Then came a pandemic during the presidency of Donald Trump.
Note: Flanagan has been diagnosed with Stage IV Metastatic Cancer. This is a recurrence; she was first diagnosed when her twin sons were in kindergarten; again five years later and now again after an 11 year remission. The boys are graduating from college but with no ceremony.
“I’m one of the people all of this social distancing is helping to stay alive, so far. I belong to the group of people—the infirm, the weak—who certain conservatives have said should offer themselves up to the coronavirus. I’m part of the “cure” that mustn’t be worse than “the problem,” according to Donald Trump. Glenn Beck seems to think we should show our patriotism by volunteering to be killed by the virus rather than “kill the country.” . . .
“. . . If I die from the coronavirus, it will be one more unnecessary American death. Every epidemiologist in the world warned us the pandemic was coming, yet we were totally unprepared. And even after governors and public-health experts performed the astonishing feat of getting huge numbers of Americans to stay home, Trump continued to undermine them.
In March, he got bored and floated the idea that we’d all be sprung by Easter. In April, Central Park became a field hospital and refrigerated trucks were moving through New York City. Easter—victory over death—came and went. We tuned out the president, and listened only to experts. The experts said we weren’t getting out anytime soon.
Now here I am—here we all are—with our health in the hands of Donald Trump, M.D. When the coronavirus appeared on the horizon, he did not get closer to the science. He mocked science. He said the panic around the virus and the criticism of his response were a big hoax; he said the outbreak would end with warmer weather in April; he said the virus was no more serious than the common flu; he said there would be a vaccine soon; he said the virus would suddenly disappear “like a miracle”; he said there were plenty of “beautiful” tests and anyone who wanted one could have one; he said the number of U.S. infections was going “substantially down, not up.” He said an antimalarial drug cured COVID-19 and the FDA had approved it for use by prescription. He said there were only 15 patients with COVID-19 in the U.S. and the number, “within a couple of days, is going to be down to close to zero.”
See the complete Op-Ed in the Atlantic and Medium by Caitlin Flanagan