Typhoid Mary 2020?

Pardon me for pushing the panic button here, but I can’t help it. There are just too many questions and too many insufficient responses about this Coronavirus. And information that should have been given to me and the rest of America at least 2 months earlier wasn’t — thanks to POTUS #45.

So how exactly did this virus develop into such a contagion? Could you catch it and not know that you’ve caught it? How would you be able to tell the difference between a mild case of this Coronavirus versus a bad case of the flu? If you do contract it, would you develop an immunity to it, then not get it again later on? Or could you catch it again?

Even now, no reassuring answers are forthcoming.

No one really knows very much about this Coronavirus, either. They just keep telling us to wash our hands and stock up on supplies “just in case.” And it’s starting to sound more and more like a storyline from Action Comics with no Batman in sight to save us. Joker or no Joker to blame, there’s still something diabolical about a mysterious, highly contagious — possibly fatal! — disease that comes out of nowhere with no operating instructions to follow once you’re actually infected with it. No cure. No vaccine. Just oodles of helpful hints, as though we’ve never bought anything in bulk or (gasp!) washed our hands before.

Enter Larry David.

Leave it to this curmudgeon extraordinaire to call attention to the virulent elephant in the room — and keep us laughing. Last week on the leap day broadcast of Saturday Night Live, he finally said the two words everyone in this country should have been saying by now: TYPHOID MARY. During the opening sketch that spoofed candidates from the Democratic debate, David gave his usual uncanny portrayal of Senator Bernie Sanders. Not only were his body language, vocal inflections, and mannerisms spot on, he also delivered an insightful line as he belittled Mayor Pete.

“America doesn’t need a hand-cougher,” he quipped. “They need a President who was old enough to remember Typhoid Mary.”

So who was she? And why is she so important to any discussion or understanding of the Coronavirus?

She was a carrier of typhoid fever who exhibited no signs of typhoid yet still managed to infect more than 120 people — and that count includes 5 dead ones. Just as the name Scrooge became a dictionary definition of a miser or skinflint, Typhoid Mary became the term for any “healthy carrier” of a disease. Unlike Charles Dickens’s fictional invention from A Christmas Carol, however, she was an actual person. Born Mary Mallon, she was an Irish immigrant who came to America and gained notoriety in the early days of 20th Century New York, circa 1906, as a killer cook.

So she was a living source of contagion who was able to “pass on” typhoid fever to others while remaining highly functional and unaware that she herself was infected with it. When questioned by authorities, she repeatedly denied that she had any symptoms — and was vilified, arguably treated like a criminal, for it. But as an asymptomatic “healthy carrier,” of course, she wouldn’t have presented any symptoms… Now doesn’t that sound familiar? That description of Typhoid Mary’s ability to infect sounds remarkably similar to those of countless people with no signs of illness who’ve been unknowingly infecting others with the Coronavirus.

But 21st Century America gives it a different spin, thanks to medical and media establishments determined to downplay any possibility of bad news. After the infection had been spread to others by some unknowing viral host, we started hearing that it takes 14 days or more for the virus to do its thing and make you sick. And yet, the very real possibility that Coronavirus could be passed on by “healthy carriers” has, to this date, not even been considered a possibility by the experts who keep telling us not to panic.

Is that because they really don’t know? Or is it because they do know and don’t want us to panic?

Start connecting the dots between Mary Mallon’s case in early 20th Century America and the current 21st Century pandemic, and you’ll begin to see why this Coronavirus is so scary. More and more, it’s beginning to sound like people who don’t even know they’re sick are making other people sick. So how can the spread of this virus be stopped, or at least be contained, when the people who keep infecting others don’t even know they have the Coronavirus?

Oh, I know: the government, in conjunction with various clinics and airport terminals nationwide, could offer affordable — or free! — testing so people would know if they actually have the Coronavirus. But wait. We can’t do that. Right now, there aren’t enough testing kits to go around, and there aren’t enough scientists to process the test results, either. That’s because Trump, with the help of his sycophantic minions, moved federal monies around to cover other things — like paying for the wall that Mexico was supposed to pay for — after Congress had already budgeted money for the CDC.

At this point, now that Congress has allocated billions to combat and/or contain the Coronavirus, it might be too late. But the stable genius in the Oval Office continues to spread his optimistic yet disingenuous tropes about how much better things are and how the vaccine is on the way! From “we’ll see what happens” to “it’s under control” to “great people are working on it,” Trump continues to give us sugarcoated happy talk instead of accurate information. Why, just the other day he announced it was okay for sick people to go to work(and presumably infect others?) Not that credibility and reliability have ever been hallmarks of his administration, but there does come a time when truth really does matter. And now — as this epidemic slowly spreads into pandemic — the time for truth has arrived.

Unfortunately, even when the intel about this oncoming virus was out there and readily available to him, Trump did nothing. Current reports from CNN cited January 22, 2020, as the date he’d first been informed about the Coronavirus. But other news outlets have claimed he knew about it as early as November or December, 2019. Regardless of the time frame, our resident Liar-in-Chief initially ignored the facts and chose to cling to his own reality, which ultimately involved blaming Obama.

Too bad POTUS #45 is incapable of recognizing anything that resembles veracity. It’s one thing to exaggerate, spin, or engage in endless hyperbole. But it’s quite another to say that the Coronavirus is a hoax created by the Democrats and the media when it so obviously isn’t.