Quarantine

We are less than a month away from entering 2022 — so why does it feel like March 2020 all over again? Cable news networks are obsessively covering the new Omicron variant of Covid-19. They are hellbent on scaring the daylights out of any unsuspecting viewer who accidentally flips onto their programs. To be fair, the media is taking cues from the president. According to the Washington Post, the Biden administration is reportedly weighing up a seven-day self-quarantine for all travelers arriving on our shores, regardless of vaccination status, including US citizens and permanent residents. Travel bans, which fell out of fashion in the Trump years because they were "xenophobic", are suddenly back in vogue. It all begs the question: didn’t Joe Biden promise to shut down the virus?

The coronavirus shutdown is over by public demand. There are crowds of sunbathers in the parks of New York City and mobs on the steps of the statehouses. Pedestrian and road traffic are rising and businesses are defying orders by informally reopening. The people are speaking — the people who used to work on a hand-to-mouth economy, the people who cannot afford to stay indoors indefinitely, the people who cannot be bothered to stay in when the sun comes out.These people are not all the people. They are not the doctors, who counsel caution. They are not the state governors, who are terrified of votes being washed away by a post-reopening second wave of casualties. They are not state employees, who can trust that their jobs will be waiting for them.

The Democrats are taking their stand on the coronavirus crisis in an untenable position. It is like building a defensive redoubt in a valley surrounded by hills in the hands of the enemy (like the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1955, as President Eisenhower warned them). Whether this is tactical stupidity by the president’s enemies or strategic genius by the president or — more likely — a bit of both, is not clear except to insiders. Readers will recall that the Democrats charged out of the gate on the issue of taking science seriously and reacting comprehensively; the president picked up the gauntlet, brought prominent scientists forward, and 'flattened the curve'.

COVID-19, the Wuhan virus, is an epidemiological scourge — but it’s also a clarifying catalyst for American politics. The virus’s relevance for globalization has been widely noted: this disease of Chinese origin has exposed how incapable the de-industrialized West has become of providing its own masks, drugs, and ventilators. It has highlighted the class divide that globalization produces within countries such as America as well. The highly educated professional classes can work from home, and their jobs are relatively secure; the service class, on the other hand — the waiters and cooks and hotel maids and retail clerks and others — are out of their jobs and shit out of luck. Not to worry: the professional class will write all of them checks for $1,200.

President Trump sent out a number of tweets today demanding liberation, but he probably wasn’t thinking of his old fixer Michael Cohen. Cohen, who squealed on Donald Trump before Congress, went to jail for a variety of financial and campaign finance crimes. Thanks to the coronavirus, his own problem is largely fixed. He’s getting an early reprieve from his three-year jail sentence at a medium-security prison in Otisville, New York and headed for home confinement. Another member of Trump’s rogues gallery, Paul Manafort, has asked to be released from Loretto federal prison in Pennsylvania because of the pandemic, but there’s no word yet whether his request will be granted. Unlike Cohen, Manafort remained unflinching.

Denver, Colorado is not New York City. There are not thousands of people stacked on top of one another here. To borrow from Arcade Fire, it’s a ‘massive sprawl with mountains beyond mountains’. The population skews toward young professionals in the downtown area and upper middle class families in the immediate suburbs. It’s a city and a state full of recreationalists, participating in a natural social distancing of the mountains in Aspen So how does a city population known for their isolated outdoor activities handle a statewide lockdown order, like the one issued by first-term Gov. Jared Polis on March 25? Colorado faced the grim reality of ranking within the top 15 states for reported cases of COVID-19.