the South Korea strategy should, again, allow for most daily activities to resume (or continue unabated, as they have in South Korea) without a resumption of epidemic spread so long as less drastic “non-pharmaceutical interventions” are pursued aggressively.

This short piece from Michael Donnelly mirrors my own recent work trying to predict case numbers in NYC, and he’s taken the trouble to do what I was planning to this weekend – namely, to infer, based on the number of COVID-19 hospitalizations in NYC how many total cases we have to date. So far, I’d been trying to predict the number of total cases using a model based on the Wuhan data from JAMA, but that model involved a lot of (questionable) assumptions, and now that the number of hospitalizations has sharply risen in NYC and data on hospitalizations are becoming more readily accessible, Donnelly’s method is preferable – though, for better or worse, his approach and my model yield comparable numbers (that put our current number of total cases in NYC in the vicinity of 100,000 to 200,000).

Here’s another good, short piece from Jason W. Bae – a physician in California – who uses similar methods to predict that there are already more than one million total COVID-19 cases in the US alone.

Finally, in the spirit of being / staying / getting informed, here are the graphs from NYC Health that show the sharp spikes in hospital admissions and ER visits for patients suffering “Influenza-like IIlnes + Pneumonia Syndrome” from early March on. This is the signal that we missed, and the signal that we should have been looking for. Even with that metaphorical door wide open, one of the bells was still ringing, but sound sleepers that we are, we slept right through it.

Today, I just feel beat up. I’m sure I’m not alone in that.

Shelter-in-place has arrived in New York, though owing to the Governor’s fragile ego and the importance he places on communication, it’s being called, here, a stay-at-home order. Sounds so cozy. Cuomo was worried that “shelter-in-place” makes people think of active shooter events and nuclear war, and this is just a global pandemic, so he didn’t want people to feel too alarmed.

Anyway, at the national level, our feckless Democratic Party/establishment has been so intently focused on preventing Bernie Sanders from getting the nomination that it seems, impossibly, they’ve now ceded the high ground to the Republicans when it comes to pandemic response. Basically, for weeks on end, the President spewed racism (which he continues to), dismissal, and denial when it came to COVID-19. Then, on a dime, he a made a 180-degree reversal, claimed he’d known all along it was a pandemic, rated his Administration’s response to the crisis a perfect “10,” and began attacking Cuomo and the states for asking too much of the Federal Government, while, meanwhile, his Treasury Secretary, in a big reveal, announced that the President wanted to get money to every US citizen, and fast.

“Americans need cash now. And the president wants to get cash now,” Mnuchin declared. Such is the idiotic state of play in this country.

I encourage everyone who hasn’t seen this before-and-after video from the Washington Post, comparing comments (pre- and post-the President’s epiphany on the novel coronavirus) from various Fox News talking heads; it is absolutely damning, and if there is a reader out there who feels inspired to make a similar video doing side-by-side comparisons of the President’s own remarks in recent weeks and months, you would be doing us all a great service. (The best current resource I’ve found to this end is from France 24.) The President and the Republican leadership cannot be allowed to escape responsibility for what they have cost us all; thankfully, at least, some Congressional Republicans are making this very easy for us.

In the spirit of sharing resources as we all work to educate ourselves about our changed and rapidly changing world, Doug Henwood (whose radio program / podcast I recommend) has a good piece up on his blog about responding to the economic crisis in the US, and Heiner Flassbeck has a good piece up on the same, but in Germany. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend you watch Naomi Klein’s short (~8 min) video at The Intercept entitled Coronavirus Capitalism — and How to Beat It. There is also an excellent two-part interview up on Democracy Now! with “Stanford University global health expert Dr. Michele Barry” in which Barry does a great job setting the COVID-19 pandemic in the context of global climate crisis, disinvestment in public health, and past emergent zoonotic epidemic diseases, like SARS.

Keeping this short and sweet. Monday was a turning point in that the emergency was finally officially acknowledged. Today feels to me like the last day for a long time that the emergency, at least here in New York, won’t feel constantly, readily apparent to us all.

