Consider me your news synthesizer today.
I’ve listened to a variety of podcasts so that you don’t have to. You can keep learning the ukelele or planting your ‘apocalypse’ garden or fine-tuning a new language you’re trying once more to become fluent in or running that extra ten miles or posting those Gram photos of your cat.
Activities much more conducive to ward off ‘biological weathering’ than listening to podcasts about our current state of affairs.
I started today with the The Daily podcast hosted by Michael Barbaro with the New York Times. In journalism parlance, his show today was a fluff-piece even though it was about a 12 year old girl experiencing the loss of her grandfather to coronavirus. The girl was avidly and openly Christian and her grandfather, who had been a pastor, died from complications which included COVID19. His living will instructed his medical advocates to not go to unusual lengths to keep him alive and to allow him to go and meet his maker.
It was a personal interest story simply meant to put a human face to the tragedies unfolding daily in every part of the country and in every corner of the globe.
Next I tuned in to the Rachel Maddow show, or TRMS, which was highlighting just what is going on in prisons and in meat packing and processing plants. A riot erupted over hygiene, sanitation and coronavirus in a medium security prison somewhere in the heartland. More than a dozen inmates and prison guards had tested positive, yet the conditions remained unchanged.
Meanwhile in meat packing and processing plants hundreds of workers are testing positive and falling ill. This is happening in South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Iowa. . . really everywhere these facilities can be found. The ones we know about, we only know about because testing has been done.
Estimates of testing throughout the land, the last I heard, remained around 1 per cent.
The occupant of the White House is trying to force these plants to remain open. He has invoked the DPA. He believes the Defense Production Act - the act he has been remarkably reluctant to use for personal protective equipment and swabs and ventilators - gives him the authority. I can only assume he fears there will soon be a shortage of chicken strips and burgers.
I listened as the medical director of a hospital out of Waterloo, Iowa, pleaded with her fellow citizens via a public service announcement to take the virus seriously and continue to actively social distance. She feared she may soon become responsible for the death of one of her co-health care workers.
Nursing homes, meat packing plants, prisons. Incubators for something of this virus’ nature. You can add armed insurrection at a few of our state capitols to that. But I didn’t listen to a podcast about those imbecilic actions today.
The final podcast was Science Versus with Wendi Zuckerman and she spoke with a guy who had been on the cruise ship, The Diamond Princess. You might remember the Diamond Princess from the early days of the pandemic as the cruise ship that was quarantined in Japan and - eventually - the CDC flew a bunch of Americans home. Some of the returning Americans had tested positive and were showing symptoms, while some had not. They returned home in the same cargo plane with a plastic barrier separating them and two porta-potties for the lot of them.
I must confess, I partly like listening to Science Versus because I am beguiled, enamored and totally enthralled with Ms. Zuckerman’s Aussie accent. I think Aussie accents make everything sound interesting.
In any case, her show tied it all together. Scientists and researchers viewed the gigantic cruise ship as an ideal petri dish experiment. The guy she spoke with had not tested positive for SARS-coronavirus 2 but his partner did. Being on a cruise, he and his partner had not been doing the slightest amount of social distancing and, in fact, quite the opposite. You know, sharing spoons and the '“like”.
Even so, he never contracted the virus. Or, at least, as far as they know. He certainly never exhibited any of the debilitating symptoms.
Which leads thoughtful persons amongst us to wonder - how many silent spreaders of this disease are there?
The right answer - for now - is that we can’t possibly know.
My educated hunch? (Going with hunches is the one thing I have in common with the covidiot-in-chief). It is far wider spread than we realize.
Which is why it is too soon to get your camo-panties in a bunch, monster-truck you and your buddies to the closest state capitol, threateningly waving your penile enhancers while sharing spittle and underarm body odor in close quarters.
At least, that’s how I synthesize it.
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Thanks to avid reader and commenter Nancy Enz Lill for sending me a Tiny Desk concert which I find uplifting and invigorating. Twenty some odd minutes and the residue of today’s news will be washed away.
Also, here is one of Australia’s entries into an international song competition using artificial intelligence. The song incorporates both COVID19 and the Australian bushfires from their last summer/our winter. I kind of like it. In perfect broken AI speak it is called Beautiful the World.
It includes a koala’s call.