“Ok,” the post began, “I need to say that this is the most ASININE thing I’ve seen yet.”

The caps were not ironic. More were to follow, and quickly.

“Went to Twisters Soft Serve Icecream,” it continued, “and ordered 2 doggie cups. Then I wanted a friggin icecream cone with jimmies — nope. Not allowed.”

You probably have questions. We know we did.

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Once more, for the next civilization: The way to get through this is massive testing, hotspot identification, contact tracing, and targeted isolation. Get all that up to speed, and we can live what passes for normal lives.

We aren’t doing it that way.

We’re flying blind.

We’ll be flying blind for the duration.

We’re on our own.

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“I guess the bright side,” said the skeptical lady on Facebook, “is that 99.98% will survive this ‘pandemic’.”

You’ve seen comments like that: The resort to numbers. Here’s how many die from the flu every year. Here’s how many die in traffic accidents. Why are we making a fuss over this one? Aren’t opponents just using it as an excuse to embarrass the President? Isn’t the government just using it as an excuse to take away our freedoms?

Well, we would say at first, stating the obvious, traffic accidents aren’t lethally virulent. Well, we would say, we have shots for the flu.

Now we just play out the numbers.

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In the country of the blind, goes the saying, the one-eyed man is king.

Yeah, no.

It’s a nice saying, as such things go. Concise. You don’t have to be an all-seeing master of the universe. You just need to know more than the stupid monkey next door.

Nice thought. Totally wrong.

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Something’s not right.

Nothing new about that, of course. Something’s never been right.

But something’s not right in a way it hasn’t been not right before. Or maybe we haven’t noticed something not being right like this before.

Maybe we hadn’t been born yet.

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That’s how many names are inscribed on the Vietnam memorial. The first name is recorded under 1959. The last, 1975.

58,276 names. Sixteen years.

The first diagnosed U.S. death from the coronavirus is now dated to February 6. Since then, 54,171 have followed.

54,172 deaths. Eighty days.

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We think we can say now, with some certainty, that things are going to get much, much worse before they get better.

We’re not, collectively, paying attention to the science. We’re not paying attention to the circumstances. We’re not paying attention to the reality.

Nothing new there. We’ve been ignoring global warming for thirty years.

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