Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires

My family went camping a lot when I was a kid. Nothing feels quite like home to me more than being huddled around a campfire, sticks roasting marshmallows or cooking hot dogs. There is something primal about it that connects me back to a simpler time in our collective evolution. I was also a Boy Scout and camp a lot as an adult. I love the wilderness and its endless bounty.

One of the lessons my father taught us, and he taught us many things about being outdoors, had to do with fire safety. Never leave a fire burning, he would say. Even the smallest embers can reignite the fire, especially if the conditions are dry or windy. To leave a half burning fire was to risk danger and this is a lesson I’ve always taken seriously. In order for a fire to be “out,” it must truly be out.

This is the lesson we did not utilize in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.

In late spring, while most of the world was coming to grips with the reality that a deadly virus that did not (and still does not) have a cure or vaccine, Americans were faced with a choice. Shut down everything and spare lives or continue on as usual and exchange mass death for “normalcy”. In reality, this was a false choice, as hundreds of thousands (or millions by some estimates) of people dying would significantly disrupt the economy anyway. Schools switched to online learning, businesses encouraged their workers to stay home and remotely work, and millions of people were deemed “essential” workers, forced to continue working for a crumb of a pay raise.

In Minnesota, where I live, some 85% of the workforce was considered “essential”. 85%! That’s just about everyone. What is even the point in shutting things down if most people are going to continue on as normal? Sure, corporations added plexiglass and masks and hand sanitizer. But there were always going to be people who refused to follow the plan and slip through the cracks.

So what happened? This chart explains it pretty well.

As you can see, our initial efforts had an impact on the spread, albeit a small one. Around Memorial Day, as cases, deaths, and hospitalizations began to fall, people took this as a sign of things getting better. And to some degree, it was. But as the days grew longer, warmer, and people tired of following protocols that kept them safe, our government failed us. Instead of encouraging citizens to be vigilant, the Trump administration instead decided to focus on reopening. Why? Because a country ravaged by lockdowns, mask mandates, and the destined economic fallout would hurt the President’s chances of reelection. Here is what the President said on April 22:

“If [coronavirus] comes back though, it won’t be coming back in the form that it was, it will be coming back in smaller doses that we can contain….it’s also possible it doesn’t come back at all.”

In hindsight, does that seem remotely plausible? And this wasn’t based on anything other than his desire to downplay the virus. He is on tape admitting this. It is an indisputable fact. You can see it here if you don’t believe me. What else did he say publicly? April 23, the very next day:

“You see states are starting to open up now, and it’s very exciting to see,”

“It’s gonna go away, this is going to go away.” (April 29)

“I don’t want to be Mr. Gloom-and-Doom. It’s a very bad subject,...I’m not looking to tell the American people when nobody really knows what’s happening yet, ‘Oh, this is going to be so tragic.’” (May 5)

“This is going to go away without a vaccine. It is going to go away. We are not going to see it again.” (May 8)

Does this sound like someone who is ringing alarm bells? We know it’s not because he isn’t trying to alarm anyone. He isn’t trying to set the public discourse about COVID on anything other than “it’s gone, it’s fine, open up.” Trump never took the virus as seriously publicly as he did privately. If he had, perhaps we could have slowed the virus down even more.

But he didn’t. The fire was never put out and the embers that lingered stoked an even bigger wave of disease. As the US passed 130,000+ dead Americans, the President had his attention elsewhere. He must have in order to say something like this, spoken on July 1:

“I think we’re going to be very good with the coronavirus.”

“I think that, at some point, that’s going to sort of disappear, I hope.”

Hoping isn’t a useful option. Yes, hope for the best, but don’t rely upon that as your strategy. Throughout the month, Trump threatened to withhold funding for schools that didn’t open in-person and on time. He attacked governors who maintained mask mandates and lockdowns. He chaulked a lot of the rise in cases on more testing, which in a sense, is true. However, whether we tested or not, those cases were still there. This is only a useful statistic when comparing us to other countries. But when speaking strictly about what happens within our borders, more testing should have found LESS virus if it were truly on the decline. And by the way, positive cases far exceeded the increase of testing, so it was clear from the data that the virus was out of control.

How did the President respond to this? As we reached six million infections and nearly 200,000 deaths, he bragged about how good he had done:

"We've done a great job in Covid but we don't get the credit." (August 23)

A week later, he gave false hope to people by saying we’d have a vaccine “before the end of the year and maybe even before Nov. 1. I think we can probably have it sometime in October.”

This is, of course, unrealistic. And he knew that at the time. For all his bluster about keeping the public calm and downplaying the virus as a good thing, he did nothing to ensure that people were protected. There STILL is no national COVID plan. Hospitals are still struggling to get supplies. Testing, improved as it is, is still woefully insufficient. And we do almost no contract tracing on a large scale.

Throughout September, Trump would claim that we were “rounding the corner” on the virus. This is, at best, a lie. We are not. In fact, we are facing case numbers that go beyond any point during the pandemic. People like to talk about this in waves, that we are currently beginning our third wave. But look at that chart again:

Where does the first wave ever end? It doesn’t. Our leaders in government simply convinced us that it was happening. But in reality, demonstrated above with data from the CDC, we never stopped the first wave. We never put out the fire in the first place and now our forests are burning down.

Some good news: we are better at fighting the virus in hospitals than we were six months ago. Mortality is going down. And the most susceptible people have, unfortunately, died off already. But none of this should be taken as a sign that we can let up.

Had our President, from day one, been honest with us and encouraged his followers (who adore him like a cult leader) to wear masks and take the virus seriously, some of this could have been avoided. Yes, it would have still killed thousands. Yes, the economy would have been hit hard. Yes, suicides and drug use would increase. All of the things that have already happened would have still happened. But the lives saved by having a national policy and enforcement of that policy would have been tremendous. Who knows where we would be now?

Wearing a mask is one of the most patriotic things you can do right now. You are literally saving American lives when you do it. Refusing to do even the simplest of things isn’t about freedom or liberty. It’s selfishness, pure and simple. It’s being a tantrum-throwing toddler, kicking his mother in the checkout aisle because she won’t buy you candy. It’s entitlement at it’s finest and most disgusting.

Trump can mock Biden for wearing a mask all he wants. If your goal in this pandemic is to own the libs, then congrats. That’s probably why the Biden campaign hasn’t had a single case of COVID and the White House, the most secure building in the world, has had multiple outbreaks. If you want a leader who acts like a petulant 14-year-old online, then you’ve got your man. This pandemic is serious business. More Americans have died than any other war, outside of WW2. And we’ll be cruising past that number sometime early next year. I don’t think it’s funny and I don’t think a real leader would be flying around the country holding maskless rallies where people are packed together like sardines, doing his two-bit standup routine three times a day. I mean, who the hell is running the country while he does his grievance tour?

This is on us to decide what kind of leadership we have as we face down the greatest mass casualty event of my lifetime. Probably yours too. Do we want someone who will take it seriously and come up with a plan? Or do we want the orange equivalent of the Joker, a man who just wants to watch the world burn for his own benefit?

Only you can prevent forest fires. Good advice from a shirtless bear.