The Nincompoopidemic

The governor of Florida hawks "Don't Fauci My Florida" merchandise. The Conservative Political Action Conference attendees burst into applause because COVID vaccination rates are not as high as Biden had hoped. So it occurs to me, well, golly! Maybe people just don't understand what a virus is and what it does for a living. All I need to do is 'splain it and then we can all move on. Right?

Viruses are itty bitty. There's some argument over whether or not they're alive but they definitely get around, and want to. They're like every other bit of protein on this earth: they want to keep themselves going. Trouble is, they can't live on their own. They die without a host. They absolutely require cushy digs such as your lungs to invade, replicate, and go forth and multiply like God purportedly intended, in another context. Once they're done killing you, they'd be dead themselves if they couldn't somehow jump onto the next host over and keep the whole operation rolling. So the viruses that cause you to hork and schnozzle and smear your effluent all over other folks are super successful. There are lots of those kinds. Colds. Flu.

They're not equally bright. Like any other group of protein packets, some of them are writing sonnets, some are dominating their school teams, and some are eating library paste. COVID-19 is middling smart. Not as contagious--read, athletic in host-to-host gymnastics--as some, and not quite as likely to slay their own hosts. But impressive nonetheless. Just think about how in March 2020 there was, like, one dude in America who had custody of the virus, and the scientists said it was going to flash-over like a burning building to threaten everybody, and then it totally did. So kudos to the clever virus, and more praise to the scientists, who have been vindicated at every single step, no matter what else you've read.

 

Scientists were well prepared for this, and because of new mRNA technology and genome mapping they were able to produce effective vaccines in record time. Doggone! Ever since the first one, vaccines have proven to be a beautiful thing. We have conquered plagues that vexed us for thousands of years. Do you see this on my arm? It's my smallpox vaccination scar. Must've been a doozy of a shot to still be visible. If you're younger than fifty you don't have one. Because we fucking killed it, by not giving it a place to land. That's right. After at least three thousand years of smallpox, there's no more smallpox.

 

That's how it works. We'd have polio conquered now too if we could get those last few pockets of humanity in south Asia vaccinated. Similarly, if everyone in the world could hunker down inside with a jar of peanut butter for two weeks, COVID-19 would be gone from this earth. Poof. That's a fact. That's something we can't manage to do, of course. But we do have vaccines. So victory is at hand!

 

Oh. 

 

Well, it's hard to imagine how anyone who is not irretrievably around the bend could be against vaccines. As if we could somehow thwart viruses by ourselves with our own virtue and certitude. We can't. We've had thousands of years of proof of that. Viruses have been perfecting their game for billions of years. We can protect ourselves from them but it turns out we can't protect ourselves from con artists who want to befuddle us just to gain or maintain power. What if this whole miraculous scientific breakthrough is just a conspiracy to enslave us? What if we catch autism, or our dicks fall off, or we summon aliens? Santa Claus is coming to town! Bar the door, he probably has a gun. The coronavirus is coming! We'll leave the light on for you.

 

We didn't use to be so foolish. That's why most of you do not have a smallpox vax scar. That's why there are fewer than a hundred polio cases in the world today.

 

Weird thing is, conservative mucus membranes aren't any damper or more receptive than liberal tissues. The virus is not biased. If there's a political aspect to this pandemic, it's because the virus is going to stampede toward those who refuse to protect themselves, whether or not they hate abortion or immigrants or colored voters. Bummer for them, but also for the rest of us, who have a grasp of the concept of public health, wherein we all thrive, or for that matter survive, and we're not willing to risk ourselves and our fellow human beings for the freedom to infect.

 

We actually are in this together. That's how it works. The virus does not care. The virus is a teeny tiny boll weevil. Just a-lookin' for a home.

Covered For Covid

Don't worry about us old people. Sure, we tip over a lot--you would too if you had one foot in the grave. But check this, Junior. We're going to sail right through your little virus dealie. Because we got Life Skills. We got Lore. We got Laudanum. We'll be fine.

