Logan Ramsey
News Editor
I don’t need to tell any of you how drastically COVID-19 has affected the world; whether you have been cooped up inside, know someone who was infected or been infected yourself, you’ve felt the pain of this virus.
The spread of Coronavirus is a tragedy on a worldwide scale, and none of us will ever be the same way again, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing.
When America elected a president who was dangerously unfit to rule, political pundits declared a “new normal” for the country. That was even before a pandemic ripped through the United States and upended our way of life completely. COVID-19 is the greatest crisis Trump has faced in his presidency, and his response has shown him to be incapable of rising to the moment.
But it’s not only Trump’s fault. Around the world, the virus has exposed leaders as incompetent, or even corrupt, with their people suffering the consequences.
In the weeks before Boris Johnson caught the virus, he was shaking hands with coronavirus patients. In January and February, he was skipping emergency meetings on the spreading virus. By the time he attended his first meeting, more than forty people had already been infected.
While Johnson’s mistakes can be attributed to not taking the threat seriously, the Chinese government has actively misled the world on the seriousness of the virus.
I’ve met a fair number of people who believe that COVID-19 was manufactured in a Chinese laboratory. This conspiracy has absolutely no supporting evidence and believing in such is a waste of energy, especially when there’s already plenty to be angry about.
Li Wenliang, who was an ophthalmologist in Wuhan, warned his colleagues in Dec. 2019 of the possible spread of the virus that would later be named COVID-19. That warning went public, and the Chinese government admonished him and news media accused him of spreading rumors. In late January, he contracted the virus, and then in early February, he died from it.
The government repealed its reprimand of Li, but it’s too little too late as the virus spreads around the globe.
And the corruption goes even deeper than reprimanding whistle-blowers. The rest of the world based initial predictions of how far the virus would spread off of the numbers the government reported, but they were intentionally misleading. The US intelligence community confirmed that China failed to report asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. To put that in perspective, the Chinese government later made public an identified 6,764 cases of patients without symptoms. At the time of the report, only 1,297 — one-fifth — developed symptoms. The true number of asymptomatic carriers is likely much higher than this.
There’s also doubt that China’s number of reported deaths is accurate. Pictures circulating on Chinese social media show thousands of urns being sent to funeral homes for the families of the victims to recover. The funeral homes that responded either said that they didn’t know how many of them they had delivered or that they weren’t at liberty to reveal that information.
While the Chinese government is responsible for the initial spread of the outbreak, the blame also falls on every world leader who failed to act in a timely manner.
While the virus spread without much warning throughout the world, President Trump ignored increasingly alarming warning signs when action could have been taken sooner.
After the first case was confirmed in Seattle, Trump claimed on Jan. 22 that we had the situation under control. This was while the CDC was sending out faulty tests, delaying the nation’s response.
Trump continued to downplay the threat and on Feb. 27, made the incredible claim, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” The next day, he claimed at a rally that the Democrats were politicizing the virus to try and undermine his re-election.
And the President was saying this after his administration asked congress for $1.25 Billion to respond to the pandemic. This was on Feb. 24, when the U.S. already had 35 confirmed cases.
After the case numbers mounted to 10,000, Trump finally took action, but also claimed that he knew that COVID-19 was a pandemic before it was called that.
This is another attempt by the President to rewrite history, but this time, it’s far graver. He’s trying to rewrite his negligence in allowing an epidemic to spread through the country, an epidemic that’s killed over 40,000 Americans — so far.
The problem for him is that we’ve been watching his response and the majority sees through his lies. According to Pew Research Center, 65% of those polled say that Trump’s initial response was too slow. Another 66% said they’re more concerned that state governments will lift restrictions too quickly.
However, the minority of people who want the country to re-open immediately are increasingly raising their voices. States all over the country have seen quarantine protests, and one of these states is Idaho.
