One more measly thing

Well it looks like the rest of the world is sending all of us back to our rooms.

If you were planning a summer trip to Budapest for a bowl of genuine Hungarian goulash it’s “no soup for you!” Yup, as far as American travelers are concerned, the European Union has pulled in the welcome mat, slammed the door and locked it tight – treating U.S. citizens like we were carriers of the plague, which, of course, considering the swelling numbers of COVID-19 cases within our borders, we very well may be.

Yeah, the national health care systems in Ethiopia, Vietnam, and Cuba – not to mention Canada, Japan and, yes, China – have so outpaced America’s floundering effort to control the virus the EU is welcoming their citizens as visitors and business partners, while American’s are left standing, unmasked and unwell, outside looking in.

And with the Trump administration’s latest response to the deepening public health crisis being to redouble its efforts to shut down the Affordable Care Act and leave another 23 million or so Americans without medical insurance, it doesn’t look like our situation improving any time soon.

But then Floridians did get to crowd onto the beach and collegians got to hang around in bars. The Trumpsters got their rally and, for a while at least, the mask-wearing sheeple got taught “you don’t mess with Texas.”

Yeah, like Mom said, “It’s all fun until somebody get’s hurt.”

Well, all I’ve got to say is, “Ouch,”

Infection rates are going up and up. And after people get sick, they start to die – more than 125,000 of us so far. The whole trouble is that this doggone virus is so easy to catch. The way the world is set up, we’re all stuck breathing the same air, and whenever somebody carrying the bug strays into our breathing space, they bring the virus with them – and graciously share it with anyone and everyone swapping oxygen with ‘em. It’s an easy bug to catch, a nasty one to have, and you don’t know you’re passing it around until it’s too late.

It sort of reminds me of the measles.

When it comes to measles, I’m a member of the BV – Before Vaccine – generation. Back then we relied on herd immunity to keep that disease under control, and, as part of the herd, lemme tell ya, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Back then, every couple of years, measles would “go through” the school, leaving classrooms half empty for a month or two. There wasn’t much to be done about it – it, like mumps and chicken pox, was just a rite of passage, one of those “childhood diseases” that, along with Cub Scouts and Little League, were just part of growing up.

It was a Saturday morning when the measles intervened in my day’s plans. I’d finished up my Saturday morning ration of cartoons and was about to head out to see what the neighborhood guys were up to when Mom stopped me by the kitchen sink, looked closely behind my ears and the back of my neck, then hooked a finger in my t-shirt collar to peer down at my chest. She gave her diagnosis and told me I was going nowhere. I had the measles.

I wasn’t surprised. The guys on the corner came down with it the week before and every day there was another empty desk or two in the classroom. Come Monday, there’d be one more.

For the moment though, I felt just fine – except maybe for a little scratchy at the back of my throat, and the thought of just stretching out on the sofa for a while didn’t sound all that bad. But the day, then the week, went rapidly downhill. Across the decades I remember the fever, the coughing, the feeling downright miserable as the red blotches spread then began to fade. Just as I was starting to enjoy daytime TV again, a stack of make-up worksheets was delivered to my sickroom, adding one more misery to overcome.

But I survived, most of us did, and it would have been a couple of years until a backlog of the vulnerable would allow measles “go through” again. Fortunately, a vaccine was introduced and in a few years measles was a rarity.

But until a COVID vaccine arrives all we can do is keep our distance, wear a mask, and look out for each other. To do less amounts to thinning the herd.