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Personal Wuhan Coronavirus Update
I received this text from my best friend Friday morning:
Two nights ago I felt restless and slept fitfully. Yesterday afternoon I noticed a sore throat. Last night, when I went to bed, I was chilled, and woke up every hour or so in a cold sweat. At that time I also noticed the headache. This morning I am drifting in and out of sleep, I ache all over, and I have a slight cough. I’ve canceled today’s jobs, and am hoping to recover over the weekend.
It seems likely that he and his wife have the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Their grown son received a positive test result a day or two after Thanksgiving, and the family spent Thanksgiving together, unmasked, un-distanced. His wife and their son and daughter-in-law have been mildly ill since the holiday.
I responded as would be expected, with a mixture of sympathy and gallows humor. He’s in his mid-50s, the odds that he and his wife will recover are excellent, and I’m not really worried about them.
My friend, who is also my younger brother, shares with me a skepticism about the Wuhan coronavirus and America’s response to it. We both think that the lockdowns should end – should have ended months ago. We think this disease, as bad as it is, isn’t all that bad, and that Americans need to get back to work. Life isn’t and can’t be risk-free, and the risk of this virus isn’t that great for most of us.
But most of all, we share a belief that Americans should be free, even though being free isn’t as safe as being under house arrest. We’ve had most of a year to deal with this thing, to build care capacity and to secure the relatively small portion of the population for whom this represents a serious danger. Instead, we chose to panic and to cower, to destroy the economy, and to inflict untold collateral damage on America’s families. We have lived, for nine months, under the capricious mismanagement of fearful and incompetent governors and hand-wringing technocrats.
On January 1, a new year begins. I hope and expect Americans to refuse to live through 2021 as we have half-lived through 2020.
Recently a liberal filmmaker (Ron Howard) made a movie with liberal actors about the book Hillbilly Elegy. It has received strong criticism from both sides of the political aisle. But since this is not a conservative movie, and it was made by standard-issue Hollywood leftists, the criticism from the left is more interesting.
A group of 400 politicians from around the world, including two ‘Squad’ members US congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, 
Golly.
That is a political movement to be feared.
“I wanted to kill myself. If I hadn’t been pregnant, I definitely would have killed myself.” Thus, does Seema Misra begin the story of her three-year odyssey as a sub-postmistress working for Britain’s Royal Mail.
I have three little girls, who are in college now. When they were young we rarely gave them candy or soda. Those were special treats for birthdays, or travel, or holidays, or whatever. But that was not part of their everyday diet. We weren’t fanatics about it, but we avoided junk in their diet. Nothing wrong with the occasional treat, but that wasn’t how we lived every day. And we raised three very strong, healthy kids.
It took me a second, and then I realized what she had done. A good father would have been very sympathetic and gotten her something to drink to get the taste of bourbon out of her mouth. I, of course, laughed myself silly. Along with the other adults. I still chuckle, just thinking about it. Maybe you had to be there. She looked so horrified and disgusted and green around the gills. She was maybe eight years old. She was so cute.