Do you remember that hideous children’s TV character named Barney? He was a huge purple anthropomorphized T-rex who often broke out into this monotonous jingle for positive thinking: “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family.” I felt dumber every time I saw him do this.
Barney comes to mind for me when people implore the public to wear masks because they protect other people. “I wear my mask to protect you!” is the rallying cry. We all need to love each other! Respect my authoritay!
Yeah, that works. Have you ever tried to convince someone to love you? How did that go?
I wear a mask because I’m not interested in sharing this planet with SARS-CoV-2. This tiny, fragile, sticky wadded-up ball of sugar-strands needs the cooperation of human beings to survive. We can choose not to cooperate. I can choose not to.
SARS-CoV-2 really hates that I’m not an ally.
I refuse to cooperate with the virus by isolating myself in my home. I refuse to cooperate with the virus by washing my hands practically every time I pass a sink or a bottle of hand sanitizer. I refuse to cooperate with the virus by wearing a mask. I refuse to be a good virus host by getting regular daily exercise and eating whole foods in moderation.
This isn’t about you, it’s really not. I hate this virus, it completely destroyed my birthday plans.
Sunday I turn sixty. I have been planning my observance of this birthday for five years. Four detailed plans have been made and abandoned, I thought the most recent and last plan was covid-proof, but even that one was yanked away from me last week as retribution for something I wrote (and later regretted) in an angry text.
So, I have no plans. Five years in the making, four complete revisions to the plan, each cancelled by someone or something I could do nothing about. My roommate and I will pass the day like any other summer Sunday, perhaps we’ll make illegal burgers on the contraband grill and listen to Joni Mitchell streaming over an eastern European VPN. It could be worse.
It is going to get worse.
If you think things are messy now, and you’re in the US, you’re going to look back on mid-July 2020 with nostalgia this fall. You’ll long for those days when things were kind of half-open, you could get a haircut, and the lines at the grocery stores were short. You’ll remember fondly before the White House took the data away from the CDC and the deaths, suddenly, mysteriously, started to drop. That’s going on today.
SARS-CoV-2 has a huge supporter in the White House. Dear Leader is putting everything into place so this nasty new virus will have a chance to grow, spread, mutate, and further develop new ways to find human hosts to exploit to further its existence. SARS-CoV-2 needs for human beings to be crammed in close together, breathing each other’s exhaled respiratory droplets, absorbing those not only through the mouth and nose, but through the exposed surface of human eyeballs.
SARS-CoV-2 can’t get very far on it’s own, and if it doesn’t have the warm and wet environment of human secretions around it rapidly melts like cotton candy left out in the sun. You can detect it on surfaces, but you don’t catch it from surfaces.
In fact, when you do come into contact with it in low concentrations, like in the hallway of a hospital with covid patents, it often dies out before it can infect you. This is not a ninja killer microbe like measles. It needs help from humans. It needs a good stiff, sustained, dose to take hold in a new host.
It’s not getting my help to do this. If you want to believe that I wear a mask out of altruism, go ahead. I wear a mask for the same reason I wear long sleeve shirts and smear sunscreen on exposed skin in the summer. This isn’t going to 100% protect me from skin cancer, but it makes it less likely.
Masking up when I go out, washing hands, staying socially distant, all thwart the virus. My focus is on the virus and what little I can do about it. The virus is completely out of f*cks to give about who I think should be in the government (but it has a friend in the White House, bigly.)
Not in my house. SARS-CoV-2 hates my place. No one is there, soap is all over the damn place, and the outside air circulates through this corner of this building all day. Ugh, that sucks for the virus.
But, it will never really find out how inhospitable a place my home is because it’s not invited. Only a few of the same people every come over, they stay distant while they are here. That sucks for the virus. It can’t reliably find chances to jump from one human to another at my house.
Forget Trump, forget Fauci, forget the kerfuffle. Focus on SARS-CoV-2. It is weak, fragile, dependent. Starve it. Wear your mask, stay home, wash your hands.