Mardi Gras

March 16-19, 2020



Mardi Gras, literally "Fat Tuesday," is a day of revelry before Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Lent is the period of forty days leading up to Easter, and is a time of penitence and denial. This year Mardi Gras in New Orleans was February 25. The period of Lent to follow was not not a figurative period of abstinence, but a literal one as well. Mardi Gras was when Covid-19 was seeded in New Orleans.

I was in New Orleans where my son lives about two weeks before and two weeks after Mardi Gras. During that four-week period, everything changed. While we were there March 16-19, the spirit of New Orleans died. We arrived just as the city was planning for a funeral, but the patient wasn't yet dead. We almost felt like we were escaping when we left the morning of the 19th, and were afraid that the city might be cordened, so we'd be trapped. That's probably a bit dramatic, but things got weird really fast. We all felt the bad juju. My son shocked us by asking if he could come home to Florida with us. There was no work to be had in NOLA, and he wanted to get out. He walked past an old guy he knew from the neighborhood, and the man mumbled, "We shoot to kill." My son didn't take that as a threat, but as an omen of what was to come. So we left and drove thirteen hours to our home in Florida.

Life in the Time of Corona

April 5, 2020

A storm has been brewing since January when coronavirus first emerged in the national consciousness. At that time the outbreak was confined to Wuhan in China, but in the last two months it has spread to every continent except Antarctica. It is here in Florida. It is everywhere.

I have been very concerned that the United States would suffer some sort of catastrophe ever since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. His election was itself a catastrophe, but I knew that if something bad happened during his term--I was thinking more of a military attack or some sort of accident--he would be ill-equipped to handle it. It was clear to me that he didn't have the intellectual, temperamental, moral, emotional, or leadership ability to steer us out of a disaster. Now I see that his capabilities and instincts are even worse than I imagined.

We find out now that in January our epidemiologists and intelligence officers were sounding the alarm, but Trump ignored their warnings. He spent his weekends golfing at Mar-A-Lago, chatting with his fan club on Fox and pretending to be a leader. By the third week in January, we had already lost control of the the virus. We had few tests for surveillance or diagnosis, so we didn't know it yet. The virus spread below the radar in February. There were quite a few patients with flu-like illnesses, but without testing, we were not able to connect it to the epidemic in Wuhan. If there is one thing that epidemiologists tell us, it is that we must strike an epidemic at its earliest stages with diagnosis, contact tracing, isolation, etc.  We failed, and now we are suffering the consequences. Life, as we knew it, has changed for perhaps the next year or so. We will forever divide our lives into Before and After. We are living in a pandemic, and since our leadership didn't act early, we must rely on a strategy from the Middle Ages--quarantine.