On April 17, Boise saw several hundred protesters gather for ‘Disobey Idaho’ outside the state capital building, carrying guns and violating every social distancing guideline we have. Among these protesters concerns is that quarantine is doing more damage to the economy than it’s worth. This belief is the darkest example of market worship we’ve seen in our time.
Disobey Idaho was hosted by three conservative groups, one of them being the Idaho Freedom Foundation. The IFF receives funding from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which are two of the largest tax exempt funds with anonymous donors, but among the past donors that we know about are the Koch brothers. Donors Trust alone has spent nearly $400 million on “free-market causes” since 1999.
Supporting the free-market isn’t wrong, but when business owners actively advocate for Americans to ignore the guidelines set by scientists and put their own safety and their loved ones’ safety in jeopardy to protect the bottom line, free-market worship becomes a death cult.
If you’ve attended a quarantine protest, you’ve been used by private donors who don’t have your best interests in mind. What they’re interested in is protecting their bank accounts.
With this in mind, the U.S. government and governments around the world need a massive change in leadership, or in other words, a revolution.
Contrary to what anti-quarantine protesters think, this revolution can not be fought with guns; the second an American fires a shot at another, we’ll go down a terrible path.
I’ve barely scraped the surface of the Chinese government’s corruption, and it’s clear to me that they need a change in leadership. The entire world has been permanently scarred because of the intentional efforts they took in covering-up the extent of their outbreak.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any solution to overcome the massive obstacles that stand in the way of that. China wields incredible power on the world stage and I don’t see that changing any time soon.
The only ones who have the power to answer the question of what should happen to the Chinese government are the Chinese people themselves.
As for Americans, we need historic voter turnout like the country has never seen before. Every citizen has a responsibility to evaluate how well their local leaders did in responding to the Coronavirus crisis and cast their vote for politicians who will take another crisis of this magnitude seriously.
With Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee for president, I don’t believe we have a hero to turn to. That’s why we must find our own, in our cities, our school, and our local election poll booths.
The importance of the presidential election pales in comparison to that of state and local government elections. If we all do our research on our community elections, we can create change from the ground up.
While many of you may want the world to return to how it was before the pandemic, I think we can’t let that happen. When I say this, I don’t mean that we should never restart the economy. The time will come to get America back to work, but we can’t sacrifice lives for it.
Before the pandemic struck, we were heading into an election season hot-off a failed impeachment attempt, the country was losing the support of our allies and the Trump administration was dismantling environmental protections that we desperately need.
COVID-19 has exposed deep structural issues in our private healthcare system. These issues gave us an America where the average cost for a six-day treatment is $73,000 if you’re uninsured.
It’s also exposed how far some business owners will put their faith in the economy, even if that means the most vulnerable members of our society die.
What I’ve said in this column may sound radical, and that’s because it is. Revolution is radical by definition. The founding fathers were the radicals of their day, and the world would be in a much different place if they hadn’t chosen to rebel.
Unlike the founding fathers, our path to revolution isn’t one of violence. It’s recognition that humankind faces a greater enemy than each other, and that we shouldn’t support leaders who can’t recognize that.
I can’t deny that the proposition of changing our country forever is terrifying; it’s easy to choose the demons you know over the unknown. I also can’t claim that I have all the answers, because I don’t.
But what I know is that if we go back down the path that we were on, our future generations will never forgive us, and we’ll never forgive ourselves.
If you’ve been looking for a sign that you should change your life, let the Great Quarantine be a lesson in the dangers of not participating in the world around you. Too many of us have lived our lives distancing ourselves socially while not paying attention to the issues that plague society. Now we have no choice but to socially distance or risk spreading the pandemic, allowed to spread because of many of the problems we were ignoring.
When election day comes, we’ll all have the opportunity to vote the politicians out of office who were complacent with the changing world, because we’ll need better leaders than what we have now if we want to recover from this disaster.
And when Americans cast their votes, let’s hope it’s for candidates who are dynamic and not complacent in the changing world.
