Look at that. I love pictures like this. A cold, crisp winter’s day, a pretty girl blowing snowflakes off of her mittens, her breath a cloud in the air.

Her breath a cloud in the air.

You know why we see her breath, don’t you? Sure – you don’t even need to know what thermal dynamics is to know this: the air temperature is below freezing, and the moisture in her exhaled breath freezes, creating that pretty, lighter-than-air fog.

Remember this image as you read on.

Because I’m going to talk about Covid-19, and the special kind of stupid that has surrounded our response to it – or lack thereof. The special kind of stupid that has allowed our response to it to become politically based. And the even more special kind of stupid that refuses to learn anything from history or current events.

I’m not an epidemiologist or infectious disease expert; in fact, I’m not in the medical field at all. I’m just a guy who’s been around the block a couple of times, I’ve lived through at least one other pandemic (1969’s “Hong Kong Flu” – aka H3N2 – which is when Woodstock happened), and I like to read and understand complex problems. Contrary to some opinion, the Covid crisis is a complex problem. So I’ve picked up a few interesting bits of knowledge about it, learned some new things.

Did you know that viruses aren’t actually alive? It certainly helps us to think they are, gets us into the mindset to “fight the enemy,” but they’re just a few bits of genetic material in a fatty coating that has these spiky things sticking out of it; they’re called “receptors” and match up with host cells. We encounter viruses every day, most of which don’t do anything to us because those spiky things can’t find a match in our bodies, so they can’t invade our cells. Some viruses, though, can and do, and that leads us to colds, the flu, and now Covid.

And since they don’t have legs, wings, or any other kind of motive force – they’re not alive, they have no internal processes going on – they need help finding hosts with the right kind of cells. That’s where we – ignorant, blissfully unaware humans – come in.

Biology 101: we’re wet. We’re “ugly bags of mostly water.” (That’s another Star Trek: The Next Generation reference, FYI.) The human body is something like 70% water. Without water, we’re 30-some pounds of inert elements and compounds. Water is essential for our bodies to function. We can go weeks without food, but only a couple of days without water. We take it in, we expel it in a cycle that ends only when we die.

That’s why we see our breath on cold days. Our lungs are moist; they have to be to do what they must do. So the air we take in gets wet, and it carries that moisture out when we exhale. Every time we exhale, we create a cloud of infinitesimal, literally weightless, microscopic droplets of water. No matter where we are, or what time of year, we exhale a cloud of invisible water vapor with each breath. We only see it in the cold because it freezes, and those tiny ice particles reflect light.

It doesn’t matter what they are – cold, flu, or Covid – all viruses work in the same basic way. They get introduced to our warm, wet interiors, find a cell they can latch on to, and the genetic material gets transferred into the nucleus of that cell. So when that cell reproduces, it doesn’t make another cell, it makes copies of the virus – thousands of them until the cell bursts and those viruses ride the wave into other cells, and into the moisture our lungs are coated with. The same moisture that makes pretty fog on winter mornings.

So when you get exposed to a virus (well, several thousand of them – they’re really tiny), and it gets into your nose and lungs, in a very short time you’re going to exhale viable viruses – maybe millions of them – in that pretty fog you see on winter mornings. They are in each tiny droplet of moisture, weightless, floating on the air current. (If you hear scientists talking about something that’s “aerosolized,” that’s what they’re talking about.) The person you’re talking to is breathing in those droplets, getting the virus into their nose and lungs, where they’ll latch on to cells and inject their DNA so it produces thousands and millions of copies… And you’re breathing their exhalations…

That is the primary way these viruses spread. Literally by word of mouth……

If there is no immunity, if it’s a new – or “novel” – virus, never before able to attach itself to a human cell, our immune response is delayed and the virus is able to replicate itself with abandon; our body doesn’t realize it’s being invaded until the virus reproduces enough copies to interfere with the body’s operation. Then our immune response kicks in. We get feverish, we start coughing to expel the invader – spewing even more clouds of virus-laden fog – until we either conquer it, or it does enough damage that our bodies can’t function and we die.

