The five-day rolling averages continue to alarm me. Cases and hospitalizations are up, sharply, in Florida, Texas, Nevada, Alabama, the Carolinas, Arizona, and other sunny states where the warm weather was supposed to make it difficult for the coronavirus to reproduce. We all knew that reopenings were likely to assist the transmission of the pathogen, but some of these places never exactly closed. Nowhere is the virus spreading as aggressively as it did in New York and New Jersey in April. Numbers are climbing nevertheless, and if they continue, it’s likely that governments will intervene again.
On the other side of the globe, China is locking Beijing back down after an outbreak traced to a wholesale food market. The Chinese authorities have been loud about their response to the coronavirus — how decisively they’ve moved, and how well they’ve been able to put out fires — but I get a sense that they speak with fingers crossed behind their backs. They clearly expect to be slapped by a second wave.
Regardless of the direction of the lines on the state graphs, America ought to be ready, too. Some epidemiologists predict a spike during flu season, but that’s just a guess based on older models that may not apply to the threat we face. Here in the Jerz, some of my neighbors proceed as if they’ve been through the storm and made it to the other side, and this pandemic is now the Sun Belt’s problem to deal with. Restaurants in Asbury Park opened their doors and invited patrons inside. Through court order, the state government put the kibosh on that. Nevertheless, businesspeople on the Shore are getting restless. They don’t want to lose their livelihoods. They want to get the summer rolling.
Meanwhile, street protests continue. In Atlanta, where coronavirus remains steadily problematic, a white cop killed a black man named Rayshard Brooks. This shooting, which happened on Friday night, was more kerosene tossed on a blaze that is burning from coast to coast. Even before it was ruled a homicide, it prompted justifiable public outcry. That’s going to mean more people congregated in public, and more opportunities for the virus to spread, and I imagine some unscrupulous politicians are readying their excuses and gathering their talking points even as I type.
Can the acceleration of cases be attributed to the protests? Not too cleanly, it turns out. Many of the hottest zones are located in places where people haven’t been marching. But let’s be fair here: unless the germ-theory is somehow inaccurate or inapplicable in this case (no evidence for that), mass actions and mass gatherings will necessarily lead to more coronavirus. It would be nice to think that structural change and public awakening might happen in a manner that didn’t further the spread of a deadly disease, but I doubt it can. We may not know whether street actions will prompt municipal governments to reform their police departments, but we can be pretty certain that nothing positive is going to happen unless there’s public pressure.
So that’s the state of the nation on the ides of June, and it’s an ugly one. In order to stare down one threat, we need to run the risk of amplifying another. To make matters worse, there’s no guarantee that our efforts to address either problem will amount to much, and more than a little reason to believe that they won’t.
But we’ve got to try, because inaction would be downright suicidal. There are many who say that we’re all bound to be infected with the coronavirus eventually, just as there are many who’ll say about institutional racism and police brutality that that’s just the way it is/some things will never change. Don’t you believe them. Other countries have demonstrated that the pathogen can be stopped in its tracks, or at least kept at bay, through a combination of tracing, isolation, mask-wearing, and good hygiene. In America, our government is going to be whatever we will it to be. For quite some time, it’s been terrible because we’ve been terrible; it’s been a frighteningly accurate expression of our national priorities. We can realign those priorities, and we can get healthy. It’s not going to be easy, and we’re not all going to make it. But all the airborne particles and all the smoke from the burning Wendy’s can’t obscure the way forward. It’s pretty damned visible.