These are our lives now, and I’m sure some of the strangeness is in getting used to that and settling in for the long months ahead. To that end, here are a few things I’ve been trying to do / finding helpful:

• Showering in the morning;
• Doing yoga;
• Talking with friends on the phone;
• Not over-indulging;
• Leaving my devices off until 9 AM and putting them away by 9 PM (that was a battle in the first few days post-declaration of the state of emergency but is now feeling doable);
• Going for short, socially-distant walks;
• Striving to be a good neighbor (all the basics become so much more important now that so many of us are at home almost all the time);
• Striving to be a good partner / roommate (same as above);
• Opening the windows; and
• Appreciating plants.

I’ve also been writing like crazy as any regular reader of this site will well know, and I plan to continue to. Thanks for reading along.

Last night, after thinking for some time in silence, my partner declared: “It feels like losing time, like losing life.”

Those of us who have been subjected to involuntary confinement know that feeling all too well, but if the monumental pain in the City right now is engendering a scream, like Munch’s, it is a silent one. I hope, in time, we may, like our peers in Brazil, take to banging pots and pans out our windows in solidarity with each other and in protest of the kleptocrats and authoritarians who have driven us headlong into this mess.

Once a day, I stop for a minute or two and cry.

Safe to guess that we’ll see a baby boom starting around December 2020 and lasting, at this point, let’s say indefinitely. If the reports out of China are any indication, we’ll also see a divorce boom starting much sooner. MTA buses are running empty as the agency appeals to the Federal Government for a $4 billion bailout, and the privatization vultures, long circling, tighten their wheeling arcs overhead. It is a story that Puerto Rico knows all too well.

Impossible to weave a single or even really a coherent narrative about what is unfolding around the world right now. Many commentators have observed that pandemic is not an ideal way to drastically reduce global emissions (note the tiny dip after the Global Financial Crisis; I’d expect the current dip to be much deeper and longer), but it is certainly effective. Axios reports that satellite images show smog clearing over China where factories remain shuttered (evoking the lead up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics) and that the pandemic is “poised to feed Middle East unrest” as oil prices plummet (owing both to a demand shock and the price war between OPEC/Saudi Arabia and Russia), leading to reduced government budgets and cuts in social services; at the same time, vulnerable populations across the region – in Gaza, Syria, and Yemen, for example – are now threatened by pandemic.

Building on my thoughts from yesterday regarding growing US-China tensions, I look to Bill Bishop who writes, of the propaganda war currently unfolding between the world’s two most powerful countries:

Meanwhile, the CCP continues to push its increasingly aggressive domestic and global propaganda campaign to sow doubt about the belief held by every serious person working on the outbreak that the virus originated in China. It is important to push back on that CCP propaganda, but it is also important not to sow the flames of racism, and I am very concerned that is what we are seeing from certain US politicians and media outlets.

And further:

Over the last 24 hours we have gotten even closer to the precipice. I can not think of a more dangerous time in the US-China relationship in the last 40 years, and the carnage from the coronavirus has barely begun in the US.

Half the world’s students are out of school; nearly 20% of US workers have already lost jobs or had hours reduced as a result of the pandemic; and while major US automakers are suspending production under pressure from the UAW, Tesla has ordered “factory workers to come to work in spite of [the] shelter in place directive” in force in the Bay Area, and Charter Communications has “told [staff] to report to offices despite positive coronavirus tests” among Charter employees – though, of course, corporate, as governmental, responses have varied too widely (for example, Apple has closed all of its retail stores outside of China but announces: “All of our hourly workers will continue to receive pay in alignment with business as usual operations”) for anything like a comprehensive roundup to be possible.

Here in New York, we are descending into a nightmare, with the Governor now openly admitting that the coming spike in cases (foreseeable weeks ago) is going to overwhelm our healthcare system. The State has ~50,000 hospital beds. He suspects we’ll need 100,000. Meanwhile, the Navy hospital ship Comfort will soon arrive in New York to provide an additional 1,000 beds, which will still leave us about 50,000 short. Shocking, but as the picture becomes clearer, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that there was a warning signal that the pandemic was already upon us, discernible in a spike in ER visits starting March 1st – coincidentally or not, the day that the first official case of COVID-19 was (finally) registered in NYC. According to Murdoch’s Journal:

New York City hospital emergency rooms started seeing a sharp rise in people coming in with flulike symptoms in early March

while according to The Intercept, the virus has now reached Riker’s Island, and ColorLines opines, with many others, that “Jails and Prisons Will Be Ground Zero for COVID-19, If We Don’t Act Now.”

