Editorial: Selfish lack of compassion drives Trump's COVID-19 response
CBC Editorial: Wednesday, Oct. 7, 2020; Editorial #8595
The following is the opinion of Capitol Broadcasting Company.
Here’s the clear truth. There is no mystery to stopping the spread of COVID-19. Maintain social distancing, wash hands often and wear a hygienic mask. Wearing a mask is more effective than a vaccine. Says who? Says the man President Donald Trump put in charge of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield.
What logical reason could there be to refusing to wear a mask? What statement is made by attending a political rally, a reception for a U.S. Supreme Court nominee or re-entering the White House after a three-day COVID-19 infection-related emergency hospital stay — and refusing to wear a mask?
How has something so commonsensical morphed into a statement of partisan politics; religious faith; political ideology and virility? Why does it spawn child-like behavior, as exhibited in the House and Senate chambers of the North Carolina legislature?
Just as there is no vaccine for COVID-19, there isn’t one for willfully ignoring the facts which seems to be a pandemic of its own spreading through the White House, Congress, and North Carolina politics.
Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest, who is challenging incumbent Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, has cavalierly declared “we have to learn to live with viruses,” and promised to repeal any requirements for wearing safety masks. “Masks do not work with viruses,” he pronounced. “That’s why we’ve never used a mask for a coronavirus before, ever.”
Forest has not talked with Trump’s Dr. Redfield.
It doesn’t take a team of scientific and medical researchers to diagnose the impact of this purposeful blindness to reality. In the last seven months:
- 210,180 Americans have died, 3,670 in North Carolina (imagine nearly every person in Pittsboro dead);
- 6.8 million U.S. workers have lost their jobs, 132,800 in North Carolina (think about everyone in Wilmington out of work).
The impact has forced an unprecedented slowdown in the economy, schools and businesses closed; basic functions in our society – such as voting – disrupted.
Seven months -- 214 days – after the first COVID-19 diagnosis in North Carolina, President Donald Trump announced on Sunday he’s figured it all out. “I learned a lot about COVID. I learned it by really going to school, this is the real school,” he said from Walter Reed Military Medical Center as he was being treated for VERY serious symptoms related to his coronavirus infection. “I get it. I understand it.”
No, based on what he’s said and done since leaving Walter Reed, he doesn’t get it.
If he did, how could he -- two days after being hospitalized for COVID-19 with treatments of oxygen, steroid drugs, remdesivir, monoclonal antibodies and a cocktail of other medications – hop in a car for a joyride to greet his fans outside the hospital?
Just Monday, it was revealed that White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEaney was COVID-19 positive. This is someone who seven months ago unequivocally declared: “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here.”
Yet, Trump still remains blissfully blind to the truth. “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.”
Who needs to be afraid when you have the best medical care on the planet and a legion of medical professionals at your house, poised to respond to the least sniffle or very real urgent medical need?
Trump doesn’t get it and it only reinforced the misinformation his disciples spread.
Refusing to wear a mask isn’t a misguided patriotic statement about personal freedom.
The statement from those who refuse to wear masks is clear:
- We don’t care if we get sick.
- We don’t care if we make other people deathly ill.
It is the selfishness and lack of compassion in the second that is especially disturbing.
