Take COVID-19 seriously

By Deauwand Myers

COVID-19 is "…like the cat I have nine times to die / This is No. 3. / What a trash / To annihilate each decade… / Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well. / I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. / I guess you could say I've a call." ― From "Lady Lazarus," by Sylvia Plath.

Two months ago, I was clinically dead. Three times, my heart stopped. Me, a runner for well over a decade, struck down by this cursed pandemic as if all these years I were eating hamburgers and milkshakes. The brutality of experiencing death and being extricated from it is a unique trauma I would not wish on anyone.

The betrayal is terrible because one, it felt like a series of murders, but there is no one to prosecute. Two, I respected the evil of COVID-19 and wore masks, social distanced, and rarely saw my friends. I haven't been to a party in at least half a year. I wash my hands. I do my part.

I did my part, but everyone is not doing theirs. Even in Korea and Japan, I see (always) young men not wearing masks as if that makes them cool. They could have been the vector to be a super spreader in a convenience store or shopping mall or worse, a subway car, probably the most dangerous place not to wear masks.

Now, a growing list of American White House staffers, not least of which President Trump himself, have tested positive for COVID-19.

But why do we find this shocking? President Trump held ego-massaging political rally after political rally in crowded venues with mostly-mask-less cult followers chanting and screaming, potentially infecting many people in these venues with a novel virus from which there is no cure and few therapeutics. The virus is highly contagious and is many times deadlier than the flu.

Vanity and some odd sense of entitlement seem to make some people, worldwide, to think this virus is not real or plays favorites. COVID-19, even in asymptomatic people, can leave potentially long term after-effects, including myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), something I have, and lung damage, and even amputations.

Unlike the common cold or the flu, COVID-19, in many people, makes the blood coagulate in a radical fashion. This can cause havoc to various portions and organs of the human body; so twenty-year-old athletes with no pre-existing conditions or co-morbidities end up having heart damage as if they were older.

Worse, medical doctors and epidemiologists do not know how long the damage done by COVID-19 will linger in those afflicted with it. Recently, in America, a young medical doctor died from COVID-19 complications four months after her diagnosis. Four months. I had it two months ago, and I am still feeling lingering effects.

As with most problems in the world, men are the main culprits. Not unlike President Trump's unearned braggadocio, other male world leaders were cavalier about the severity of this disease and the threat it represented. Former Japanese Prime Minister Abe did not require testing and tracing in Japan, and many suspect it was for the ridiculous aim of keeping the Olympics on schedule mid-summer…in the middle of a pandemic so new the medical community had no idea how to combat it.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Great Britain similarly was late to a cogent, national response to the virus, trying to stave off negative economic impacts from a concerted shutdown of his country. He just recently recovered from the virus, and is being roundly criticized for his handling of the disease in his position as head of state.

Like President Trump, President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil downplayed the virus and was outright combative with his health experts, even as his country's infection rate ballooned and he himself contracted it.

As usual, women do it much better. Consider these two examples of how heads of state handled the pandemic: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany are universally praised for their expert handling of the outbreak and the timeliness in which they deployed countermeasures to its containment. Upon the writing of this article, Germany and New Zealand have few or no new, confirmed cases.

I did all the right things, but other people did not, and they were around me, and it may very well have caused me to experience horrors no human should. It is selfish and arrogant, and frankly tantamount to murder, to go around maskless and act as if this virus is nor brutal and unforgiving.

World leaders, young dude on the subway, and that recalcitrant Trump supporter: please, if not for your safety, then the safety of your fellow human being, take this virus seriously.

Deauwand Myers (deauwand@hotmail.com) holds a master's degree in English literature and literary theory, and is an English professor outside Seoul. The views expressed in the above article are the author's own and do not reflect the editorial direction of The Korea Times.

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