The Journal’s coverage only further validates the past concerns of thoughtful people that the virus had been circulating cryptically (as Trevor Bedford has shown it was circulating from January 15th onward in Washington State, more than a month before the first official case was confirmed), while the report from Riker’s should chill us all.

In brighter news, as after Sandy, New York is experiencing a biking boom, and I’ve personally been enjoying walking down the middle of empty streets (which incidentally also makes proper social distancing much easier, given the cramped sidewalks to which we pedestrians are mostly confined in this anti-Jacobsian New York).

As of last week, Boeing’s stock price was down nearly 60% from its 2019 peak, showing the danger of pumping a company’s strategic reserves of cash into inflating its stock price (although the practice has, in recent years, been a short-term boon for activist investors and to executive compensation). Just think if Boeing hadn’t pumped $43 billion into share buybacks to buy shares that have now plummeted in value… Meanwhile, the battle over a bailout of US airlines is proceeding along predictable lines, and Amy Goodman reports on this morning’s Democracy Now! that almost all of the stock market gains of the President’s term have been erased.

Something has been troubling me though, beyond the immediate economic fallout of the pandemic’s US onset and the terror of our predicament in New York, and it’s why I fear we’ll be dealing with COVID-19 not for months, but for a year or two. President Xi has won his People’s War – with no new infections reported in Hubei yesterday for the first time in months – and let’s pray that no actual war results between China and the US, but what happens when the Chinese economy is restarted? Isn’t the virus almost guaranteed to begin to spread again? And how long can Xi keep the economy shut down before other aspects of the vaunted social contract begin to fray?

My good friend in the UK, let’s call him Frank, sent me this study from the Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team comparing different approaches to mitigation (that is, limiting the harm caused by the pandemic without fully attempting to stop its spread) and suppression (that is, attempting, as China and South Korea have to date, to fully eliminate the virus from a population – though notably, there are hints that Chinese efforts to suppress the spread of the virus in Xinjiang have not been so vigorous) in the UK and the US. A few of the study’s key findings include the following [bolding is mine]:

Stopping mass gatherings is predicted to have relatively little impact (results not shown) because the contact-time at such events is relatively small compared to the time spent at home, in schools or workplaces and in other community locations such as bars and restaurants… 

Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US… 

We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.

I’ll just reiterate: “We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time”; the study’s authors go on to argue that suppression measures “will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed.” The Johnson Government in the UK has belatedly abandoned its proposed herd immunity strategy and must now be scrambling to undue, or at least limit, the already “baked-in” harm, and even those of less benighted than Boris Johnson and his ilk still don’t know for certain to what extent infection confers immunity, as there are scattered reports of – but, as yet, no scientific studies on – cases of reinfection.

We should be moving all US elections to remote voting – by phone, by mail, or, if it can be done securely, by Internet; holding the legislators and executives most responsible for this debacle accountable and not letting them buy and pander their way out of blame; sadly, expecting very little from many of our elected representatives; and doing everything we can to support healthcare workers and other “essential personnel” at the frontlines of this struggle, as well as those already being hit hard by the pandemic’s economic impacts (though it’s a sad state of affairs when GoFundMe is where people turn for such support, and I hope we’ll see bold and creative approaches to mitigating the harm emerge at scale in the coming weeks ).

Finally, we should be educating ourselves as much as possible. To that end, I found this study on “The effect of public health measures on the 1918 influenza pandemic in U.S. cities” illuminating and accessible; it gives some hint as to the knowledge we’ve collectively lost in the last century as we’ve enjoyed the privileges conferred by modern hygiene and vaccination, and we can hope to see both a resurgence of such knowledge in this pandemic’s aftermath, and – perhaps I’m being overly optimistic – but a death, at last, to the anti-vax movement.

