Author is Jacqueline Alemany of WaPo's Power Up blog.
quote:
Power Up: This was my experience with the novel coronavirus
MY STORY: I recently became one of the 12 million Americans to contract the novel coronavirus. And as former Education Department secretary Arne Duncan phrased it, the disease totally flattened me.
It's unclear exactly where I picked up the virus. I traveled to Georgia in the run-up to Election Day and went canvassing with women in Cobb County. I also attended an outdoor Trump rally in nearby Rome, with roughly 20,000 Trump supporters, many of them maskless.
Of course, campaign travel during a pandemic isn't exactly recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But I took a calculated risk to witness political figures swarm the Peach State before what turned out to be a major political upset that turned it blue for the first time in nearly 30 years.
After testing positive, I spent the majority of my time in self-isolation sleeping and in between naps, I watched 'Schitt's Creek' and 'The Queen's Gambit,' and tried to respond to friends, family, and sources routinely checking in for proof of life. Some of these sources were Republicans — Trump campaign staff, former administration officials, people close to the president, and staffers on Capitol Hill.
I was struck by how dissonant those conversations were from some of the GOP's public rhetoric about the virus. President Trump repeatedly and falsely insisted the country was “rounding the bend” before the election, and several Republican governors from South Dakota, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Wyoming are still resisting mask mandates. Some, like Oklahoma's Gov. Kevin Stitt and South Dakota's Kristi L. Noem, have sanctioned gathering with family this week for Thanksgiving, despite warnings from public health officials.
Some of the talks with sources were mundane: “How are you feeling?” they would ask. “Tired” or “meh” were my two most common replies. Others politely asked if I needed anything. One source close to President Trump, who has largely stepped back from managing the pandemic since losing the election, expressed alarm at the croak of my voice when I picked up their call mid-nap and promptly shooed me off the phone. In other conversations, sources lamented how flippantly their own bosses and colleagues were still treating the virus. One GOP Hill staffer encouraged me to write about my experience with the virus because their boss still doesn't “think it's real.”
“It's pretty incredible that even when people do get it, it doesn't change their behavior very much,” a Trump campaign staffer told me, reflecting on the number of people inside the White House or in Trumpworld who have gotten sick, including President Trump.
“If anything, it just emboldens them that they made it through the virus … it blows my mind.”
I'm a healthy 31-year-old former college athlete with no preexisting conditions and like many other people, I was still knocked out by a moderate case of covid-19. My recovery did not require hospitalization, and while I'm still fatigued and have a lingering cough, I'm lucky to have avoided the worst-case scenario and have a boss who insisted that I take time off to recover. While I was unsettled by how much I slept during my bout with the virus, there was nothing unusual about my case and my symptoms more or less aligned with those listed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But you don't need to take it from me. A quick glance at headlines from around the country continues to paint shocking pictures of intensive care units in overwhelmed hospitals as the disease surges. The 14-day average for new cases is up by 54 percent, according to the New York Times, while the average for new deaths over the last two weeks rose 64 percent.
“On this Thursday morning, 28 COVID-19 patients are in intensive care, with 12 spilling beyond the designated unit to areas designed for heart problems, strokes and surgical recoveries,” reports The Star Tribune's Jeremy Olson. “A total of 97 COVID-19 patients have been admitted to Regions, which is almost full. Minnesota’s experience with the pandemic suggests one-third of patients on ventilators won’t survive, even with optimal critical care.”
“'We are depressed, disheartened and tired to the bone,' said Alison Johnson, director of critical care at Johnson City Medical Center in Tennessee, adding she drives to and from work some days in tears,” the Associated Press's Paul Weber and Sarah Rankin report.
“The Texas National Guard has sent a 36-member team to El Paso to assist morgues in the border region with the number of dead as a result of COVID-19,” the AP reports. “Statewide, the Texas health department on Saturday reported a one-day high of 12,597 new virus cases, nearly 20,500 dead and more than 8,200 virus hospitalizations."
