― Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception
How bad was it really though?
The critics are right that the pandemic comparatively hasn’t killed as many people as other causes. But the real point should be that we don’t take other causes like degenerative diseases or accidents or substance abuse deaths as serious social problems. They’ve been normalized as matters of personal frailty & moral dissipation, not as having any social cause at all. Politically, society hasn't even existed since the 1980s when Reagan busted the unions & Thatcher just outright said so. Like people who secretly think, "Shame on those people who eat sugar." Dude, seriously? Mitochondria are the powerhouse of the cell. And glucose is their high-test. Denying the value of sugar to living is like neoliberals thinking not being selfish enough is the main threat. Huxley was right. The eyes can bear much more than the mind can under the influence of culture.
The guidelines to the public are completely incoherent. Wear masks, don’t wear masks. The Schrodinger's virus meme is right:
"Since you can't get tested you don't know if you have the virus or not. We have to act as if we have the virus so we don't spread it to others. We also have to act as if we never had the virus, because if we haven't had it we're not immune. Therefore we both have, and don't have, the virus. Thus, Schrodinger's virus."
As to the origins of the viral outbreak the early messaging was divided between the view of epidemiologists and generally educated people that the virus definitely was a zoonotic jump & the outcome of people living in close proximity to wild animals. “Wet market” became a new object of identity like foot binding or polygamy. It was a thing to be both protected as a cultural value, & also blamed for the source of a virulent respiratory disease that humans have no immunity to. And for Americans it has an irresistible ick factor. No one is really talking about why people resort to buying food from wet markets.
Richard Ebright at Rutgers & Harvard2thebighouse want to give you the low down on not eliminating the possibility that the virus was evolutionarily accelerated in a lab & escaped by accident. Because wouldn't working on a vaccine be a perfect cover for bioweapons development? And a biosafety lab-4 is located so close to the wet market that you could jump out of your containment suit & go there on your lunch hour. But if so, then who's zooming who? It's a story I bet Seymour Hersh would love to not name a source for. Me & Eric Olson are still waiting for him to name names in the MKUltra death of Frank Olson in 1953. Or is it the Camp Detrick bioweapons research death of Frank Olson? Errol Morris might know.
But then the maps of covid-19 mutation suggested something strange, an oddity. The dominant strain in Wuhan was not the original strain [B-type], but the original strain was dominant on the US west coast [A-type]. And Italy somehow got a fulminant C-type. No one would say out loud that the pattern suggested that the virus originated in the US instead of Wuhan. Except of course a Chinese foreign minister. But China can't be trusted. Except with a social credit system. It's the specter of Allen Dulles that is haunting us. And also, a cruise ship ticket is cheaper than rent & groceries these days so the A-type could have gotten an upper deck cabin to the west coast.
Here's are some graphics of the 3 types:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8204255/There-THREE-separate-types-coronavirus.html
On March 27th the president signed the CARES Act into law, which was a 2.2 trillion dollar economic stimulus package. The bureaucratic processes were not automatically in place to implement it. Calls to House representatives yielded only, “Well, there should be a website up soon.” The fund went broke in 3 weeks. It turned out that most of the money for Small Businesses went to large businesses, & very small businesses had heard nothing from their banks by the time the second bill was already in Congress. By April 21st Congress was working on the second Paycheck Protection Package. People who had filed an income tax return & had gotten refunds automatically deposited were receiving $1200 per person by the middle of April. No one was talking about people who don't file income tax returns or people who don't have bank accounts b/c they have bad credit or are homeless.
While unemployment rate reports were making your eyes bleed economists were saying they were concerned that they not repeat the mistakes of the '08 TARP bailout. "Oops, did we do a massive wealth transfer? Well, let's not do that again," while doing that again. A hungry worker is a worker that doesn't take a sick day even when he's sick, making others sick, & generating business for the medical & pharmaceutical sectors as well as higher profit margins.
By April 15th going to the grocery store had become a cheerless experience. There was no serious food insecurity for suburban people, but the signs were there that it was possible. Some shelves were empty. You could tell that some shoppers clearly knew what the staples were: sugar, butter, eggs, milk, orange juice, potatoes, flour were sold out or low. Those were female shoppers whose grandmothers taught them that. The fresh food counters were dark & quiet. A sensation of what I had read about Venezuelan food insecurity was transmitted to my mind immediately. My brain began to calculate what foods would pack the most nutrition for the lowest cost. People started to post where good groceries were in stock. And then they stopped. Not b/c there were no groceries, but b/c they didn't want to start a surge. That was their remote stash.