We’re in this for the long haul. At very least, we should know what we’re talking about. I’d say we have six months to go if it turns out that infection does confer immunity to most individuals, and “18 months or more” if it doesn’t.

Stay sane and stay strong. We’re in this together.

Another short walk, another confirmation that our efforts are failing. I couldn’t have been out for fifteen minutes when I’d already seen snot-rockets blown, a cough uncovered, someone spitting, and multiple people sniffling when the strong advice repeated ad infinitum has been to please, please, please stay home if you feel or seem at all sick. More optimistically, I saw a man haphazardly dumping bleach on patches of sidewalk outside a condominium building (I assume he planned to spray that patch down with a hose) and two friends talking through an open window, one on the sidewalk, the other, inside, more than six feet away behind the screen.

Zooming back out, I’d say that there’s a reasonable chance parts of our healthcare system in the City are already starting to buckle by this weekend or early next week. I can say that dispassionately – if with compassion – but friends who are physicians report increasingly fraught conditions in facilities across multiple boroughs. (One of them informed me last night that current protocol is seven days asymptomatic or 72-hours fever-free for quarantined healthcare workers – which she was, but no longer is, per this protocol – to be back on the job; no testing, no nothing; that’s our current state of affairs, though, bear in mind, it is only the median incubation period that is 5-6 days, which means that fully 50% of cases take longer than that to manifest.) They are the ones in the path of this freight train and it is they, and patients unable to receive care, who will suffer the most should such a situation come to pass. At this point, sadly, it feels almost inevitable, and it is our elected executives from the President, to the Governor, to the Mayor who, in their different ways and from their different political positions, bear the chief responsibility for this nightmare.

On Democracy Now! this morning, Amy Goodman spoke of beaches in Florida still thronged with spring break revelers, and of the DNC’s decision to forge ahead with primaries (no doubt, in part, owing to the ironclad intention of the Democratic Party establishment to force through Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate); Tom Perez, head of the DNC, went so far as to threaten states that postponed their primaries with loss of half their delegates. Such actions will, of course, live in infamy. Projections more professional than mine increasingly suggest that millions of people in the United States are likely to die from COVID-19, and the death toll around the world will almost certainly climb into the tens of millions now that the pandemic has spiraled totally out of control globally.

Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary and Foreclosure King Steve Mnuchin, sounding every bit the payday-lender that he is, declared, “Americans need cash now. And the president wants to get cash now.” The President, of course, has a long history of saddling projects with toxic debt, then declaring not personal, but corporate bankruptcy, and fleeing the scene, as it were – leaving his contractors unpaid, his creditors in the lurch – but who could have foreseen that the US would be the next such of the projects he foundered.

Still, ICE continues to hunt down migrants in California, only now the ICE officers have protective wear. Against the virus that is, not against the migrants, who we all know are mostly nonviolent, hard-working people fleeing desperate circumstances (often driven by climate crisis and oftener still, of US-making) and seeking opportunity. Sadly, the xenophobia and hysteria fueled by the pandemic are being used as justification for further “hardening” of borders, and I fear we’ve only seen the beginnings of the use the Far Right will make of this global catastrophe.

A month or so ago, many commentators in “the West” were still smugly pontificating that the outbreak (for then, it remained only an outbreak) in China might “at last” “finally” prove Xi Jinping’s demise. The tables have certainly turned, for now – after Xi led a triumphant “People’s War” against the virus, and we sailed headlong into this shitstorm, eyes firmly closed – and for those of us who hope not to see an authoritarian future, there is no delight in the likelihood that the pandemic and its aftermath may mark the decisive point of inversion in the roles of China and the US in the world. Whether or not China properly emerges in a post-pandemic world as the planet’s leading power though, the escalating rounds of expulsions by China of US media workers and companies, and the US of Chinese in turn, certainly does nothing to advance the cause of truth.

So what do we have to guard against?

