“China will do anything they can to have me lose this race,” Trump said, citing its handling of the crisis as proof. Business Insider, May 1, 2020

There is, apparently, a rumor going around that the Chinese manufactured the coronavirus in a secret military lab in an effort to get rid of President Trump. I say apparently because I haven’t actually read or heard anybody actually say the rumor, I’ve only heard people referring to it to say the theory is absurd. I have also heard that the President believes and has repeated the rumor. I don’t understand that. I would think that Trump would aggressively deny that anybody manufactured this virus to make him look bad.

Think about it.

If the Chinese made this virus in a lab to make President Trump look bad, they had to be certain that he would, in fact, end up looking bad; they had to be certain that he would do a terrible job of coping with the problem. If he had done a superb job, or even a good job, he would have been a hero. The President is saying, in effect, that “The Chinese knew I would be incapable of handling a real crisis so they created one to make me look bad.”

Why would he say that?

In plague, fear acts as a solvent on human relationships; it makes everyone an enemy and everyone an isolate. In plague every man becomes an island—a small, haunted island of suspicion, fear and despair. John Kelly in The Great Mortality, and quoted by Talia Lavin in CQ Magazine.

…but Zoom has changed everything and I feel much less isolated for it.

First, some numbers as of the morning of April 28. There are 1,002,498 known cases of COVID-19 in the US with over 57 thousand deaths. New York still is the hot spot with 295,106 cases and 22,668 deaths while California has dropped to the fifth hardest-hit state with 45,219 cases and 1,795 deaths. On March 17, San Mateo has 64 cases and two deaths and today we have 1,099 cases and 141 deaths, so I think we are doing pretty good, considering. The Six San Francisco Bay Area counties, with about seven million people, were in the first group of counties to quarantine – and one of the first groups of government entities to work together – and it seems to have worked. If you are interested in more detail, the New Yorker has a fascinating article on the difference between the reaction on the East Coast and West Coast which has resulted in wildly different results.

Even before the coronavirus quarantine, Michele and I watched a lot of TV, and, as you can imagine, we are watching even more now. After a while, all that TV runs together, that is not to say that it isn’t good, much of it is good, some is excellent, but after a while, it does all run together. Still, every once in a while something stands out and for me right now, the one that stands out is Unbelievable. It is a true story about tracking down a serial raper that fits in with my belief that men have pretty much fucked up their self-assigned role of running the world and it is time for women to take over. Unbelievable stars Kaitlyn Dever, who I first saw as the old beyond her years Loretta McCready in Justified, Toni Collette, who was the ditzy mother in About a Boy, and Merritt Wever, who I have seen many times but she is so good each time seemed different.

Unbelievable is really two stories, interwoven but separate, one takes place in Washington, near Seattle, and the other is in Colorado and features two terrific women detectives and is the main story. After the first episode which starts with the rape of a young woman, played by Kaitlyn Dever, and is hard to watch mostly because of the mishandling – and mishandling is a gross understatement – of the subsequent case by a male detective and his male boss. The second episode starts three years later and features Toni Collette and Merritt Wever doing the kind of job the men didn’t do three years earlier and I spent most of the remaining episodes wanting them to become one story. The difference between the professionalism of the women and unprofessionalism – for lack of a better word – of the men is stunning (and it is an actual, true, real, story). Check it out.

On the women should run the world front, I would also recommend Long Shot. It is a RomCom, starring Charlize Theron as a Secretary of State getting ready to run for president and Seth Rogen as…uh…Seth Rogan. it is a much more subversive movie than it first appears. Also on the women should run the world is a list of best-action-movies in Glamour. When I clicked through to the list, I realized that they were all woman-centric and I wanted to pass it off as a gimmick except that the first movie was Mad Max: Fury Road which should be on the top of anybody’s best action-movie list (to double-check, a random search gave me #25 The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, 44 Edge of Tomorrow with Emily Blunt and #9 V for Vendetta with a shaved head Natalie Portman).

One of the programs we watched and liked was Unorthodox, which also featured a female protagonist. and it answered a question that I’ve long wondered about. Why do Orthodox Jews dress like they still live in a shtetl in 1895 Eastern Europe? I was brought up in the exact opposite manner, “assimilate, look and act like everybody else, blend in…”. The Jewish Orthodox community in New York does not want to assimilate because they believe God brought on the Holocaust, the Shoa, because the Jews were losing their specialness, their Jewish separateness as the Chosen People. Most of the New York Orthodox community are Holocaust survivors or descendants of Holocaust survivors and their attitude seems to be, we’re never going to do that again. I don’t agree, obviously, but it is a coherent theory so I feel a little better. As an aside, I am aware that during the 1920s through the early 30s, the Jewish Community in Germany was one of the most assimilated Jewish populations in the world and it did them no good and may have contributed to the Holocaust (but that is a data point I choose to ignore). End aside.

