8 Fingers

The Center for Disease Control became a lightning rod for the epidemic storm of alternative reporting and the dissemination of misinformation. What was once a taken-for-granted institution rarely considered outside of The Walking Dead mythology suddenly morphed into a make-or-break infrastructure that, whether one trusted its recommendations or not, became an essential gateway into returning to norms. It didn’t help that varied guidelines on pandemic protocols depended on who was doing the talking, what recent developments had wrought, what scientists had newly discovered, or which department was racking their brains about this, that, or the other.

It was a new bug. It was complex with a wild range of effects, onsets, and results. The CDC was spit-balling same as Oxford, UC San Francisco, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, Karolinska, and all the rest of the world’s leading medical institutions capable of properly studying and addressing a novel virus. Yet Americans expected definitive solutions in the shortest time possible. They were accustomed to prompt reactions to volatile situations, mostly because that’s what they’ve learned from their televisions and the fact they wanted to get on with their lives.

It would’ve helped immensely if the pandemic response teams already in place weren’t eliminated back in January by That Guy’s administration. He and his cronies ignored the already established playbook, downplayed the epidemic at every turn, lied about PPE or respirator availability, forced states to compete for resources against each other, refused to set a good example and wear masks, encouraged states and businesses to reopen prematurely against CDC recommendations, promoted conspiracy theories, discredited their own epidemiological experts, and politicized a bug that didn’t care about what side of the aisle its host was on, all these things were grievous errors on the part of our less than stellar leadership.

California’s caseload exploded. We were at the end of July with dramatically rising deaths and hospitalizations. The reopening of businesses was already rolling back, though not quick or widespread enough. I still saw vast crowds of people milling about at our local eatery, nightclub, and bar thoroughfares. Too many people didn’t care. It was shocking. After so many months of quarantining, it was maddening. It tweaked my own caution fatigue for sure. It sucked so many of us were sacrificing and so many of us weren’t. The division in this country was at an all time high in so many ways.

California was once again the center of the American pandemic, for the second time. The Sun Belt had been hallmarking that distinction, in Florida and Texas. But then the Golden State reigned supreme again, with more than 430,000 known cases in the last week of July 2020, surpassing the previous record in New York. On Wednesday of that week, we set a new single day record with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.

Governor Newsom continued to struggle with appeasing local officials who held out against a second lockdown or a mandatory mask order. Los Angeles and San Diego projected shutting down public schools in the fall. The governor stated most schools weren’t going to teach in person for the remainder of the year. Yet Orange County’s Board of Education steadfastly maintained kids would return to classes without masks, come hell or high water. Vanilla Isis continued to plot.

Tim Arango and Sarah Mervosh at The Los Angeles Times made a fair point about the disparities between California communities:

“It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back and forth…what applies in one area may not feel necessary in another…and the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor, and the White House.”

Everybody was grasping at straws or reaching for lifelines, or searching for bricks to toss at glass houses, for any desperate stability they could fall back on. Marina Del Rey yacht clubbers or Salinas Valley field workers alike, we were all walking a fine line. Some were wisely proactive. Some were shortsightedly reactive.

The rest of the world was handling it far better.

Singapore, Korea, Vietnam, and Thailand reported fair recoveries, though nobody was out of the woods yet. Singapore was on top of it from the get-go. They moved fast, implemented immediate protocols including border controls, expansive testing and tracing, fluid communication between agencies, strict social distancing and travel embargoes. Vietnam initiated a full bore lockdown, shutting down travel, intensive monitoring of traffic at borders, shuttered schools, executed a strict policy in contract tracing, and provided generous proactive treatment of suspected cases. They were the shining light in Pan-Asia. With a population of 95 million, as of that week in July, they reported only 440 cases and not one single death. Even the European Union showed a marked decrease in infection rates and deaths.

Humanity elsewhere was rallying.

America…not so much.

Within our own borders, we effectively showed the rest of the human race how little backbone and grit we possessed, as well as our utter lack empathy for fellow at-risk Americans. Our World War II Greatest Generation character so often lauded was almost nowhere to be seen. The CDC was at the center of bipartisan arcs of disinformation, flailing in public response to accusations of censorship, bent to breaking levels from lobbyist scapegoat agenda.

A few stalwart medical administrators stuck to their guns, like Doctor Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. That guy couldn’t catch a break. He was roasted on the ‘net as a toady for leftist elite. The dude was just doing his fucking job.

The White House issued an order that all hospital and health care facility Covid-19 data, including infection and mortality rates, was to be directly routed to that administration instead of the CDC. It wasn’t the first time they tried to sideline them, an obvious ploy to control or manipulate hard data. To be fair, the CDC itself wasn’t fully transparent or consistent with their information either. The overwhelming amount of activity their agency experienced unquestionably bogged down their response time, what with the influx of data from vaccine trials, nationwide health care statistics, and morbidity rates. They didn’t have the staffing or resources to address everything that came at them. In theory, the CDC is an agency that shouldn’t be politicized. You don’t want to spit politics on the shoes of the experts in medical science. We were never going to know everything about how that epidemic response from on high precisely transpired between agencies, what was classified, what needed to be prioritized, what wasn’t. It was a garbage heap of a year and it’s still tough even now, four years later, to pinpoint how things really went down at the upper echelon levels. Historians and journalists will be researching and pontificating for decades about governance response to the challenges of 2020.  

Here was the bottom line everyone danced around, in the United States, something that was never going to happen under our for-profit, military industrial complex umbrella.

The government needed to pay people to stay home until there was a vaccine.

Yeah, I know.

Communism!

Socialism!

While we fretted about the death of capitalism during a global pandemic killing hundreds of thousands of people, it would’ve been wise on our part to try and remember the United States pours most of its discretionary spending into its national defense budget, and allocates nearly a trillion of our tax dollars each year to improve and maintain it. Just ten percent of that allocation would’ve easily covered every single American citizen’s average monthly cost of living for several months. Do the math yourselves. We didn’t need new Apache helicopters. We needed to save lives.

That week, I caught an interview on a local news channel out of Los Angeles. A guy being interviewed was hospitalized for 64 days with Covid-19. He was forty-some years old. He grew septic. The docs had to amputate eight of fingers. He survived, lived to tell the tale, and warned those who continued to scoff at the severity of the outbreak to not underestimate its danger. He held up his hands. What remained of them, anyway.

8 fingers gone. Two lonely fingers left.

It was not just a cough.

Blood clots, sepsis, heart attacks, strokes, lung transplants.

8 fingers.

*Compiled from July 27, 2020