The President showed his hand almost immediately last week in proposing to cut the Payroll Tax, a nonsensical response to jolting economic slowdown, but a perfect way to go about privatizing Social Security. Now that the MTA is seeking a $4 billion Federal bailout – in the face of plummeting ridership, and on the back of a decades-long crisis of funding brought on, in part, by the disastrous (Wall Street-favoring) structure of its debt – we have to remain ever vigilant against the barbarians at the gate who will be eager to turn our collective suffering into their private profit. I’ll repeat myself from yesterday:

[I]n the face of ongoing climate disruption and neofascism on the march, only concerted global effort by the majority of us – a majority who want to live in peace and justice, and I think increasingly recognize that the choice is actually socialism or barbarism, or, to sidestep, once again, the risk of ideological discord, that we either choose public wealth and private sufficiency, or the world burns – and only concerted global effort will ensure that that burning does not happen.

Do you remember when institutions were still saying “out of an abundance of caution” when they closed “for a week or two,” you know, like about five days ago? Just staggering the pace of this, and it can’t have been more than a month ago when, riding a crosstown bus on 86th Street – when leaving my home was still something I did routinely – I noticed a man about my own age – like a kid thinking he is “secretly” picking his nose – surreptitiously vaping across the aisle from me. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind not doing that on the bus, and he looked at me and said, in a way that made clear that what he meant was “Fuck you”: “Oh, I didn’t realize it was bothering you.

Just then, the bus was reaching my stop, and as I disembused, I simply pointed up, like Babe Ruth after that iconic home run, at the clear signage in the bus regarding smoking, then asked the bus driver on my way out, “Hey, sorry to bother you. What’s the rule on vaping on the bus? No vaping on the bus, right?”

His eyes got big, and he seemed like he was ready to jump the protective barrier: “Is someone vaping on the bus?”

“Sounds like there’s no vaping on the bus,” I called back to the guy.

The incident would have ended there – I was about to step onto the street after all – but the guy sprang up in a rage from his seat, leaving his stuff behind, ran to the bus’s front still pathetically clutching his Juul, and began to scream at me, red-faced (he was, of course, white), “Mind your own fucking business!”

And when I suggested – half inside the bus, and half out, and directing my remarks more to my other fellow riders than to the unhinged hot-head – that it was my business when he blew toxic nicotine fumes into a closed container full of dozens of other people, he screamed at me again, “Go fuck yourself,” as he stalked back to his seat.

“Nobody should be vaping on the bus,” the driver announced over the bus’s PA system as the doors closed behind me, and I was gratified to see some other heads nodding.

Why do I write about this now? The incident stayed with me. So far down the path of privatization have we gone since the days of those iconic Apple adds with the dancing silhouettes (or that even more iconic Apple add from 1984) that many of us no longer have any sense of a public. One feels half like a tattle-tale or a schoolmarm for simply believing that we should have social norms that we honor and that we should give a shit about each other and the things we share in common – like the bus and the air in it, or Earth’s atmosphere and the vast but finite riches of the global commons.

Obviously, this guy belonged in an Uber – where he could’ve tormented a hard-working driver with his unaccountable behavior instead – but perhaps he was too poor to afford one, and perhaps that was the source of some of his rage. I’m spitballing here, of course, but perhaps he’d been promised an aspirational dream that was always a lie and an unattainable fantasy, that he could shelter himself from others, behave as he pleased no matter the circumstances, never be accountable to anyone, never be touched by the world’s dangers and sorrows.

Really, I have no idea about this guy. Maybe he was just having a bad day, but as Jay Smoove legendarily put it, when someone steals your wallet, you dont’ want to know why; you just want your wallet back. I don’t particular care why that guy acted like such a colossal asshole; I’d simply have preferred if he hadn’t.

This is a long digression in an urgent time, so to bring it full circle, what COVID-19 is doing rapidly, and the climate crisis is doing slowly, but at a far vaster scale, is gradually dismantling our very ideas of ourselves, our institutions, our most deeply held beliefs. You can’t gaslight a virus, and the biogeophysical laws and dynamics of the Universe do not brook dissent. We can learn, and adjust, and seek to live with some degree of humility and awe in the face of the miracle that is life on Earth, or we can continue to royally fuck it all up and pay the price as we, sadly, are doing today.