* * My coronavirus lightbulb moment

It was a conversation I’ll never forget.

I was riding shotgun in Margie Lee’s van as she drove us to Greensboro on a cold day in early February to pick up her new motorcycle. She’s my frequent riding partner, an avid sport-bike rider with a penchant for fine wines and exotic Italian machines. Her day job is Professor and Department head at Virginia Tech’s Department of Biomedical Sciences and Pathobiology, and she has a string of academic letters following her name.

I had just returned from my first trip to Asia where I visited friends in Taiwan, an island nation off the coast of China, where we were hearing about this “novel” disease, a coronavirus, emanating from the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Knowing Margie was an expert, I grilled her with questions about it, and got an earful in return. Even aware of my ignorance in biological sciences, being the academic she is, she spared me no technical details, explaining how viruses attack, commutate, and mutate, and why they are so dangerous and difficult to control.

The gist of the danger was essentially three aspects: contagion, bodily impact, and mutability. For example, measles are highly contagious but seldom fatal. HIV is often fatal but not readily contagious. Polio is contagious and debilitating but not mutable, making it easily controlled by a single vaccine. The new virus coming to be known as COVID-19 was not the worst in any of the categories, but nonetheless quite high; it was contagious, severe and sometimes fatal, and quite mutable.

As I wrapped my head around the implications of this terrifying new knowledge, my mental lightbulb came on, and I blurted out the childishly naïve observation, “This is really serious.”

She turned her gaze towards me and deadpanned, “Ya think?” as if she should be amazed by my grasp of the obvious.

Even when armed with this comprehension, I look back retrospectively and conclude I had no idea how uniquely susceptible our USA was to this rapidly emerging threat, and how badly we managed, and are still managing, its ravages. By late March, the USA already led the world with over 80,000 infections and 1000 deaths, a mere precursor to the carnage to come.

The President, who had already waste-canned the 69-page National Security Council guidebook “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents,” prepared under his predecessor, bowed to personal political exigencies, downplayed the threat, and began filling the airwaves with a series of  insulting misstatements, factual errors, and pan-fried baloney. For example:

(January 22) “We have it totally under control.” They didn’t.

(February 10) “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” It didn’t.

(February 27) “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” It hasn’t. It won’t.

(April 23) “I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute.” True. It will also kill you.

Weeks later, I spoke with a friend in Taiwan where life had returned to normal. She said, and I’m paraphrasing, “We had a bad SARS outbreak a few years ago and we learned how terrible viruses can be. Our government is studying COVID-19, is devoted to our health and safety, and is directing us what to do. We care about each other. We trust the scientists and the media. We are an obedient society and we do what we're told.”

When was the last time you heard anyone in America say any of those things?

We’re Americans! We have FREEDOM! Our freedom is killing hundreds of thousands of us.

Today we have a staggering 4 million cases and 150,000 deaths, leading the world in both categories. In at least 40 of our 50 states, cases are showing an upswing, with the worst to come. More people have died in the last 3 months than in any other similar timeframe in our history. Most Americans have no idea how poorly we’re fairing compared to the rest of the world. We are a pariah nation whose citizens are forbidden to travel to most other countries.

In Blacksburg where I live, there is a palpable sense of disquietude and fear as students returning to Virginia Tech will invariably bring more cases with them. Universities seem to be ideal breeding grounds for disease transmission, with tight living, recreating, and studying conditions and mindsets of invulnerability that come with that demographic.

Tragically, we may need to shutter the economy again to stem the spread, given our botched response the first time. Human tragedy aside, it is impossible to rebuild the economy when vast numbers of citizens are sick and dying.

Perhaps if we’d all had lightbulb moments back in February, we could have avoided this terrible anguish.