One Percent

Tell me this isn't happening. In the middle of the worst health crisis in modern history, the President is having his henchmen attack the country's leading infectious disease expert because his public opinion poll ratings are too high.

But it's true. Dr Fauci, who is strictly apolitical, having worked for six presidents now, is trusted by a much larger portion of the U.S. population than Trump, and that makes the President jealous.

How pathetic!

While this latest psychodrama plays out, California has basically shut down again. From being one of the states considered a relative success story in the Covid-19 fight, the Golden State has fallen back into one where the pandemic is on the verge of surging out of control.

So much so the state's two largest school districts, Los Angeles and San Diego, announced they will have online-only classes this fall, in defiance of the White House.

Beyond that, the way this affects residents is not that we can't go to bars or restaurants; most of us wouldn't do that anyway. Our "non-essential" medical appointments are being cancelled once again, and we are being forced to further delay treatments that are already badly overdue.

Dentists, eye doctors, hearing clinics, exercise centers, physical therapists, and so on are closing for business and our collective health needs are reverting to being on hold. Will tomorrow ever come?

Even our entertainment is out of reach. By all rights, this should be the middle of baseball season, but that's been on rain delay since early April, which reminds me of the story of the longest home run ever hit:

"One day during the 1930s, the Pittsburgh Crawfords were playing at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, where their young catcher, Josh Gibson, hit the ball so high and so far that no one saw it come down. After scanning the sky carefully for a few minutes, the umpire deliberated and ruled it a home run. The next day the Crawfords were playing in Philadelphia, when suddenly a ball dropped out of the heavens and was caught by the startled center fielder on the opposing club. The umpire made the only possible ruling. Pointing to Gibson, he shouted, "Yer out -- yesterday in Pittsburgh!"

That rendition is courtesy of Robert W. Peterson's book about the Negro Leagues, "Only the Ball was White."

The main battle is becoming whether we can keep our sense of humor through all of this. After all, laughter may represent our only and final line of defense.

Recent reports suggest that about one percent of the U.S. population has had Covid-19 so far. That's over three million people. So is that the good news or the bad news? Hundreds of millions of us are left.

If Dr. Fauci is right, we'll soon be seeing a million new cases every ten days or three million each month! But what is there to keep that rate from accelerating? No amount of "contact tracing" can track down all the exposed people when we reach those levels.

If the experiences of the first one percent are indicative, we most likely will see a variety of long-term effects on those that survive. This is a severely debilitating illness for some.

One down, ninety-nine percent to go.

Those of us awaiting the day we fall ill can feel scant comfort at the prospect that a vaccine will save us. Whenever it arrives, if it arrives, it will be too late for millions of Americans. Hundreds of thousands will die.

When it comes to a sense of humor, that is a lot of laughter that will never occur. Think about the sound. The sound of nobody laughing. 

And you can tell everybody this is your song 
It may be quite simple but now that it's done 
I hope you don't mind 
I hope you don't mind 
That I put down in words 
How wonderful life is while you're in the world -- Elton John

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