Long-term effects of COVID – Bianca Smith – Curfews in European nations – The well-heeled rioters – Jacob Chansley receives catering in prison – Preparations for the inauguration – Harold Bornstein – Evening statistics
I have been recording the number of deaths from the COVID virus, which is fairly high in proportion to the number of recorded cases of infection but not overwhelmingly so. What is less easy to track is the number of people who have been in some way incapacitated after their recovery. The case of Rachel Gunn, from Dublin, Ireland, is an example. She was 28 years old, healthy, active, a non-smoker, with no underlying conditions. She contracted the virus in October and spent two weeks struggling against it. After that period she felt sufficiently healthy to return to work, despite a persistent sense of fatigue. In December, however, the fatigue became worse, to the point that mounting a flight of stairs felt as if she had been running in a marathon and she was requiring 15-16 hours of sleep every day. At last she checked into a hospital, where it was discovered that her lungs were covered with pulmonary embolisms. That was the cause of her fatigue; she was not receiving a sufficient degree of oxygen as her lungs were steadily deteriorating. She will have to stay on blood thinners for at least a year and may be susceptible to blood clots for the rest of her life.
The most common post-virus symptom that lingers for months or (as it is projected) for years after recovery from “mild” cases is loss of smell and taste. Even this is not trivial – it can trigger depression, after all – but at any rate it is possible to cope with it. But statistics on the number of those who had had more serious consequences after the disease has come and gone are at this point impossible to obtain. In fact, I don’t know if anyone has gone to the trouble of attempting to collect them.
I heard an interview on the radio with Bianca Smith, the baseball coach. What is remarkable about her is this: despite her record of achievement, she does not consider herself at all remarkable. She doesn’t think of herself as a trailblazer and she brushed aside all comparisons with Jackie Robinson: he paved the way already, she said, for people of color, and she personally encountered little resistance on account of her race or her gender. It is the coaching and baseball that matter to her; the fact that she happens to be the first black woman to be a professional baseball coach is a pleasant by-product of her career, but nothing more. She is pleased that other women and other African-Americans are encouraged by her example; but the force that drives her is her love of baseball. She has just been hired by the Red Sox as a minor league coach, the first African-American woman to obtain a position as a coach for a professional baseball team.
France is currently imposing a nationwide 6PM curfew that will last at least 15 days in an attempt to contain the COVID virus. In addition, all travelers arriving from outside the EU have to test negative for the virus within 72 hours before their travel into France, and then isolate for seven days and test negative again. France has been particularly hard-hit by the virus, especially in recent months. It has lost over 69,000 people as a result of the virus, the seventh-highest death toll in the world. Other European nations are following suit: Hungary, Belgium, Italy, and Latvia all have curfew restrictions, and the Netherlands is contemplating imposing them as well.
As reports about the siege on the Capitol continue to flood the newspapers it is becoming apparent that the rioters are not, as might initially have been supposed, members of the blue-collar working class fueled by indignation at the neglect they have been receiving from our legislators. On the contrary, they are for the most part children of privilege. Many traveled to Washington taking business-class airplane flights and booking rooms at four-star hotels. Some of them are fairly highly placed: for instance, Derrick Evans and Klete Keller, who are, respectively, a delegate in the state legislature of West Virginia and a swimming champion who won medals in the 2000, 2004, and 2008 Olympics.
And they have been treated like a privileged class in many cases. The charges brought against them are relatively minor; none, as far as I can tell, have been formally charged with sedition. Jacob Anthony Chansley (“the QAnon shaman”) whose picture was prominent in the headlines on account of the costume he wore to the siege (furry hat with Viking horns, tattooed bare chest, tan pants, face coated with red, white, and blue paint) – for all the world as if he were attending a Halloween party – has since been arrested. After his arrest he complained that he can only eat organic food. Instead of his being told that he had a choice between eating the food served by the prison or ending his worthless life by starvation, the judge in the case ruled that he must be served organic food. Worse still, the charges against him are misdemeanors only, not felonies. Chansley, incidentally, has not done a stroke of work since his dismissal from the Navy in 2007 and lives in his mother’s house, supported by her. She appears to be as infatuated with him as Jocasta was with Oedipus. Most mothers, I believe, would be rather upset to discover that a child of theirs participated in an act of domestic terrorism, but such considerations trouble her not at all and her main concern is that her pampered darling receives the same standard of living in prison that he enjoys at her home.
Preparations are being made for the inauguration, which, thanks to the rioters, threatens to be one of the gloomiest in our history. When I was driving on the Beltway today announcements were posted urging people to stay away from the capital during the period of January 16-20. Muriel Bowser has requested Americans to remain at home rather than travel to the city. She has also been granted a state of emergency order for the city. Anti-scale fencing has been erected around the Capitol. The Pentagon has authorized at least 15,000 National Guard troops to patrol the event. (The mayor of Washington does not have the power to call out the National Guard directly, because large swathes of the city fall under federal jurisdiction. This security fissure played a role in the events of last week, when the Pentagon ignored Bowser’s requests for assistance as the violence began.) It will all have the appearance of the beginning of a third-world nation administration. Such is the legacy that Donald Trump will leave behind him.
Harold Bornstein died this past Friday, of undisclosed causes. He was the physician who in 2015 attested that Donald Trump, should he be elected in 2016, would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.” Several months later, when he was cast off by Trump (the usual fate that awaited Trump’s underlings once they had served their purpose) he revealed that the letter from which this quotation was taken had been dictated to him by Trump. The cause of the breach between the two was an article in the New York Times in which Bornstein casually mentioned that he had given Trump prescriptions for Propecia, a prostate-related drug to treat baldness, as well as other “antibiotics to control rosacea, a common skin problem, and a statin for elevated blood cholesterol and lipids.” Trump was outraged by disclosure of these minor health issues, and consequently raided Bornstein’s office to remove his medical records – at least according to Bornstein’s account. It should be added that the White House maintained that removal of any President’s records is standard procedure and that Bornstein cooperated in turning them over after being notified to relinquish them. What is indisputable is that Bornstein became persona non grata after the interview with the Times. Bornstein is only one of many who learned the hard way that trying to obtain a link to fame through association with Donald Trump is inevitably accompanied in the long run by a damaged reputation and public humiliation.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 93,493,980; # of deaths worldwide: 2,001,034; # of cases U.S.: 23,836,911; # of deaths; U.S.: 397,808.