Coronavirus Is Bigger Than Politics

In my newsletters the last few weeks, I’ve discussed the coronavirus outbreak on and off. I live in a college town, the kind that prominently features co-eds laying around their front lawns in swimwear — and, apparently, the kind that continue to throw densely packed frat parties even when there’s a pandemic on. It frustrates me, so I like to throw in a word every few weeks about how the pandemic is not getting better and we need to keep wearing our masks.

In response to my last newsletter, I got interesting feedback from a reader. What he told me was, essentially, “stay out of politics”. Since I’m neither an expert in public policy nor a doctor, I should not comment on political issues. According to him, I should stay in my lane.

My first instinct was to empathize with him. It always makes me angry when people who suffered one relatively minor episode of anxiety or depression that was easily resolved with three months of therapy claim to be authorities on what it’s like to suffer from mental illness. I’m sure it’s equally frustrating for someone who understands the modern political system listen to a 24-year-old self-help writer blather on about the latest political scandal.

But the thing is, the coronavirus pandemic is not the latest political scandal. Sure, it’s kicked up a great deal of political maneuvering, and many politicians are treating it like it’s yet another event they can spin to their political advantage, but this latest political scandal is more than a scandal. While politicians bicker in their offices about the optics of wearing face masks, people are dying. Lots of them. 130,000 so far, give or take a few.

All political events affect some citizens. The hair-pulling over Obamacare affected whether several hundred thousand Americans like me would have access to affordable health insurance. But the thing is, nobody died while they were hair-pulling. I’m glad I got Obamacare insurance from the whole ordeal, but if I hadn’t gotten access to Obamacare, I would have figured something out.

We don’t have time for politicians to do their usual self-absorbed maneuvering. Every day politicians jockey for power, people die.

We don’t have time to leave it up to the politicians to figure it out, either.

There’s no time to wait for the politicians to decide on a course of action. We need to do what we can, right now. And that’s two very simple things:

1. Socially distance when we can
2. Wear masks, wash our hands, and practice good hygiene when we can’t

I don’t need to be a doctor to make these recommendations. Every medical professional from New York City to Los Angeles, whether Republican or Democrat, has made these same recommendations.

I don’t need to be a politician to make these recommendations either. I’m not recommending we restructure our entire economy or pass massive stimulus bills. I’m merely proposing we stay home when we can and practice good hygiene when we can’t. If you can’t stay home, by all means, don’t stay home. Don’t kill yourself doing it. Just do what you can from where you are.

But despite how minimal these requests are, we are still failing to follow them. When I take afternoon walks in my college town, it never fails that there are at least one or two house parties brewing. A couple of weeks ago, I agreed to join some friends at a bar thinking we would be social distancing (bars in Ohio have state regulations about how close tables are together, how customers line up, so on and so forth) but was met with a bar so packed inside it resembled a nightclub. This bar (and many others, as I’ve discovered since then) simply don’t care about these recommendations. Neither do the patrons inside.

Even in my personal life, I think people are beginning to view me as a bit of a nag. I demand my boyfriend wear a mask when they go indoors and continually request that we spend our free time outside in public parks instead of public buildings. These are nothing more than the bare minimum interventions requested by epidemiologists, but it’s difficult to get people in their twenties to do even these.

Until people around me start following the minimum baseline requirements set out by epidemiologists, I’m going to keep talking about the pandemic. Because when the pandemic kills thousands every day, it’s not merely a political issue any more. It’s a human one.

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