Yesterday, March 4, Leslie went to see her hairdresser for the first time in months. She has received her first shot of the Moderna vaccine and is scheduled for the second on March 14. The hairdresser, whom I’ll call Jane, had gotten both. She is fully inoculated, so when she phoned this afternoon with the news that she had tested positive for COVID19, Leslie was unpleasantly surprised. So was I. She will now have to be tested, but because the test isn’t accurate immediately after exposure, she must wait till Tuesday or Wednesday to have it done. Meanwhile, she  has to quarantine herself, wear a mask even inside the house, and keep at least six feet away from me, although I, too, am fully inoculated — for whatever that’s worth. Apparently not as much as we had thought.

I relate this domestic anecdote to underline, italicize, and emphasize that for a long while yet vaccinations are not going to catapult all of us back to normality. This disease is called the Novel Corona Virus not because it’s an extended prose narrative but because it hadn’t  been seen before its appearance in, roughly, January, 2019. Scientists and medical experts have learned a lot about it since then, but by no means everything. It’s full of nasty surprises, mutating into variants that spread more rapidly and severely than the original, infecting people, like Jane, who think that vaccination has made them bullet-proof.

I ponder this as I read and hear about the governors of Texas and Mississippi lifting all restrictions in their states, including mask mandates and requirements to maintain social distancing. The war’s over! These moves, which, count on it, will be copied by other state governments, have been cheered by the nation’s  ignoramus faction — generally the same people who still believe that the 2020 election was stolen by the Democrats — and lauded in the conservative media. The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial and oped pages are to unbridled capitalism as Pravda and Izvestia were to Soviet communism, ran an editorial in this morning’s edition scorning President Biden’s characterization of the above governors as “Neanderthals.” The paper’s argument is that Democrats want the COVID crisis to be perpetual, using it to “expand the welfare state.” Public Health experts have warned that the vaccine rollout ought not to be an excuse to lower our guard until the pandemic is fully contained. But these experts are the despised elite, part of the cabal seeking to cripple the economy so the welfare state can emerge triumphant.

This is nonsense, of course. But in a country where millions believe that liberals drink the blood of children, among other atrocities, it is too much to expect common sense to prevail. Nevertheless, I’ll throw out this idea: mandating that masks be worn in public and that people practice social distancing does not force restaurants, bars, stores, and other businesses to shut their doors. Those sorts of restrictions, as opposed to lockdowns, do not gravely effect economic activity; but if they are not followed, you may be assured that infection rates will surge, ICU’s will become overcrowded, and medical staffs extended to the breaking point, all of which will result in lockdowns. In so many words, the governors of Texas and Mississippi, among other state leaders, aren’t lifting restrictions for economic reasons; their motives are political. As Paul Krugman phrased it in the New York Times, “Refusing to wear a mask has become a badge of political identity, a barefaced declaration that you reject liberal values like civic responsibility and belief in science.”

Are we becoming, if we’re not there already, an ungovernable country?

 

Discover more from Philip Caputo

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading