The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Hey governor, keep your distance
There’s distancing, and there’s distancing.
Did my years cleaning dog and cat poop for Darien veterinarians way back in the 1970s help inoculate me from the coronavirus? Doubtful, but more on that later. Let’s talk about something a little more close in time, and someone who should be a lot more distant.
It’s your governor I’m worried about.
Now here’s a guy we know did not sign up for this moment in history, when everything is literally going down in flames around us.
The $60 million state budget deficit of a month ago, when the COVID freight train was still off in the future?
It seems so quaint now that a new half-billiondollar deficit, maybe $1.5 billion by July 1, 2021 is even less a concern than the 220,000 unemployment claims over the last two weeks, the shuttered businesses, the untimely deaths in the hundreds and the percentage of the populace justifiably paralyzed by the thought of going outside and inhaling the virus.
As Dannel Malloy’s perseverance and leadership within the tragedy of the Newtown school massacre was the hallmark of his time in the governor’s office, this moment is Ned Lamont’s. But at 66, he’s in the coronavirus sweet spot.
You’d figure he’d follow his own admonitions on social distancing. But what made him electable (Remember when he defeated
U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary?) — the personable, easy-to-talk-to nice guy — is what could land him in the hospital.
As a rule, politicians are people persons, and people like to get close to them.
Take last week, at BioMed Devices, Inc, the manufacturing and assembly plant in Guilford that’s making 10 urgently needed hospital ventilators a week for the state.
Lamont’s hour-long visit was a study in the dangers of people bunched up in one place. Argh, I shouted in my head while leaning tightly against a wall in a 12-by-12 waiting room with two news photographers, Guilford First Selectman Matt Hoey, state Sen. Christine Cohen and state Rep. Sean Scanlon. We’re all breathing! Cut it out!
Finally allowed back into the manufacturing area, there were two dozen workers, part of the sevenday-a-week operation of the company. Their work tables were well-lighted and they were at least six feet apart as they assembled and tested.
CEO Dean Bennett told Lamont about the supply chain problems the company experienced with a company from China. Lamont, dressed in a blazer and open collar, asked some questions in a way too-close-for-socially distant group of four company officials standing near one of the workers.
A few minutes later, the group began a slow walk through the area for a little one-on-one breakage of social distancing and the governor chatted with individual workers. Only one of the casually dressed employees wore a surgical face mask.
By Wednesday at Southern Connecticut’s State University’s Moore Field House, I was fit to be tied. The sun was shining but it was a little cold. News photographers were cheekby-jowl, as usual, as they set up in a phalanx inside the gym. No way I was going in there with those heavy breathers.
Fortunately, the National Guard troops who had just set up the 200-bed field hospital in a few hours, had some sanitary standards, so they kicked everyone out and Lamont, after a brief tour, held his daily news conference outside.
As usual, Lamont was the center of a group for which the six-foot social distance effort was someone else’s standards, apparently.
At least Dr. Steven Choi, chief quality officer for the Yale School of Medicine and the Yale New Haven Health System, had a sixfoot force field in his vicinity while explaining that the pop-up medical unit on the gym floor will be available if other hospitals get inundated.
“We’re predicting that the worst weeks are ahead of us in the upcoming month of April,” Choi said, stressing that recovering COVID patients would be transferred there to free up acute care hospital beds.
Everyone was still too close to the governor, whose daily schedule has had way too many field trips and encounters with people who want to get close.
Cut it out! This guy needs to stay well, now that the General Assembly session is all but abandoned and we all hope for a dose of COVID-19 herd immunity. At least Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz has diverted her daily schedule from Lamont’s proximity.
So I’m on the phone with one of my oldest friends, a veterinarian now in upstate New York who I scraped many a filthy dog and cat cage back in high school and college. My friend, whose daughter is an infectious disease specialist for the CDC, reads the coronavirus literature and was reminded that there are similar, rare viruses in our favorite pets.
He half-joked that perhaps all his contact with animals over the years has somehow inoculated him from COVID-19.
“Maybe you have some too, for all the poop you scooped back then,” he told me.
“Would that,” I replied, “mean I developed turd immunity?”