A Detroit Free Press columnist argued that COVID-19 has turned “breathing into a deadly event” and made “all of us potential serial killers.”
“As coronavirus burns an exponential path of destruction across the American terrain, an insidious blanket of shadow damage is quietly unfurling in its name,” wrote Michael J. Stern Tuesday. “It’s not just the death and scarred lungs. COVID-19 has turned every man, woman and child into a potential serial killer.”
Stern said he’s been lucky not to catch COVID-19 so far, but he worries every day that a trip to the grocery store or an encounter with a person wearing his or her mask below the nose could prove to be fatal.
“So far, I’ve been fortunate,” Stern wrote. “But not a day goes by that I don’t wonder whether my streak of good luck is about to end, because the person in front of me in the grocery line is wearing a mask below his nose — expelling a cloud of radioactive COVID dust that I cannot escape, short of dropping $50 on the conveyor belt and trying to outrun the security guard.”
The columnist lamented that the most basic thing people do to maintain existence — breathe — makes them a threat to their neighbors.
“But COVID-19 has turned the most necessary part of living — breathing — into a deadly event,” Stern worried. “If there’s anything that can make us hate our neighbors, it is the possibility that their very existence — every breath they exhale — could be lethal.”
Worse than running into a stranger at the store, Stern fears most the potential deadly ramifications of interactions with people he cares about.
“What’s worse is the brutal reality that the people we love and trust most in this world bring us the same risk,” Stern wrote. “More risk, because these are the people with whom we have regular and close contact. Any sustained encounter with those we love — kisses, hugs, laughs, conversations — could bring fever, blood clots, fluid-filled lungs, and death.”
Stern’s fears are realized most in a video chat with his partner, a London hospital employee, who causes the columnist’s head to explode as he watches him “unwittingly rub his hands over his face, after spending the day in a hospital that treats COVID-19 patients.”
“Earlier this month, he went home with a fever, after vomiting several times,” Stern recalled. “I was certain he had COVID-19, and I spent the next 24 hours planning what quarantine laws I was going to break as I made my way to London to get to the hospital before he died.”
Stern’s partner survived the ordeal, having only contracted a “stomach virus,” but the “face rubbing” and “related fights” continued for the couple.
The scare had Stern looking for more creative strategies to prevent exposing those he loves to the virus, eventually leading him to Google “whether holding my breath when I hug my parents will spare me the Greek tragedy of killing my own mother and father.”
Stern went on to lament that, like AIDS, COVID-19 teaches us that “daily life” and “love can be lethal.”
Stern concluded that scientists have come up with effective treatments for HIV, just as they have developed a coronavirus vaccine, but the way we “look at our own survival” will be different “for years to come.”
“And so, as the world eagerly awaits a vaccine that promises to be rolled out over the next six months, the wrath of the coronavirus will not end with inoculation,” Stern wrote. “The way we look at our own survival, and the dangers faced by those we love, will be stamped with COVID’s dirty fingerprint for years to come.”
