From The Looks Of It, Some A-Holes Think Coronavirus Is Gone

My science-loving teenage son recently sent me a video about the science-y, mathematical magic of circles. I learned about roulettes, trochoids, and brachistochrones. Even though I didn’t completely understand the concepts from the video and certainly can’t perform the equations necessary to grasp the underlying math, I acknowledge that these mathy concepts exist and play out in both theory and practice.

It doesn’t matter that it seems impossible to me that a rolling ball would travel quicker from point A to point B if the surface the ball is traveling on is slightly curved, rather than straight, thereby increasing the distance between point A and point B. I always thought the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, but smarter people than me can easily prove that this is not always true. The theoretical math checks out, and so do the practical experiments that verify the math. I trust the mathematicians when they tell me it’s accurate.

One would think this is a reasonable way for a person to approach most things—to understand that one can’t possibly be an expert at everything and therefore must rely on the people who are experts in the fields they’re not an expert in to tell them how shit works.

Hello, America? What the fuck is this absolute bullshit?

Y’all know that COVID-19 is still here, right? It didn’t disappear just because shelter-in-place restrictions were loosened. It’s still very much alive and spreading, doing its killer-virus thing as killer viruses are wont to do. Science still applies.

For weeks, people across social media complained about lockdown because they were worried about losing their jobs, their family business, or being able to feed their kids. I felt sympathy for these people. I still do, actually, but how many of these people who made me feel sorry for them, who made me want to cautiously begin to open up the economy so they could get back to work and feed their kids, were out partying it up over the Memorial Day weekend?

No fewer than three of the houses on my street threw huge parties. America, the virus didn’t fucking disappear. It still behaves like a virus. It’s still contagious. It’s still deadly. We still have to go about our lives working under the assumption that COVID-19 could kill us or someone we love, because literally it could.

Anyone who participated in a large gathering over Memorial Day weekend, fuck off. Seriously, I want to punch every one of these assholes right in the nose. I just cannot anymore with the stupidity. It’s not “living in fear” to acknowledge science and have some regard for the health of our community. It’s being a dumbass to act like 100,000+ haven’t died!

It’s one thing to have a small get together with another family or two who has also been isolating, especially if you live in an area where there haven’t been many cases. I can understand that. I get it, we’re tired of being isolated. It’s hard.

But these dumb fucks partying it up are just asking to spread this disease. They’re laughing in COVID’s face and daring it to infect them and everyone they come into contact with. And that’s the thing, if exposed, you are not just jeopardizing your own life, you are jeopardizing the life of everyone you share space with. That’s not acceptable.

Do we honestly need to remind people again that COVID-19 is nothing like the flu? COVID-19 has a much longer incubation period (meaning a person can transmit it to more people while asymptomatic), a higher mortality rate, and there’s no vaccine to slow its spread. Oh and in three months it killed double what the flu kills in an entire season—and all of this while under a nationwide lockdown.

And it’s still out there, still doing its virus thing, eager to claim its next victim. It’s a fucking virus—it doesn’t give one single solitary shit that we are anxious to throw a party. Or that we miss our friends and family. This is not the time to become complacent.

The sad thing is, most of the folks out celebrating are likely in the lowest-risk group in terms of what they personally would experience if they got sick with COVID-19. So if they were to get infected, they’d carry COVID-19 around, sharing it with everyone they come into contact with because you know these assholes also refuse to wear a mask, and then they’d finally succumb themselves and be bedridden for a few weeks but generally no worse for wear. Meanwhile they just killed someone’s grandma. And someone else’s kid ends up in the hospital with MIS-C.

Listen, I get the desire to socialize. But what happened over Memorial Day weekend? That was some bullshit, America. We are the laughing stock of the entire world because we look like a country full of Joe Exotics and Carole Baskins. We look infinitely ridiculous and irredeemably stupid.

100,000 people have died from this shit. That’s more than died in Vietnam. Wake the fuck up, America.

No one’s saying don’t socialize at all or don’t go anywhere at all. Or that you should be “locked up forever.” Go out, but wear a mask. Hang out with friends who have been socially isolating, but do so in small groups, preferably outside, don’t hug, wear a mask, wash your hands, etcetera. It’s right there on the CDC’s website. It’s not that fucking hard to just be a decent human being, someone who cares about how their actions impact others.

The fact is, whether we want it to be true or not, COVID-19 is still out there. Still claiming lives. It’s still acting the way it always has. We won’t see the fallout from Memorial Day weekend for another three to four weeks because coronavirus incubates for up to 11 days and then the infected person doesn’t require medical care—and therefore testing to be counted as a confirmed case—for another two weeks after that.

I, for one, am not looking forward to the spike in infections that are coming. It would be nice if more people in this country had the same healthy respect for science. Because science is literally the thing that will save us—but only if we let it.