This might not be popular.
But Friday, I was reminded of Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “The Mask of the Red Death.”
What brought the tale to mind — a story of how nobles welded themselves inside a palace to protect themselves from a plague, only to have the plague arrive during a huge party and kill everyone in the place — was watching American politics.
Never, ever confuse luck with skill.
Thursday night, just before bed, I saw on Twitter that President Donald Trump’s close associate, Hope Hicks, had tested positive for COVID-19 after displaying symptoms. Then, Friday morning, reading about Trump’s positive COVID-19 test, and Melania Trump’s, and then, a little later, U.S. Republican Senator Mike Lee’s positive test. (Lee met with Trump’s new Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett, the day before he tested positive.)
A group of high-paying Republican donors met personally with Trump Thursday night, even after White House staffers knew about Hicks’ positive test, and they are now concerned about the risks to their health. Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna Romney McDaniel tested positive about the same time as Hicks did. The president of Notre Dame University, Rev. John I. Jenkins, was at the Amy Coney Barrett announcement last Saturday, without a mask. He’s now tested positive for COVID-19.
I suspect that list will be growing — especially given the opposition (and the downright disdain) the Trump campaign has had for wearing masks.
I couldn’t help thinking that they all must have thought the contagion was safely outside the walls, and that the doors were safely shut.
And that’s where we come in.
We’re not so different; we all think the contagion is safely outside the bubble.
There has started to be an unseemly amount of back-patting here inside the old Atlantic Bubble. Stories on the national news about what a good job we’re doing — comparisons to countries like New Zealand.
Now, we’ve had some things go in our favour. We don’t have the same concentrations of people, the sheer movement of population, the close quarters in transit systems — and above all, we haven’t had more than a couple of potential super-spreaders across the entire region.
Yet.
The truth is, we probably will.
That gets more and more likely every time the numbers in parts of the rest of the country rise. In Quebec and Ontario, by Friday, the numbers were really quite staggering. And if there’s anything that’s been clear about COVID-19, it’s that when community spread is well and truly established, it’s the multi-headed Hydra — and, like the Hydra, every time you nip one head off, it seems like there are two more to deal with.
The question is — when and if something does arrive — whether we’re poised to respond to it. We’ve opened up a lot of things, though some public gathering rules and physical distancing rules are still in place. But by large, if you’re not at the grocery store or the liquor store, your mask probably isn’t on your face, you’re running into friends and family daily, and life is sliding towards something that feels almost normal. Have you washed your hands today? It’s still a long haul to a vaccine.
Yet we’re far less afraid than we were in March, April and May. It’s almost as if familiarity was breeding something…
You can shut the doors. Weld and bolt them in place if you like.
But don’t take all the other precautions lightly. Never, ever confuse luck with skill.
I had a look back at the Poe story.
“With such precautions the courtiers might bid defiance to contagion,” they thought, at least, until “towards the close of the fifth or six month…”
It’s chilling, really.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
