San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Can Californians skip the gym to save lives?
Humans are a selfish and destructive species — “a virus with shoes,” as the late comedian Bill Hicks put it. But we have at least one quality in abundance that the unshod viruses lack: vanity. Our capacity for selfregard prescribes that every frivolous human activity forgone for a lifethreatening pandemic must be resumed as soon as possible. What a world: in which we are cruelly prevented from getting pedicures, doing brunch and going to Disneyland!
The gym has generated as much angst and anticipation across California as any of our suspended indulgences. When Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out the phases of reopening, the stage that included gyms — along with such other risky business as movie theaters and religious congregations — sounded like a distant eventuality, and rightly so. A single group dance workout in South Korea was shown to have infected more than 100 people.
Gyms combine this superspreading potential with an intrinsic inessentiality. Sure, exercise is good for you, but no one really needs a warehouse packed with expensive equipment and airborne particles to stretch his or her legs, especially in evertemperate California.
Though Newsom figured the gym stage was “months” away back in April, it took him little more than a month to give most of the state the green light to reopen fitness centers, even in such highinfection areas as Los Angeles and parts of the Bay Area.
But California’s struggle to resume group ironpumping was not without its setbacks. Former governor and first musclehead Arnold Schwarzenegger, for instance, stopped by legendary Gold’s Gym in Venice, learned it wasn’t requiring masks, and declared he wouldn’t be back.
Another Southern California gym, Inspire South Bay Fitness, was in
spired to jerryrig transparent personal exercise cubes out of PVC pipe and shower curtains. It thereby safeguarded its customers’ right to make others watch them work out while inadvertently creating one of the most comic scenes of our national tragedy: a menagerie of adult humans sculpting their physiques while trapped in oversize hamster cages.
Not to single out gym hamsters. Take another pastime that more sensible people can do at home but would rather do in public: get drunk.
Bars and the people who tend them deserve our support through takeout, donations and more, but sharing an indoor space with other unmasked, disinhibited and loudly conversing Californians is utterly indefensible in the throes of the pandemic. And yet drinking establishments were open in the Bay Area, Los Angeles and much of the rest of the state more than a month ago. We’ve wrung our hands more over whether to reopen schools.
California had devolved from coronavirus success story to basket case before Newsom thought better of this hasty return to normalcy last week, when he ordered bars shuttered statewide, along with gyms in the most populous counties.
The shutdowns, for all the relentless horrors of the pandemic, haven’t been without mercies. Violent crime in San Francisco fell by more than a third in March and April. Los Angeles enjoyed its longest stretch of clean air in at least 40 years. Wild animals reclaimed Yosemite and, in one case, South of Market. And with the Democratic Party hesitating to allow any actual gathering for its national convention next month, we may even be spared one of our two useless presidential nominating spectacles.
The Republicans, meanwhile, are partying like it’s 2019. The sickening of former presidential candidate Herman Cain and Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt following President Trump’s ominous Tulsa rally hasn’t stopped their party from preparing an almost traditional national convention in the coronavirus hot spot of Florida. It would proceed with all the promise of a pathogenladen cruise, another reminder that not all of humankind’s prepandemic pursuits were inherently good or wise.