[bunch of graphs appear here in original article]
One doctor from Minnesota who checked in to see how I was doing was downright furious at Washington. “I cannot express fully, how angry I have become at the [president's] indifference in handling the pandemic,” Michael Wilcox, who has practiced medicine in rural communities for nearly 50 years, told Power Up.
“My health-care colleagues are getting clobbered by ill covid-19 patients needing admission while he holes up in his bunker, stewing about ways to overturn the election," he fumed.
A friend and former colleague at CBS News, Alan He – also an expert on procuring N95 masks and hand sanitizer in bulk – suggested I keep a “coronavirus diary." I reviewed the first sentence of my lone entry in my iPhone notes, which read: “My mother called me 1,500 times today.” (This is where I should note that my parents very kindly left grocery bags of soup, Gatorade, and licorice outside of the door to my apartment. Thanks, mom and dad).
Included in the next paragraph of the first and last entry of my unsuccessful diary endeavor was a link to the tweet thread from Jodi Doering, a nurse in South Dakota, detailing her horrific experience with some of her covid-19 patients who “still don't believe the virus is real":
I have a night off from the hospital. As I’m on my couch with my dog I can’t help but think of the Covid patients the last few days. The ones that stick out are those who still don’t believe the virus is real. The ones who scream at you for a magic medicine and that Joe Biden is
— Jodi Doering (@JodiDoering) November 15, 2020
The other epidemic: When I wasn't sleeping, I was having trouble sleeping because of the muscle pain I experienced. I read Doering's tweet thread in the middle of the night as I doom-scrolled through Twitter and in my cough-syrup haze, I wondered why the country couldn't do better in trying to control this awful disease.
The following night, during an interview with “60 Minutes,” former President Barack Obama criticized Trump for propagating conspiracy theories and accelerating ‘truth decay’ in the U.S.:
“We have gone through a presidency that disregarded a whole host of basic institutional norms, expectations we had for a president that had been observed by Republicans and Democrats previously,” said Obama “And maybe most importantly, and most disconcertingly, what we've seen is what some people call truth decay, something that's been accelerated by outgoing President Trump, the sense that not only do we not have to tell the truth, but the truth doesn't even matter.”
The “truth decay" epidemic, defined as the “diminishing role of facts and data in American public life" by the nonpartisan Rand Corporation, has soared alongside the coronavirus pandemic.
Take Jay Andrews, the 35-year-old state director of Georgia's chapter of Blexit, a conservative initiative started by right-wing commentator Candace Owens, for example. During an indoor event featuring Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) in Alpharetta, Ga., the Friday before the election, a maskless Andrews tried to explain to me the rationale of those “who don't want to wear masks because it's an introduction to socialism and Marxism."
In the crowded room, many of whom also weren't wearing masks, Andrews explained he's not a “fearful person” and if he does contract the coronavirus, “then it's in the cards for me. I'm a Christian. Then I'm cool."
Michael D. Rich and Jennifer Kavanagh, who co-authored the book “Truth Decay,” wrote in an article last week that if President-elect Joe Biden wants to tackle the current crises facing America, his administration “must begin rebuilding Americans' trust in their government and public institutions.”
They argue that will require increased transparency from elected leaders, the elevation of experts, a diverse administration and increased investment in civic education for young people.
“In the early 1930s at the start of the Great Depression, federal economic policymakers ignored key pieces of evidence, and as a result the Depression got worse. As the crisis deepened, a reversal ensued. New government agencies were set up to collect and analyze data and launch evidence-based approaches for getting the economy restarted. Individuals with genuine expertise and training were brought in to develop and implement new policies. Over time, trust in government rose. The same approach could work today," Rich and Kavangh argue.
“Restoring trust won't occur quickly, nor will progress follow a straight line. But the new administration can begin to repair the deep fissures in our society by explicitly and implicitly rehabilitating the nation's civic infrastructure. The health of America's participatory democracy depends on it.”
In the meantime, however, lives are at stake.
“If you look at the map of spread across the country, you can see the risk; it’s very visible. And moving through airports or travel hubs, I think that will increase people’s risk,” Tom Inglesby, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Even if they’re driving from point to point, unfortunately, we don’t know if we’re infected when we walk into a gathering.”
