Sunday, March 22, 2020

Captain's Log, Day 1: An Introduction to COVID-19 in 2020


Date: March 22, 2020
Quarantine Day: 8
Last Song I Listened To: “Reggaeton Lento (Remix)” by Little Mix ft. CNCO
Last Person I Communicated With: Mikayla Sharpless
Last Thing I Ate: sour cream and onion potato chips / lemon-ginseng green tea
Last Thing I Read: currently reading These Witches Don’t Burn (2019) by Isabel Sterling
Current Mood: Mostly indifferent, kind of excited about this blog/diary
One Thing I’ve Accomplished Today: Recorded and posted my first PowerPoint lecture for ENGL 100
One Thing I Want To Accomplish Today: finish watching Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island (1998)
One Reason I’m Stressed Today: I have so much housework that needs done, mainly dishes, and I hate housework
One Reason I’m Happy Today: I’m oddly excited about grocery shopping tomorrow



Dear Apocalypsers,

This is my first entry—hopefully it won’t be my last.

Dramatics aside, here’s the situation: COVID-19, aka coronavirus, is running rampant in the U.S. It’s a flu-like virus that is particularly dangerous to the elderly and immunocompromised (*thinks nervously about my Type 1 Diabetes*). It causes high fevers, shortness of breath, body pain, but the scariest part is that we don’t have a vaccine for it, and it has an incubation period of 2-14 days after exposure, so you could transmit it to so many people before you even know you’re sick.

That’s why we’re on “social distancing/self-isolation/quarantine” right now. K-State is online for the rest of the semester. We’re working from home. They cancelled graduation. Public gatherings in Riley County are prohibited. You’re not supposed to be in groups of more than 10 people. Stores are operating on shorter hours. And everyone is buying up all the freaking toilet paper. (I really don’t know what that last point has to do with anything, but it must be the equivalent of Alabamians buying out the bread and milk when we have the threat of snow.)

COVID-19 has literally spread all over the world. The virus originated in China, but Italy has been hit particularly bad. A K-State professor was exposed to it in London. Some singers I follow have had to cancel tours across Europe because of government ordinances. It’s an actual pandemic, which is pretty scary. A lot of people go their entire lifetimes without experiencing something like this…guess I just got lucky, huh?

And, of course, our president is being an absolute useless bag of steaming orange garbage about this. The country is at mass level hysteria. But, don’t worry, our commander-in-chief said just yesterday, “At some point this is going away” (Diamond). Comforting, isn’t it? (It’s not.)


The U.S. doesn’t have enough testing supplies to test the public, and it’s bringing to light how truly classist American healthcare is. Some people are taking their privilege and basking it. One of my favorite cynical tweets about this whole situation goes, “For the average American the best way to tell if you have covid-19 is to cough in a rich person’s face and wait for their test results” (@hrmoroz).Other celebs, however, are using their fame as a platform. Yesterday, actor, model, and activist Nyle DiMarco tweeted about his own experience with COVID-19: “It is very possible I contracted coronavirus and I have access to get tested but I do not want to. The reason is because there is a shortage of covid-19 test kits in the U.S. and the sick patients need it more than I do” (@Nyle DiMarco).


But the fact of the matter is that Trump set us up for disaster long before the first person ever contracted this virus. A Washington Post Fact Checker article breaks down (or tries to break down) just what Trump has (or hasn’t) done when it comes to his pandemic response. A former Obama administration official, Beth Cameron, claims that Trump closed the White House pandemic office and that “has contributed to the federal government’s sluggish domestic response” to the coronavirus pandemic.” Meanwhile, Tim Morrison, a former Trump administration official claims that the office “was folded into another one to streamline a bloated organization.” Long story short, the article determines that, yes, the most of the positions in the “pandemic office” that Barack Obama established in 2016 do still exist, but they have been lumped into another office where domestic pandemic response is not their primary occupation (Kessler and Kelly).

As someone who has done journalism, it’s never reassuring when the article says, “as far as we can determine…” (Kessler and Kelly), because that means that easily accessible information isn’t easily accessible.

Of course, there are literal thousands of memes and jokes going around about this—which I kind of appreciate, honestly. My dad always says it’s better to laugh than cry, and, by this point in our lives, millennials are really good at laughing in the face of disaster.

In the words of Natalie Imbruglia, "That's what's going on."

I haven’t decided how I’m going to tackle each of these “diary entries” yet—I’ll probably just go where the wind takes me—but I thought it would be good to start with the current state of things…which aren’t great. But I guess they could also be worse.

Anyway, I’ll be in touch soon.

May the odds be ever in our favor,
Katie





Works Cited:
Diamond, Dan. “Short-term thinking plagues Trump’s coronavirus response.” Politico, 21 March 2020. https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/21/short-term-thinking-trump-coronavirus-response-140883

@hrmoroz. “For the average American the best way to tell if you have covid-19 is to cough in a rich person’s face and wait for their test results.” Twitter, 20 March 2020, 10:35 a.m., https://twitter.com/hrmoroz/status/1241025578527903750

Kessler, Glenn and Meg Kelly. “Was the White House office for global pandemics eliminated?.” The Washington Post, 20 March 2020. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/20/was-white-house-office-global-pandemics-eliminated/

@NyleDiMarco. “I’ve been really sick and I am now on the mend. It is very possible I contracted coronavirus and I have access to get tested but I do not want to. The reason is because there is a shortage of covid-19 test kits in the U.S. and the sick patients need it more than I do (see more).” Twitter, 21 March 2020, 3:21 p.m., https://twitter.com/NyleDiMarco/status/1241459950578069506

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