I was afraid of covid-19, Mr. President. I’m not ashamed of it.
By Megan McArdle,
On Oct. 2, the day President Trump was taken to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for coronavirus treatment, some 840 of his fellow Americans perished from covid-19. By Monday, Oct. 5, I gather, Trump was feeling better.
“I will be leaving the great Walter Reed Medical Center today at 6:30 P.M.” Trump tweeted. “Feeling really good! Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge. I feel better than I did 20 years ago!”
To hear the president tell it, covid-19 is better than a spa weekend. Perhaps this will become, in time, the origin story for a new generation of superheroes: “I was a 74-year-old obese man, but then I got covid and my doctors injected me with an experimental drug. Next thing I knew, I was biting through high-voltage lines for breakfast and incinerating America’s enemies using the crackling beams of electricity I can now project from my eyes.”
Or perhaps the president is merely enjoying the euphoria that is known to accompany the use of dexamethasone, a drug that is given to patients with serious cases of covid-19. For that matter, Trump’s message is only a supercharged version of what his remaining supporters had already settled on: “Sure, Trump got covid because he didn’t take standard precautions, but only cowards do that. We of the right do not cower in our bedrooms, hiding from a virus; we bare our faces and dare covid to infect us.”
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I’m afraid this message has fallen flat with me. I lean more right than left, but I also spent five weeks last spring at my father’s house in Massachusetts, after he caught the coronavirus at his cardiac rehab facility. When he came home, still covid-19 positive, I literally cowered in a bedroom with all of its windows open to the 35-degree New England “spring.”
I guess I’m supposed to be embarrassed that I isolated myself rather than frolicking through the potentially virus-laden air of the common areas, the way a real righty would have — sans peur et sans masque.
Of course, I did venture out to help my dad, who had just spent a month locked in his room by a nursing home that was — get this — afraid of letting the virus spread among its vulnerable patients. While he recovered his strength, my sister and I ran errands and did housework, protected by masks and nigh-obsessive hand-washing. The rest of the time, we stayed in our rooms while my dad occupied the main part of the house.
I would have gravely disappointed our president because I felt a deep, sick fear every time I wondered whether I had caught the virus. I was afraid for me, with my history of lung problems and hypertension. I was afraid for my sister, because who knew what this disease might do to her. And I was also afraid for my dad, because if we caught it, he’d end up with two patients instead of two helpers.
In retrospect, I probably could have relaxed; it now appears that covid-19 patients are mostly contagious in the first few weeks, which dad had spent in the rehab facility. But while we might have been mistaken about our personal danger, I’m quite sure we weren’t wrong to be afraid of covid-19.
As of this writing, covid-19 has killed more than 1 million people worldwide. One-fifth of them were Americans. Another number, currently unknown, will have lasting — perhaps lifelong — and debilitating complications.
Of course, Trump is right that treatment has improved almost miraculously over the past six months. But remember those 840 people who died just on Friday. We haven’t beaten the disease yet. We aren’t even close.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t do the things that are important and necessary, like taking care of family. We should send our kids to school. We should look for ways to see friends outdoors. We should do everything we can, safely, to sustain America’s communities, businesses and jobs.
But the way we make that happen is by deciding what’s important enough to potentially risk dying for and then taking prudent steps to minimize the unavoidable hazards, not by pretending that those risks don’t exist. Republicans have been trying the latter for six months, and all they’ve gotten for their troubles is a shattered economy and a party leadership riddled with the virus.
What we need, besides clear priorities and aggressive risk management, is some actual courage — the kind that does the right thing despite real danger, not the false fearlessness that imagines away true threats. Unfortunately, instead of showing us what genuine bravery looks like, Trump keeps trying to manufacture the ersatz variety, out of equal parts feckless belligerence and sheer pigheaded denial.
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Read more: Michael Gerson: Trump’s character flaws have damaged the country. They will determine his political fate. Eugene Robinson: Let’s hope Trump recovers — and that the GOP gets what it deserves Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent: Trump’s latest madness may herald large-scale GOP collapse Leana S. Wen: Doctors say Trump may go home Monday. Based on what they’ve told us, that’s a bad idea. Patti Davis: Presidents don’t get privacy. My father understood that — even when he was shot.
