GENE THERAPY
Gene Collier has some words of advice: Yellow’s not mellow, so be careful out there.
You probably still have a good supply of complaints about how the days blend into each other in this pathogen spring, and about how the weekends are barely distinguishable within our quotidian rhythms, but there is good news: You’ve finally reached a weekend like few others.
At least like few others in our recent, unfocused memories.
’Tis the first weekend of our “yellow phase” lives. We are, at long last, exuberantly sprung from the highly uncomfortable, commerce-paralyzing red phase. So instead of sitting in the house and doing nothing this weekend, get out there, do next to nothing, wear a mask, social distance and get back in the house.
Oh yeah, yellow ain’t so mellow. Not designed to be.
If you need a lift, enforce a weekend moratorium for yourself on trying to process the brain-bending numerology in one news cycle after the next. Numbers representing coronavirus cases, coronavirus deaths, countries with the most cases, states with the most cases, counties with the most cases, cities with the most cases, projections, statistical models — all the things that have plastered themselves into various corners of the cable news screens, pulling your attention from whatever is getting said by whatever talking head, which is often darker than the numbers themselves.
Because this is still America, somehow, there’s a significant part of the citizenry harboring a distrust of numbers, as they tend to be generated by mathematicians, scientists, statistical modelers, engineers and other professionals who might appear to be mentally at odds with the president.
So depending on your politics, the death count is either overstated or understated, because Republicans and Democrats could not possibly tabulate things the same way. That’s where we are, thanks in some part to President Donald Trump, who never met a number he could not inflate, deflate or retrofit to his own immediate purpose.
If he’s not busy with that, the president deftly provides instantaneous data via the riotously non-Euclidian method they call “making things up.” Mr. Trump loves to tweet-boast about the number of federal judges he has appointed, which is considerable (193) and will have widespread impact long after he leaves office — say, in 2031.
In the last month, according to Daniel Dale, CNN’s chief president corrector, Mr. Trump has represented those 193 appointments as 252, 448, 280 and “close to 250.” None of these numbers were thrown out Thursday when Mr. Trump visited an Allentown mask distribution center in his determined role as America’s Unmasked Avenger. Fear not, you’ll see some version of 193 in a tweet again very soon, perhaps as 931. He’s got plenty of numbers.
You would hope that after three months of processing granular data on COVID-19, there would be some numbers held in general agreement, those that have been scientifically buttressed and commonly reflected by multiple sources.
The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (not exactly Herb’s House of Digits) put these out Thursday afternoon:
• The United States had 1.39 million cases of coronavirus, nearly six times the next most infected country, Russia, which had 242,000.
• China and India, each densely populated countries more than four times America’s size, had 162,000 cases between them. For every case in China and India, we’ve got eight.
The most discouraging number to emerge this week was 20, and it wasn’t even a number — it was a date.
On Jan. 20, the U.S. and South Korea had the same number of coronavirus cases: one. As this weekend approached, South Korea had 260 deaths from the virus. The U.S. was walking toward 90,000. Yeah, we’re six times bigger, but six times 260 is 1,560, not 90,000.
You almost get the feeling something went wrong. You’d have an easier time believing in American Exceptionalism if 4% of the globe’s population didn’t have 30% of the cases and 25% of the deaths.
Against that backdrop, fired immunologist Rick Bright turned up in front of a Senate committee Thursday, a couple of weeks after the Trump administration found it inconvenient that he was screaming at its Department of Health and Human Services that it was catastrophically unprepared for what was about to happen.
At least in this case, Mr. Trump didn’t have to rage against some anonymous whistleblower. He was sitting right there, telling Republicans and Democrats alike that his repeated warnings were met with indifference, people who were “too busy” or “didn’t have a plan” or “didn’t know who was responsible.”
Asked about Mr. Bright on Thursday, Mr. Trump called him “disgruntled.”
Yeah, we’re all pretty disgruntled.
But hey, it’s the weekend. Enjoy the yellow, and pray for a day when we will all be gruntled again.