Shoot, we been training for this forever. We're supposed to start looking at children as little disease vectors? Way ahead of you. And we know exactly how far apart six feet is. It's coffin depth. It's the gap you keep from the person in front of you at the ATM. It's the distance between Rob and Laura Petrie's beds. It's the length of a proper dog leash. You young people with the retractable beagles are the ones getting confused.

Six feet is weird anyway. Supposedly that recommendation comes from the idea that it is the distance an infectious droplet can travel when coughed out. Well ain't that precious. Doesn't anybody smoke anymore? We had an old man down the street from us growing up who could launch a loogie ten yards into a headwind. He'd get started hacking and you'd think someone had tied tin cans to his bumper. Speaking of bumpers he had a hell of a tailwind too. Mr. Frank was a deeply frightening man, to a little kid. We kept our germs well away from him. He had to get sick all by himself using nothing but Viceroys but that's the kind of can-do initiative people used to have, before we had to have fancy imported viruses.

What else? Wash our hands all day long? Oh fine, but there's a limit. Our tissues are thinner. You start soaping off too many layers and you're getting into a damaged-packaging situation. And then we're supposed to stop touching our faces? What's left to touch that we can still reach without bending over?

Old Person Amusing Himself

Besides I only touch my nose ten or twelve times an hour, just to get the crusty bits on the outside. I don't do any actual excavation unless there's no one else around, so that's safe. And I hardly ever have to go in past the first knuckle. What I really do a lot of is stick my finger on my eyeball. I do that because I wore hard contact lenses for forty years and completely lost the revulsion factor. Sticking your finger on your actual eyeball is the best way of getting those stray eyelashes out. Of course, you have to lick it first. Anyway, I haven't seen anything specific about not sticking your licked finger on your eyeball. I'm fine. Also, I've made extra sure I wipe my nose thoroughly on my sleeve and my hands thoroughly on my doorknobs. The doorknobs are metal and viruses slide right off.

You want contagious, you should try measles. One kid could easily measle up a whole class of fourth-graders. But we measled in rolling shifts for efficiency. That way we could still maintain dodge-ball teams all winter, which was an important lesson in survival skills, especially for your smaller and squishier children.

I'm in fine shape. I spent a good portion of my life learning how to amuse myself. I can hole up here in the house for months. And thanks to our lack of weatherstripping, we can get a pizza slid right under the front door without losing a mushroom.

But we've got another ace in the hole: nobody visits old people. We only have hard candies and our breath is bad.

Love In The Time Of COVID-19

Well look at that--big fat flakes are coming down and things could hardly look festiver. It's mid-March and this is certainly not unprecedented, but it's still a surprise, and I can't remember if we had any snow this winter. In fact the winter has seemed unusually mild. Our normal winter days are rainy and top out in the mid-forties, but it's been a good ten degrees warmer than that, enough to make me wake up in the middle of the night and kick off my beloved slab of blankets and fret about what summer will be like on our new, remodeled planet.

What else? Oh. There's a new virus in town, perhaps you heard. If you drew a Venn diagram of People Who Should Be Real Worried and Me, you'd have one big dark circle. Nevertheless I find myself not real worried. This is mainly a matter of principle. Worry has always been the least helpful tool in my kit and often as not I can't even find it in among the store receipts, pennies, and itty bitty screws.

I am not yet a complete dunce, however, and have adopted all the protocols recommended by scientists in the Deep State, a.k.a. the remaining still-functional bureaucrats whose salaries I am happy to pay with my tax money. Even though I am well over sixty I believe I would survive an infection. I worry more about Dave, who, despite being apparently bionic in fundamental ways, was a smoker of long standing, and the creative things he can do with a simple respiratory ailment are legendary around here. We're hunkering down.

