No excuse

Public health really shouldn’t be a craft fair project.

Now don’t think for a minute that I’m in any way denigrating the good work done by all the folks diligently stitching quilting squares, blue jean patches and even plush purple Crown Royal whiskey bags into face masks better to contain the contagion caused by the corona virus. I applaud their effort and community-minded dedication, especially since my own tentative attempts at mastering needle and threat ended in multiple self-inflicted puncture wounds and blood stained fabric. Our do-it-themselfers are doing us a real public service, but, in truth, it’s a service the public should have done for itself.

This pandemic caught us with our pants down and there’s no excuse for that. It’s not like a sudden appearing, fast moving, all infecting disease is new to the human experience. It seems like we might have learned something from smallpox, cholera, the black plague, Spanish flu, SARS, MERS, Ebola, H1N1 and a long list of other maladies that periodically sweep through the population, laying folks low, filling the graveyards and providing a grim reminder of our personal mortality, societal fragility, and cultural amnesia.

They tell us that denial isn’t just a river in Egypt and the fact that my neighbor across the street is sewing up makeshift personal protective gear rather than crotcheting baby bonnets  is testimony to that. It might have told us something months ago when China started building a new Great Wall around 50 million people and basically shutting down life in response to a brand-new, virulent viral infection. We might have noticed that “Made in China” is stamped on most of the stuff we buy and use and that Wuhan is just one long plane ride from anywhere in the world. It shouldn’t have taken more than the average smart fifth grader to figure that it wouldn’t be long before somebody was going to show up here with more than the ordinary case of the sniffles and perhaps we should gear up and get ready.

But we didn’t.

Instead we pretended it wasn’t going to get here, and when it did we tried closing the barn door after the proverbial horse got out. Now we’re sitting at home, hoping the curve will flatten while the neighbors stitch face masks and garage-bound inventors cobble up Rube Goldberg respirators just in case worse comes to worst.

It didn’t have to be this way.

Now we can’t stop a virus from mutating and we can’t stop that mutant virus from doing what viruses have evolved to do, but there’s plenty we can do to us as individuals and as a global civilization.

Yeah, a global civilization. It’s time we recognize that borders are arbitrary lines on a map -- invisible to sun, wind and water, matters of profound indifference to a virus, bacterium or migrating mosquito, and little more than minor legal formalities in the global exchange of people and products. Unless we want to live like North Koreans we’re gonna be part of a global economy and culture which demands that we cooperate and coordinate with the rest of the world rather than pretend we can go it alone.

Not that there isn’t plenty we – as Americans – ought to be doing for ourselves. If this current debacle teaches us nothing else, we ought to see the need to invest and plan. Invest in public health facilities and resources to deal with the next COVID-scale outbreak and have plans in place to mobilize those resources early and effectively. And of equal importance to each of us – a guarantee that every person in this country will have equal and affordable access to health care if and when it is needed. Everyone. Period.

We can learn from this. We can do better than this. There is no excuse for this. No excuse at all.