Covid-19 is such a virus. We have no immunity to it. It attacks our lungs and other internal organs, and it is worse than the flu, more dangerous because we have no immunity. And if we’re exposed, it can take upwards of 2 weeks before any symptoms show, which means that we’re spewing “live” viruses at our family, friends, and neighbors without even knowing it.

Understand that I’m speaking in generalities here. I don’t understand the entire process, but I understand this much, and it is sufficient to allow me to realize just how badly Government has dropped the ball. All governments, at all levels, not just one man, however influential that man might be.

The Chinese government knew early on that they had a virus that had mutated a “spike” that was compatible with human lung cells, that it was a killer, that we had no immunity to it. They made the conscious choice to quash the information, silence the medical professionals, basically keep it a secret until it was too widespread to keep hidden. The Chinese robbed the rest of the world an opportunity to nip it, contain it, to limit the damage. Then with a complicit WHO, the danger of the virus – and it’s virulence – was downplayed until it was almost to the point where nobody could contain it.

So nobody really knew how dangerous it was when it first showed up on those cruise ships, or was carried into Europe, or onto our shores. It was just another flu-like virus. The “Wuhan Flu.” The “China virus.” Then it got into our nursing homes…

And this is where it got ugly, and it got ugly on so many different levels. And only began the missteps and botched response to the Novel Coronavirus 2019. It became apparent very quickly that we were dealing with something far beyond a new strain of influenza.

So that you understand me completely, I don’t blame the Trump Administration for our terrible response to the Covid-19 crisis, not exclusively. I blame all government from the top down, from the White House to Congress to the Governor’s Mansions to the County Health Authority. Pardon my French, but they fucked up from the get-go, made it political instead of addressing it as a public health crisis.

We’ve had pandemics before. Epidemics. Viruses that we’d never encountered before that decimated entire populations. Since before recorded history, they’ve happened. And over history, we’ve learned how to deal with them, to minimize the death and destruction they cause, long before we understood just what the infectious agent was.

It’s a crying shame we didn’t do any of it for Covid-19.

The Administration dismissed it. Congress made it into a political football to damage the President. It was left to the states to take action. What resulted was a hodge-podge of different measures and policies, almost all of them based on political considerations instead of medical, and many of which were instituted to show the authority of the state governments rather than as effective actions against a health threat.

The Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 proved that the time-honored pandemic process worked – you quarantined the sick, you isolated the vulnerable away from the sick to keep them from being infected, and the healthy took precautions – masking up and keeping your distance – but otherwise lived their lives. This reduced the spread of the virus and the healthcare system wasn’t overloaded, and the economy didn’t suffer all that much. Yes, people died, but the virus didn’t run unchecked through the entire population, so lives were saved.

And the proof it worked came when, under pressure from people who didn’t like wearing face masks, they relaxed the precautions, and more people died in the subsequent surge than died in the “first wave.”

In 2020, most states quarantined the healthy, packed the vulnerable into nursing homes that had Covid-infected patients, the economy crashed because everything was closed – and Covid cases have continued to rise; no surprise there. Other states took only the most rudimentary precautions against the spread of the virus, and their healthcare infrastructure is straining, if not collapsing. The White House has continued to downplay the severity of the virus (despite the spread of it within those walls), Congress keeps pointing in alarm at the evil President who doesn’t care about the lives being lost, and the states are left holding the bag – and screwing up left and right, because they’re too busy flexing their political muscles.

Too many of them are toeing the political party line – clamp down to control the population, or downplay the virus and let the vulnerable die. Nobody – least of all a sizable percentage of the general public – is bothering to educate themselves, looking instead to authority figures who clearly don’t have their best interests at heart.

It’s probably too late in this crisis to do anything more than what is being done, backwards though it is. The light at the end of the tunnel, though, is the report of very effective vaccines now on the immediate horizon.

I hope in 2 years’ time we see a massive turnover at all levels of elected government, with fresh faces and new ideas, and 2 years after that we see the same, so that by Election day 2024 we have all the current lawmakers responsible for this massive failure and unnecessary death in the unemployment lines with the rest of their constituents. Given our history, though – and our apparently deliberate unwillingness to learn from it – I’m not holding my breath.