Meanwhile, farmers were destroying milk & vegetable crops that couldn’t be repackaged or shipped in a timely way for the residential market. By the third week in April meat processing plants that employ thousands of workers in close quarters were closing. A plant in Sioux Falls SD had 600 workers test positive.
A pandemic just rips the bandage right off the lies we tell ourselves socially. "We're all in this together, . . .except when we're not," said all the influencers escaping to the Hamptons for the party version of quarantine, taking emergency delivery on deep freezers even though no one in the house knew how to defrost a ball of hamburger. Probably. People were posting a lot of cooking videos like food preparation was a hip new post-scarcity invention. "People are super into beans," said one NYC grocer. The courts placed a temporary injunction on White House plans to narrow qualifications for food aid [b/c that would just be Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism]. But it is still true that monthly limits on SNAP benefits mean the poor can't stock up at all on their already limited food choices. Upscale grocery stores sold out of bread before the working class neighborhood stores did.
Some of the super rich began issuing press releases about their charitable giving & slick feel-good advertisements were mixed in with dystopian PSAs with synthesized music instead of voice-over that felt like they were supposed to induce a trance of hand washing & distancing in Freedom Units.
The Army Defense Logistics Agency wasn’t in the news at all. Neither was the first report on January 29th by the Federation of American Scientists that the president’s requested low-yield version of the Trident nuclear weapon had been deployed on the USS Tennessee from Kings Bay submarine base in Georgia. By April 22nd the president was ordering by tweet that Naval captains shoot down [sic] any Iranian gunboats that fire on American naval ships. The silly Doomsday Clock was set to 90 seconds. Hey, atomic scientists, that cardboard thing is running out of time.
At the same time the effects of American economic sanctions against Iran combined with a global pandemic wasn’t in the news either. The bar is getting very low for catastrophic action. Remember in the Cold War days when we thought that we might be evaporated by nuclear weapons launched accidentally? Well, that was a long time ago and we've had a long run of politics commandeering science & having good luck controlling its political use. It almost makes me wish for a Doctor Strangelove.
The US indicted Nicholas Maduro for drug trafficking presumably to replace him with Guaido while no one is looking. "So who's the banana republic now?" said Fidel looking down like he had another 20 hours of things to say.
Meanwhile, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, “the John Wayne Dude” of "put your guns down" Katrina infamy, was calling the pandemic a time for shock doctrine opportunism.
The viral incidence curve in America was not as steep as in Wuhan or Italy, but it was catastrophic in the NYC hospitals. The peak day came & went. In some local urban areas that had held celebrations just as the pandemic was spreading became hot within 2 - 3 weeks. New Orleans became a hot spot after Mardi Gras.
Some people were in disbelief for a long time. The media were hysterical in their hourly reports of increasing numbers, unexpected hot spots, sectors of the economy closing.
Governors & doctors were reporting their resorting to the gray market in securing testing kits & safety equipment for the medical workers in their states. The president asserted his total authority over the governors & liberals gulped & said "fascism," & he then walked it back a couple of days later. The epidemiologist who had worked for 6 presidents didn’t know if he had a job from week to week. The bible church ministers said Jesus would protect them & their congregations.
Bank lobbies were closed & long lines of cars formed to get cash or make deposits or just to ask questions about their money. A 10k$ limit was placed on bank withdrawals. Har.
By the third week in April it began to dawn on people that things would not return to normal after April 30th. There was for at least a year going to be a pre-covid-19 time & an after covid-19 time. The mayor of Las Vegas wanted to open the casinos & hotels. Governors finally realized that in a global emergency you can't keep the liquor stores closed. They didn't know anything about the Great Depression. They were probably absent that day.
Then oil prices went negative & local gas prices dipped below $1 in some places. There were activists in Los Angeles facilitating the homeless to occupy abandoned houses. The police just parked their cars near those homes & the new occupants couldn't leave. Food pantry lines in urban areas were seeing 1000s of cars lined up for food boxes.
