Watergate Advice is Still Good: Follow the Money

I've been playing volleyball for more than 30 years. I know a lot of players. When the pandemic started all the gyms closed down, even before the state of Minnesota called for a general shutdown.

As the state opened up this spring I started looking into playing outdoors, which is much safer. The first guy I called, we'll call him D, said he wasn't going to play this year because his wife has a health condition.

This is a guy who plays almost every day in the summer, and in the winter drives more than 150 miles round trip once or twice a week to play at an indoor sand court in Wisconsin.

As infection numbers declined I decided to play sand doubles with a group of guys who (I thought) were being fairly careful. We didn't high five and maintained our distance. But the most important thing was to keep the circle small: no more than 10 people who are taking care to avoid contact with others.

I haven't even been inside a building, other than my house, for the past five months. If I do get infected, I want to make damn sure I don't pass it on to someone who didn't agree to be exposed.

Clearly I'm taking a risk by playing, but I have the explicit consent of everyone I'm in contact with to take that risk. My sister, who has a number of health conditions, was hospitalized with the virus, but she's okay now. So I figured genetics are on my side.

Then a couple of weeks ago one of the guys in the group invited his brother. After I was done playing I found out that the brother had just come from Arizona, a coranavirus hot zone. I was ticked.

So I resumed my self quarantine and stopped playing, assuming I had been exposed. I monitored my temperature and other potential symptoms. I've had none, but that's not uncommon -- about 50% of infected people don't know they've got it. And contrary to what Donald Trump says, the coronavirus is not 99% harmless. Trump might think he has the best words, but he most definitely does not have the best numbers.

According to experts, exercising outdoors while maintaining distance is pretty safe. So I continued to bike. I stopped by a different volleyball court where another group of people I know happened to be playing. One of them we'll call K. K also just came from Arizona. Between games he was citing numbers from some right-wing website, claiming that reaction to the pandemic is overblown.

Today we read that Arizona is experiencing the worst covid-19 outbreak in the country. Ninety percent of the ICU beds are occupied. Arizona is now the first state in history to enact "crisis care standards" for deciding who will receive treatment -- the infamous "death panels" that Republicans accused Obama of creating with the Affordable Care Act.

What's the difference between D and K? D works for a medical technology company and can work from home. K is a regional manager for national car rental company.

D knows that the coronavirus threat is real and is paid to save people's lives.

K is paid to entice people into flying around the country, rent cars so they can go to Disneyworld and the Grand Canyon, where they patronize bars and restaurants.

When it comes to the pandemic, you just can't trust people who are literally paid to say that things are fine, that the coronavirus is just the flu, that's it's not airborne, that only old people die, that only a tiny percentage of people suffer long-term effects.

All of those things are false: the coronavirus is not a flu virus and a flu shot provides no immunity whatsoever.

Experts may argue about droplets and aerosols, but it is crystal clear that people get the disease by breathing the same air as infected people. The evidence has been there since the beginning: the well-documented case from a restaurant air conditioner, the Washington state choir practice, and the superspreader soccer match in Italy.

Younger people with no underlying conditions do die (Nick Cordero, a Broadway actor, just died at age 41), and children are coming down with an inflammatory condition similar to Kawasaki disease.

About 20% of infections require hospitalization, which means spending thousands, tens of thousands, and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many victims suffer strokes, heart attacks, limb amputations and long-term neurological and lung problems because Covid-19 causes severe clotting throughout the body (that's what killed Cordero). That's not "harmless."

Trump makes his money from hotels, resorts and golf courses, all of which have been hammered by closures from the pandemic. The booming economy that he inherited from Obama has gone down the toilet, and the stock market has been gyrating madly as gamblers who usually bet on sporting events, all now canceled, turned to stocks to sate their addiction.

So, who do you believe when it comes to the pandemic? The people on the front lines who staff the hospital wards, ICUs and labs, or the hucksters whose income (and reelection) depend on lying about the severity of the crisis?

If Trump had acknowledged the severity of this pandemic from the beginning and really locked down the entire country with a coordinated federal response, the way Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand and Angela Merkel in Germany did, we would have been done with this in May. (How much better would this country have fared if we'd had a woman president during this crisis?)

But all Trump cared about was promoting himself and his properties. The disease would magically go away by summer, he said, because that's what happens with flu, and this was just the Kung Flu. So now it's summer, and the disease is running rampant in the south -- Florida, Texas, Arizona and California -- because everyone flocked to air-conditioned bars after Trump demanded the states open up.

All these years later Deep Throat's advice is still good: follow the money. If someone's future depends on denying the reality of the pandemic, don't believe a word they say.