It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Covid

A lot of what we’re now going through has echoes of what we went through during Covid. The timelines are eerily similar.

In January 2020, the rumble was in the distance, but we knew the storm was headed our way. It wasn’t something we wanted to think about. We knew what the disease was capable of, but we only knew it from afar. Denial was easy.

Read that last paragraph again, but substitute 2025 for 2020. The word ‘disease’ still applies — only its definition is expanded.

By February, we could see the virus spreading, a few cases here, a few there, but the CDC was warning that this was not something you want to mess with. It was only a matter of time before it would arrive in full force, and our experts seemed flummoxed as to how to respond. A few tried to warn us, but the alarm went unheeded. Even so, a sense of dread was descending on the land.

Same deal in February of this year. As DOGE vandalized the government, right out in the open, fear of the unknown was, for many of us, almost paralyzing. Experts were again confounded, even as we were warned that this was just the beginning.

By March 2020, we knew the contagion was here, and we knew it was a nasty and ambitious killer. My old hometown, New Rochelle NY, was an epicenter in the early days. The dread got worse.

By that point, the epidemiologists were fully engaged and telling us what the sensible precautions were, and the dire consequences of non-compliance. Meat-packing plants became incubators for the virus, and word was spreading among the workers — mostly immigrants, many undocumented — that it wasn’t safe to go to work.

This March, as the Trump regime started flexing its muscles, the early warnings were, once again, coming from the immigrant community, where the word started spreading that it wasn’t safe to go to work. In both years, as throughout American history, immigrants bore the brunt of it.

Because it was then quite clear that the consequences of this would go far beyond the immigrant population. Without migrant workers, crops would rot in the fields, nursing homes would go unattended, hospitals would go woefully understaffed, and a lot of hotels and restaurants would go under. The price of everything would go up, and be borne by everyone. All these things are starting to happen.

Strangely, while we know we’ll be feeling it in a thousand ways, in a thousand ways we still haven’t. It’s all still just clouds on the horizon, but those clouds are getting darker.

Tariffs played a prominent role in both years, though the timelines are not as neatly analogous. This year, they are threatening to literally tear the global economy apart, a contagion of its own that is spreading rapidly. The insanely stupid tariffs will only get more disruptive in the coming months, and the costs — both economic and personal — will grow deeper and wider. Once again, we’re not really feeling it yet, though a growing number surely are.

By the beginning of summer 2020, we could see that Covid denial was its own epidemic, almost as dangerous as the virus itself. The Trump cult believed every lie he told them — about the virus, about masks, about public health in general and Anthony Fauci in particular — and created politics where politics had no business. He suggested people take bleach internally, then moved on to hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and any number of quack remedies that were themselves life-threatening.

Was this where we started understanding that the cult was a disease in itself? Was this when we realized the extent to which the brainwashing effects of Fox News were real, and were every bit as bad as we’d feared? Was this when half the population of this country lost their collective minds?

There was plenty of evidence, as the virus spread and the death toll mounted. It was in full view that August — five years ago this month — when the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally brought 460,000 dimwits to a small town in South Dakota. This was the ultimate superspreader event — the vaccine hadn’t yet happened, masks had become needlessly controversial, and the sociopathic ambitions of the governor, Kristi Noem, were already apparent.

Fauci later estimated that this one event was responsible for 230,000 infections, spread throughout the country. The known death toll is only in the hundreds, but when you’ve brought in bikers from all over the world, then sent them home to share the virus far and wide, with friends and family, who knows what that number actually was?

By then, we had, for the most part, gotten over our fear. Yes, there was still much danger, but it was a danger we knew. Even so, we grew more and more astonished at how hard Trump was making it for everyone, how he seemed willfully determined to make a bad situation worse, and how blindly his followers followed him.

Similarly, I think our fear has lessened somewhat this year. Despite all the lawlessness and wannabe fascism — and I’m sure we don’t know the half of it — we have seen enough positives to feel all is not lost. I hasten to add that we could be deluding ourselves about that.

Because once again, Trump is hell-bent on making everything worse. Between his plummeting poll numbers and the never-ending Epstein scandal, he is facing nothing but bad news on every front. As we know, that’s when he’s most dangerous. Especially now that his mental decline becomes more evident by the day.

Let’s not forget that Covid put him, apparently, at death’s door. That’s a story that has still not been told, and who knows what the lasting effects of that disease would be on an obese 79-year-old who lives on Big Macs. I’m guessing we’re seeing some of those effects now, and they seem to be getting worse.

Regardless, we are still awaiting the full effects of his lunacy, and from all indications we are in for a wild ride. While he screwed up the response to Covid, he didn’t create the crisis. Today’s crises were all created in Trump’s head.

Which is just about the worst place in the world to be.