A couple of days ago, President Trump Tweeted LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL! and my first thought was “Clueless Trump, surely he was around when saying that about Vietnam became a joke because we heard it so often.” I wondered why he would say something so tainted with failure. It must be because he is stressed and frantic. He should be stressed and frantic, after all, the pressure on him is horrendous. It is unimaginable really, and Trump, the perpetual optimist, and promoter, is desperately trying to find some light somewhere. But we are still nearer the beginning of this collective nightmare than the end. To be fair to Trump, he is in an impossible situation, we are expecting the Federal Government to come in and save us and it might have been able to do that if the disaster were confined to one area, like Sandy or Katrina. But it isn’t, the whole country is under siege at the same time and it is impossible for the Federal Government to back up everyone everywhere and, short term at least, this is just going to get worse.

Still, President Trump’s leadership has been capricious at best, and, rather than becoming the lead agency, under Trump, the Federal Government is becoming irrelevant. To fill the void, local governments are banding together in regional alliances. These two maps show conditions only fourteen days apart, fourteen days in which it became apparent that the Feds were not going to be the cavalry riding in to rescue us.

This is what happens when there is no reliable National Leadership in a crisis, people and groups start banding together to find solutions. Leaders rise like cream in milk. Trump has said that he wanted to be President because the United States is no longer respected but, ironically, both internationally and domestically the United States is less respected today than it was four years ago. Sad.

We had our first takeout a couple of nights ago. It was from Fey – Michele’s favorite local Chinese restaurant (mine is Crouching Tiger) – I drove up in front of the restaurant, opened the trunk door with the remote button, the woman who is the maitre d’ during happier times came out to the street – wearing a mask and gloves – and put the food in back, then I drove home. The only connection to the outside world that I had was the bags full of tasty Chinese food including Chicken with Chestnuts, Fried Cumman Lamb, Green Onion Pancake, Cold Cucumber in Sichuan Spicy Sauce, and Beijing Eggplant (it had been a while since we had Chinese food and we wanted everything). I thought that getting takeout would be sort of the equivalent to going out, but it is more, it is a way of saying “We want you to stay in business, this will end”.

I think Trump’s current “No, I wasn’t being dangerously stupid and trying to kill Americans — I was just being dangerously glib about something that is already killing Americans” defense needs some work. #DontDrinkBleach Tweet by Mrs. Betty Bowers@BettyBowers, America’s best Christian.

Testing: Who’s Getting It? Almost invariably, the only people getting tested are the patients getting hospitalized. Craig Spencer MD MPH@Craig_A_SpencerNYC ER doctor | #Ebola Survivor | Director of Global Health in Emergency Medicine @ColumbiaMed/@NYPhospital

Excuse our arrogance as New Yorkers — I speak for the mayor also on this one — we think we have the best health care system on the planet right here in New York, so, when you’re saying, what happened in other countries versus what happened here, we don’t even think it’s going to be as bad as it was in other countries. Governor Andrew Cuomo on March 2nd (223,699 cases in New York this morning with 15,405 deaths).

Michele and I self quarantined on March 11th, so it’s been over a month since we lived a normal life. Back then, we still had five days before the Bay Area shut down and it would still be over a week before Newsom shut the state down. Back then the Trump Administration, backed by Fox News – or, as is more likely, influenced by Fox News – was still telling us not to worry, it will not be a problem, in fact, the flu is a bigger problem. But it wasn’t just Trump who couldn’t imagine the coming reality, lots of Democrats, like Cuomo and de Blasio couldn’t either. In late January, early February, the New York Times was saying that democracies couldn’t impose the draconian measures that South Korea or Singapore were imposing and inferred that we didn’t need to. Today, the United States with a little more than four percent of the world’s population has close to 30 percent of the total identified coronavirus infections and we’re still not testing as much as most industrial countries so these numbers are undoubtedly low. For reference, South Korea with about 14% of our population has fewer than two percent of our cases. Today, we are doing what a hundred days ago was thought impossible, everybody who can stay at home in the United States is staying at home, most stores are closed, and the economy is tanking.

