THE REALM OF IMPOSSIBILITY

In my teens and twenties, I had a friend whose mother was delusionally schizophrenic. For most of those years, Mrs. D lived at home. When I went to my friend’s house, I chatted with his Mom. On most days, she was pitiably fretful. But during some visits, she was happier and even chuckled.

From time-to-time, my friend would tell me about some odd thing his Mom had done. Some of these stories were unspeakably sad and I won’t repeat them here. But overall, her nuclear family—Mrs. D had birthed four kids, and her husband stood by her until she died decades later—took care of her basic needs, listened to her and, when they couldn’t help it, laughed at what she did or said. They weren’t mocking her. They were manifesting acceptance and resignation. They were trying to cope.

Some of what Mrs. D said was undeniably funny. For example, she thought she had the super-power to telepathically marry people who had never met. Typically, she paired someone she’d seen on the TV news—she watched plenty of CNN—with someone whom she actually knew, such as a relative or a neighbor. When one of her kids would whimsically suggest some pairing of their own, Mrs. D would consider it for a moment, nod her head once, declare the contrived couple man and wife and, having worked her matrimonial magic, smile.

My wife and I later appropriated this power to decree all kinds of things: Thai takeout for dinner? Pause. Nod once. Done.

Though we still had to go pick it up and pay for it.

For a while, Mrs. D, who was all Irish and looked it, became an Anglophile. She imagined she was Lady Mountbatten and told family members to address her as “Dear” (pronounced “DEE-uh”) and to speak to her with British accents.

During this British Invasion phase, my friend took his Mom to the hairdresser. When they arrived, the woman monitoring the appointment book asked Mrs. D her name. Mrs. D announced herself as “Lady Mountbatten.”

The book woman looked at her bewilderedly.

Unfazed, and without hesitating, my friend began spelling aloud: “M-o-u-n-t-b…”

On another occasion, my friend told me that his Mom had decided, in her fifties, to begin smoking. After a few weeks, she worriedly told him, “My back hurts. I think these cigarettes are giving me cancer of the back.”

Some may consider this insensitive, but Mrs. D’s son and I both found her self-diagnosis very funny. We LOL’d before LOL “was a thing.”

Cancer of the back. After a month of smoking.

Which, of course, brings me to Coronamania.

How would people react if I, a person of Northern European descent, said that I feared getting sickle cell disease? Many would call me a delusional Nubian-wannabee who was engaging in medical-cultural appropriation, or words to that effect. What if some male they knew said that the prospect of breast cancer scared him and that, consequently, he did a monthly self-examination? Pedants would say, “Well, some men do get breast cancer!” But everyone else would laugh derisively and conclude that the self-examiner was mentally unwell.

Similarly, who would take seriously a twenty-five-year-old who thought that forgetting someone’s name revealed early-onset Alzheimer’s? How many thirty-year-old males worry about enlarged prostates?

All of the foregoing medical scenarios are nigh impossible. One’s physical attributes, physical condition and any related medical threats or diagnoses are limited by various characteristics. Sex, weight, conduct and—most especially—age all clearly shape health prospects and risk perception. Ultimately, and objectively, people are who they are. No amount of imagination, dysphoria or phobia can change someone’s demographically-bounded risk profile.

From the February, 2020 Italian, Spanish and cruise ship outset, Covid survival rates exceeded 99.8% for those under 65. Nearly all of the residual 0.2% were overweight or otherwise very ill. Direct observation of one’s own quotidian sphere corroborated these figures: who knew anyone relatively healthy under 80 who died from Covid? The figures for those over 80 weren’t much scarier. Though many somehow lost sight of this during Coronamania, death has always been more likely as people age.

Nonetheless, during the Covid craze, countless millions of people cast aside core, widely-understood risk assessment principles and, irrespective of their age or weight, delusionally ascribed to themselves serious peril. This irrational affinity for fear was bizarre. I wonder how many psychologists feared SARS-CoV-2; I question the sanity of any who did.

During Coronamania, the government and the media not only deemed hypochondria and germophobia acceptable; they evilly, actively sold these fears to a baseline-anxious populace. Politicians, the media and bureaucrats opportunistically, disingenuously told everyone that all were at grave risk and should take a wide array of preposterous, unnecessary measures to prevent infection with—Heaven forbid—a respiratory virus. They also demanded that college students, nation-wide, and tens of millions of healthy others inject an experimental substance to prevent an infection that simply did not threaten people their age. Most people lost their grip on reality and bought an obvious scam.

It wasn’t just foolish for most people to fear a Coronavirus. Such fear was as laughably delusional as was Mrs. D’s cancer of the back.

But the Covid overreaction’s vast, deep negative effects weren’t the least bit funny. Nor will be the sequelae.