We now know that COVID-19 was around long before we realized it was in our midst. Doctors mistakenly thought it was the seasonal flu. The first case has been traced back to 17 November 2019. The poor unfortunate soul — Patient Zero — who unwittingly infected the planet earth, was a 55-year old citizen in the Hubei province of China. Over the next few weeks this new virus quickly spread to nearby Wuhan, Japan, South Korea, and Thailand. And on February 25th, a thirty-year-old man who had recently traveled from Wuhan, visited a family member in a nursing home north of Seattle, Washington, and America was off to the races. But unlike Iceland and New Zealand, who immediately started preparing for the virus in January, we ignored the coming threat and wasted more than a month pretending that we were too special or mighty to be touched by something you couldn’t even see with the naked eye. And so, in March, we took the full brunt of what epidemiologists, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, often to refer to as a giant “shit storm”. COVID-19 continues to kill a thousand people a day and our nation will probably never be the same. USA! USA!
In the ensuing months, scientists and doctors from around the world have been relentlessly studying this very tricky and ever-changing virus and have come to the following three overarching conclusions:
- There’s a lot we don’t know about COVID-19.
- It tends to kill the old, the sick, and the lame.
- Immigrants, the poor, and dark-skinned people disproportionately die from the virus.
So, from a game management standpoint, COVID-19 is actually quite beneficial. It is merely culling the herd and eliminating the weak, sort of like a viral wolf preying on a herd of sheep. It primarily takes those who probably weren’t long for the earth anyway.
From a cost benefit standpoint, it is equally profitable because we don’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars treating and caring for the medical needs of those who are soon going to die. Insurance companies are probably secretly applauding this tragic loss of life.
From a white supremacy standpoint, the less non-whites the better. White Power!
From an anti-immigrant standpoint, we don’t have to waste money processing the desperate multitude of unwanted illegals and then sending them back to their home country. Hell, it’s better than a goddamn wall!
And from a social welfare standpoint, we can save billions of tax dollars on welfare, food stamps, public housing, and medicaid. Having less poor people around, sucking off the government tit, has got to be a good thing. Right?
I don’t agree with any of this survival of the fittest, Darwinian cruelty, but I totally get it.
And I know there are many, many Republicans who nod their heads solemnly when confronted with the harsh reality that 200,000 Americans have died from the novel coronavirus in the past seven months, and say it’s the terrible price we have to pay for freedom. And I guess that’s all fine and dandy if you aren’t one of the unlucky ones touched by sudden death.
But what really pisses me off about this calculated gamble is the fact that when the conservative media and politicians were doing everything in their power to sink Obamacare a few years back, they started floating this patently false rumor that there would be Death Panels to determine whether chronically ill people should be denied medical coverage for costly procedures, thus ensuring they would die. Hannity and Moscow Mitch wailed incessantly and sanctimoniously almost every day about granny dying because she couldn’t get the expensive brain surgery she so desperately needed.
But now that their exalted master, President Donald “Judas” Trump, has royally screwed up our once great nation’s handling of the pandemic and lied about it at every turn, these same conservatives that were so concerned about losing the ill and the elderly to the judgment of faceless government bureaucrats, now refer to the daily death count as an “acceptable loss.” The hypocrisy is really quite astounding.
So, just like with the Tea Party patriots who no longer have any problem with tax cuts for the rich and trillion dollar deficits, I guess it really was just all about the black guy being president.