Universities were mostly putting a happy face on their virtual contacts with students. But the unionized faculty at University of Oregon reported that the budget shortfalls from lower student enrollment would be coming out of faculty salaries for the coming year if a new contract wasn't signed. Any contingent faculty not agreeing would not be renewed. UC Santa Cruz had just had a wildcat grad student strike the first week in February. Adjunct faculty, already making poverty wages, became the objects of campus temporary “budget bucket” flexibility. They were already making wages lower than some TAs & grad students, who were facing a closed job market. Faculty who were foreign nationals had their visas put in limbo. On April 21st the president’s aides were drafting an executive order that would close the borders.
Meanwhile, organized social media efforts to mobilize people to defy the governors’ stay-at-home orders appeared. Small protests in large & some smaller cities started to happen. People carried signs declaring the virus a hoax, that they were defending their First Amendment rights. It wasn’t clear that they knew that the First Amendment right most at stake was freedom of association or what that meant, but they were there. And they were in distress & needed to get back to work in order to pay rent & buy food & medicine. One guy trolled the astroturfing organizations mobilizing stay-at-home protesters state-by-state by buying up all the remaining state domain names for “liberate-‘state abbreviation’” websites & social media. Then he got doxxed by liberals who thought he was a populist conservative. Anxiety stubbornly cultured fear & fascist tendencies.
One blog post laid out the virus numbers in a really straightforward, enjoyable read by Denise Minger. "It's a thing," she said. And oh how people love how she says it. Denise was back after losing faith in the nutrition wars because what has war done for us lately?
The hospitals cancelled elective surgeries, which are one of their biggest sources of revenue. People who had been in ICU or the families of people who had died had been separated. Some people
were being billed exorbitant amounts for testing for covid-19 if they could get it. Some nurses started to refuse to work without proper protective gear. Sinai-Grace Hospital in Detroit fired 7 nurses who refused to work, also causing the next shift nurses to work a 24 hrs shift. A single emergency department doctor in NYC reported having to care for 40 critically ill patients on ventilators.
A culture of video-only education, organizing, & socializing intensified overnight. Zoom bombing became a thing. The technological infrastructure in fact became a utility overnight even though net neutrality had already been lost in November 2017. Health care workers, the sandwich generation, and people living in poverty suffered immediate, traumatic effects. The stress was inhumane.
People began posting hospitals’ guidelines for triage as if they had never thought about that existing, because they hadn’t. Children would suffer from the hysterical sound of the environment, from the media staccato, to worried parents talking about money. Some children & people were stuck in unfit homes with even less hope of escape than formerly. Prison inmates’ meals were reduced to twice a day & some non-violent offenders were released early. Elderly parents needed to be checked on daily. Those that went to the hospital died without their families around. In NYC a few died on the floor without attending health workers. Italy suffered the worst. Families didn’t know what was happening to their spouse, parent, grandparent in ICU. There was no time to diagnose carefully or to try new treatments. The Catholic Church is against cremation but the state wanted the dead cremated. Sirens became the background noise of urban living rooms where people were trying to WFH.
The human interest news segments highlighted many efforts to bring some compassion & beauty into the days of complete isolation. There were neighborhood parades, balcony musical theater, entertaining videos, out-of-commission restaurants preparing meals for the hungry, Russians recreating classic artworks in their homes. Other people were bitter that they hadn't made better choices & bargained to quit the job, move west, & become an artist.
Jobs shifted in one huge heave away from close-quarter services & into “life-sustaining” services like grocery stocking & picking & delivery. Every type of business sought appeals from their governors that they were “life-sustaining.” In Florida that meant that World Wrestling Entertainment could operate as usual because its television broadcasts were essential to Florida’s economy, which is undoubtedly true.
Science in society was represented by Dr. Anthony Fauci, Virologist and Dr. Deborah Birx, Epidemiologist. Politics was represented daily by the president, Donald Trump and the Governor of New York, Anthony Cuomo. Both of them NYC natives launching opposing sound bites in their daily news conferences. It became clear when Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic primary on April 8th, that Joe Biden was fading from public consciousness and Andrew Cuomo was campaigning. The Vice President, Mike Pence daily waved a poster about the WH Coronavirus Task Force guidelines. The press & the president were at their adversarial meanest. Religion was represented by those who carried posters that said, “Jesus is my vaccine.” There were numerous small news stories prefaced by the line, “I didn’t take the virus seriously until I [my spouse, my parent] got it.”