One of my doctors sent out an email that included some useful information from NPR on how to treat our groceries. It says that the big problem is contamination from other people and the risk of getting COVID-19 from a grocery bag is minimal. Still, this seems to be a scary numbers game. Every interaction with the outside world involves risk assessment. Michele went to the butcher for lamb chops for easter and what are the chances that the wrapping paper is infected? the lamb chops? More than zero, that is for sure but I don’t think they are likely to be infected. After all, we trust the butcher to give us clean meat, they are familiar with good hygiene. It is safer to assume that the wrapping paper is infected so I crumble it up and put it in the trash then I wash my hands. But I touched the trash pail with a potentially contaminated hand, so I have to disinfect the trash container top and wash my hands again. What about lettuce? Whoever picked it could very well be infected. It is probably less likely from a small, organic, farm but people picking lettuce are usually undocumented, untested, and need to work because they are not eligible for unemployment (except in California where they will get $600 if they are off work). I assume the outer leaves are infected and the inner leaves are safe, but that is, really, just a hopeful guess. The choice is always between feeling slightly unsafe or curling up into a ball and going hungry. And the choices go on and on and on. What about all the magazines we get? Is it safe to assume that they are safe to read if I tear the cover off (and put it in the trash and wash my hands)?

Stalin is reputed to have said “When one man dies it’s a tragedy. When thousands die it is a statistic.” and it feels that way when I read that, as of today, there are 37,730 coronavirus related deaths in the United States. These deaths are taking place out of my sight and I don’t know anybody who has died from COVID19 and it takes a conscious effort to turn them into real people who are dying with real families devastated by their losses.

I’ve been wondering if the coronavirus – or SARS-CoV-2 if you prefer the official name – will change our world like the depression changed my grandparent’s world. At first, I was sure that it would for all kinds of reasons but mostly because, going in, governments all over the world have been willing to shut their countries down to save lives. Putting lives over business still seems impossible (and it may not last). But even before the virus, we seemed to be on the threshold of change with Bernie and The Squad, among many others, pushing the country towards a kinder, more people-focused, world with a renewed concern for the disenfranchised. Now, I worry that that concern for the disenfranchised in both political parties is a ruse and nothing will change. Still, lots of things will change even if politicians don’t want them to. More people and more companies will learn how to work from home, which means less office space demand; people will shop over the internet at an increasing rate, making Amazon – and Wallmart et al – bigger and richer and the need for retail space will continue to decline; and people will watch more movies from home; for example. These may not seem like transformative changes. Still, change is change, it isn’t just good or just bad it is – always both – and small, superficial changes have a way of rippling into big changes.

One thing that I have been very reminded of, on a daily basis, is that I do much better in a structured environment. I read about people deep cleaning their house, landscaping their backyard, or finally rebuilding an old car, with envy while I spend much of my time obsessing over the latest numbers (California numbers, National Numbers by county).

Michele tried making her own mask from a Washington Post pattern and, a couple of nights ago, about 3/4s of the way through but stalled out, she began to wonder if the mask pattern was an April Fools joke. Much of our new daily life seems like a bad April Fool’s joke; the sickness and the deaths are only visible in the news and then as charts and graphs with the action line trending towards straight up. It can’t be true that over a thousand people have died in California and the only signs are that traffic is better and the sky is bluer. The whole concept of sheltering at home, or being in quarantine, is like an awful shaggy dog story that goes on and on. Maybe we are the only people doing it, maybe life is normal just outside my vision. But, we are told, if we don’t shelter in place there will be the disaster of an unimaginable culling of the population. Paradoxically, if we do everything right and stay home, it will seem like we overreacted and more people will want to go out which will prove to be a mistake. No wonder some people believe this isn’t real.

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President Trump is trying to get the economy going again, or as he says: “open up the economy.” The day before yesterday, he said that he was appointing Ivanka and Jared to the Council to Reopen America. Yesterday he said that Larry Lindsey was going to be on the team saying, “The names that are, I think, the best and the smartest, the brightest, and they’re going to give us some ideas.” This is the same Lawrence Lindsey that was the director of the National Economic Council in the Administration of President Bush – The Younger – and who, according to Politico : said Trump has no long-term plans or ability to think ahead. He said the president has the long-term decision-making ability of an “empty chair.” adding that the Chinese see President Donald Trump as a “total narcissist” — “a 10-out-of-10 narcissist,”.

One of the things we know about Trump is that he does not like people who bad mouth him, it’s not a secret, Trump explicitly Tweets out his anger all the time and nothing makes him angrier than being dismissed as incompetent. And Trump has made it very clear that he holds a grudge.

Now here is my question, do you think Trump said to himself or his staff, “I know the guy bad-mouthed me but he’s the best and the smartest, the brightest, he has a fine mind and I want him on the Council ” or do you think he just forgot that Lindsey said “he has the long-term decision-making ability of an “empty chair.”?