The thing that's weirder about my state of mind is that I find all of this actually exciting, in almost the same way I find our imminent mega-earthquake exciting. I'm always impressed by massive real events beyond our control. Things that shake us up. In this case we have a tiny item, a virus, which, like all other living things, is doing its level best to reproduce itself, which it must do inside a "host"--in this case bats, or us. "Host" is a mighty accommodating word and suggests a degree of hospitality we might not actually feel. "Mark" might be a better term. The virus catches a ride on a suitable cell and shlorps itself inside, where it cajoles the cell into helping it replicate, slips on a new jacket, and busts out of Dodge, which is real bad for Dodge, and then it hops the next available mark, eventually existing in, conceivably, half the world's human population, plus a number of bats.

Meanwhile, we continue to hurtle toward environmental doom, even though we know full well what we need to do about it--because we knew we needed to do it fifty years ago. No politician on the planet could overcome the stubborn short-sightedness of our rapacious consumption. The disruption to our economic system would be so severe that people will not consider the far heavier price of doing nothing. The entire system needs to be overhauled, and there's little support or political will for that. Certainly not among the plutocrats, and not among the powerless serfs so easily gulled by them. I always vote as hard as I can, but it's clear to me that only some crazy outside catastrophe could turn this ship around.

But looky here: commerce is grinding to a halt. The transportation sector is nosediving. Unearned treasure is losing its value. The systems are crumbling. A crafty 120-nanometer sphere of protein and DNA has done this. It's a little viral miracle.

Scientists don't agree on whether viruses are living or not. They can't generate their own energy or live for long outside their hosts. But they're hardly inert. They're as successful as an internet rumor. Or xenophobia, which spreads rapidly but can't exist for long outside Fox News.

So that's what's filling my sails. There is something right now that has managed to bind all us individual hosts together, all over the globe. We are in a state of heightened awareness of each other's basic humanity, of what we have in common, what we each need, what we need from each other, and what we can live without. And we finally understand that what we do affects everyone else. This virus dissolves false boundaries.

We might as well call it Empathy.

I Had Nothing To Do With MERS

Nelson, the adorable neighbor child in question

Childhood diseases are not supposed to be funny, even if they result in explosive diarrhea. So it's not polite to snort when your neighbor tells you her kid has Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. Even if she explains that it's caused by a Coxsackie virus. I managed to contain most of my fluids while remarking that I had never heard of Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease. Sure enough, it's younger than I am. It was originally described in 1957 in New Zealand, and although there is no good reason for anyone to leave New Zealand, eventually someone did and it got out.

We never really have a virulence shortage. If viruses seem to be flagging, they hold a convention and run a few numbers through a trial population of monkeys, pigs, or chickens. Or possibly kiwis. Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease is so named because it presents with blisters on the hands, feet, mouth, and fanny, and some people still know how to show restraint. The name is, at least, descriptive, which is more than can be said for Fifth disease.

I'd never heard of that one, either, although it's been around for a while. Fifth disease used to be called "Slapped Cheek" syndrome because it looked as though the child's face had been slapped. Nowadays it is popularly referred to as "Repeatedly Fell Face First Onto The Coffee Table, Officer" syndrome, or (formally) "Plead The Fifth" disease. Anyway, it's viral too. Supposedly over half of children have had it by age 19, although, since many of them exhibit no symptoms at all, I suspect the statisticians are just using the disease to make it look like they've been busy.

This is flu.

A virus is often defined as a small infectious agent, but that's like defining cows as standing leather. It may be true, but it's disrespectful and anthropocentric. A virus is a perfectly interesting little bundle of protein with hopes and dreams of its own. Some people consider them to be less than living things, but for all that they have a lot of zip, even making trips around the world. The thing that lowers the status for viruses in the minds of some is that they do not actually have their own metabolism and require a host cell to get anything done at all. I, too, am small and use a similar life strategy, at least as regards being fed, so I am more sympathetic to their condition.

If one were to step back from the human-centered perspective, it could be said that the function of people is to give viruses a moist, warm spot to land. This certainly gives them more credit for their general success, and reflects well on us, too. There are a number of ways viruses transport themselves, many of them involving a spewing aspect. The host's body reacts to the invasion (or "visit"), spewing happens, and bingo, your virus is a going concern. We are merely their transportation infrastructure. One of the more successful means of transmission is called the "fecal-oral route."

That sucker really ought to be one-way.