Everywhere the US was failing to stay focused on any particular coherent policy. We had become our own Orb of Confusion. Ideology infected every statement and the profit motive determined that who could pay was who deserved, in medical care, isolation, supplies, a future. People experienced by turns giddiness, anxiety, anger. Armchair leftists were like drunken revolutionaries declaring that, “it’s going down,” but having had no practice at real activism, & isolated, there were no rallies or physical solidarity. One meme had said that, “lol we’re a bunch of paycheck to paycheck employees living in apartments owned by paycheck to paycheck landlords and working for paycheck to paycheck corporations. Lmao whole economy full of broke bitches. Whose idea was this?!?”
But if you were not in NYC or working in a hot spot urban hospital things were unusually quiet. The noise level & shaking of the whole earth lowered enough that seismologists could use their ultra-sensitive monitoring devices again. There was an ominous sensation all around, but there was no reason apparent to the eyes for it. The messaging was disorienting. The social media environment was hyper-ideologized & everyone had to stay in their corner if they didn’t want to be whatever the cultural version of doxxing would be. If you weren't up to a comment-feud then you were lacking in conscience.
To perceive what was really happening was to try to work in an environment where physical displacement & uncertainty were the overwhelming facts of life now. So making sense of it took extra energy. Here the eyes are the center of perception. Thinking about what it all meant is the next task.
ⓒCelise Schneider 2020
WHO Declares Pandemic
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/11/814474930/coronavirus-covid-19-is-now-officially-a-pandemic-who-says
A Letter to the UK from Francesca Milandri in Italy on March 27th
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/27/a-letter-to-the-uk-from-italy-this-is-what-we-know-about-your-future
Fleeing to Hamptons, Buying Beans
https://www.crainsnewyork.com/coronavirus/fleeing-hamptons-buying-beans-city-virus-fears-trace-wealth-gap
MIT Announces Quantum Dot Vaccine Tattoo Technology
https://www.sciencealert.com/an-invisible-quantum-dot-tattoo-is-being-suggested-to-id-vaccinated-kids
Coronavirus origin theories
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/inside-the-the-viral-spread-of-a-coronavirus-origin-theory
Logistical & Technical Exploration Into the Origins of the Wuhan Strain of Coronavirus
https://harvardtothebighouse.com/2020/01/31/logistical-and-technical-analysis-of-the-origins-of-the-wuhan-coronavirus-2019-ncov/
Spread of the Three Coronavirus Strains Across the World [graphics]
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8204255/There-THREE-separate-types-coronavirus.html
CDC Diagnostic Coding Guidelines for Covid-19
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/icd/ICD-10-CM-Official-Coding-Gudance-Interim-Advice-coronavirus-feb-20-2020.pdf
"The CARES Act Works for All Americans" except when it doesn't.
https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/cares
"Trump's New Nuclear Weapon Has Been Deployed"
https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nuclear-arsenal/2020/02/04/trumps-new-nuclear-weapon-has-been-deployed/
"Small Business Aid Fund Runs Dry As Program Fails to Reach Hardest Hit"
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/15/us/politics/coronavirus-small-business-program.html
"Sinai-Grace Workers Say They Were Told To Leave Hospital After Covid-19 Sit-In"
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/detroit-city/2020/04/06/dmc-sinai-grace-hospital-workers-told-leave-over-sit-in/2953168001/
"How 'Old Hippie' Got Accused of Astroturfing the Right Wing Campaign to Reopen the Economy"
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2020/04/reopen-liberate-urls/
States Keep Watch on Coronavirus 'Doubling Times'
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/10/829167659/are-we-flattening-the-curve-states-keep-watch-on-coronavirus-doubling-times
Denise Minger on Critical Thinking About Coronavirus [Yes, something is happening]
https://deniseminger.com/2020/04/16/some-thoughts-on-thinking-critically-in-times-of-uncertainty-and-the-trap-of-lopsided-skepticism-coronaspiracy-theory-edition/
Earth is Literally Moving Less Now that We Are on Lockdown
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a32007736/earth-moving-less-covid-19-lockdown-seismologists/