I got Covid at the DNC. Why's the next pandemic absent from this campaign?
It's killed 7 million. It cost Trump a second term. It's vanished from the debate.
When it first trickled into my throat Sunday afternoon I chalked it up as a bug attributable to fatigue from a week of long hours.
The sudden loss of taste and smell the next morning is what rang the bell: I had caught a fresh bout of the ‘rona from last week’s Democratic National Convention, as an at-home test later verified.
In full transparency, my vax is well out-of-date. Having experienced only a mild bout of Covid in September of 2021 (also in Chicago!) a few months after my Moderna shots, I only opted for a single booster since then, in December of the same year.
I’m not among the fighter flock who can work productively through a headache and continuous congestion, so this infection cost me a day and a half. (Ironically, an editor who received her booster was also sidelined this week with side effects similar to Covid-19.)
But this is not a post to provoke a fight about vaccine effectiveness or mandates.
Or maybe it should be?
Because as I continued to consume 2024 campaign coverage laid out on my couch — boxes of Theraflu and tissues always within an arm’s reach — it struck me how the prospects for another pandemic has completely disappeared from our political discourse, just four years removed from the coronavirus outbreak.
If I asked you to name the most momentous event in your life over the past decade, what would you tell me? Maybe you got married. Or lost a loved one.
But for many people, dare I say most, it would easily be Covid-19 and how it upended the world we inhabit today.
If you asked me to name the top contributor to Donald Trump’s defeat in 2020, I would say his haphazard response to the unfurling pandemic, when peoples fears and uncertainties were at their peak and guidance from the federal government was murky, misleading and often flat-out wrong.
If you paused to think critically about the biggest future threat the country faces, would you name China, guns or … an airborne virus that’s even stronger and mutates faster than Covid?
