Essays from the Edge of the World: COVID 19 in Seattle, Part One Just a Blurb
During the week after Christmas of 2019, Edgar noticed a small article in the Seattle Times. Article, is not really the right word, as it was little more than a blurb, and not much of a blurb at that. It wasn’t much larger than a classified ad, and it was buried deep in the bowels of the paper, somewhere around A15. That blurb, reported that Chinese authorities were treating dozens of cases of pneumonia. The cause of this pneumonia was unknown.
Edgar always flipped to the back pages of the newspaper first. Edgar was forty-four, and because of that, he’d lived about half his life in an analog world, and the other half in a digital one. One consequence of being in this transitional generation was that he maintained numerous antiquated habits, having an actual newspaper delivered to his doorstep was just such a habit. Edgar preferred to read his paper in the evening, and he also preferred reading the newspaper backwards. Reading the front page was typically a waste of his time. By the time Edgar got around to reading the paper, after work, he would have received fifty news reports on his phone, and seen CNN segments at the gym. Even at dinner time, the local evening news would cover most of the big local stories, so the back pages were the only part of the paper that still had fresh information for him to consume.
If you want to know what the city council did today, or how your national or state representatives voted on bills that never made it to the front page, you read the Roll Call in the back of the paper. Similarly, if you want to read about service workers on strike, or a police officer being suspended for some sort of misconduct, you flip to the back pages. On this occasion, if you wanted to see an obscure blurb about an, as yet, unidentified virus and proto-pandemic, you flipped to the back pages. Edgar remembered similar blurbs in 2003 and 2009. Those blurbs were SARS and H1N1 respectively. Edgar mentioned it to his wife Audrey and left it at that.
By the time the first death was reported in China, on January 11, 2020, Edgar had noticed that little blurb from the back page of the Seattle Times had grown daily. The exponential growth in news coverage of the virus in the newspaper, as well as everywhere else, walked in tandem with the exponential growth of the virus itself. Edgar read intently and daily. That day, it was a half-page article on page A2. That was the last time COVID 19 would be second-page news. From then on, COVID 19 would be on the front page daily. In fact, by the end of March, COVID 19 would be seventy-five percent or more of the Seattle Times, and based on what Edgar observed, approximately one-hundred percent of CNN’s broadcasting.
The rapidity with which COVID 19 went from back page, to front page, to every page reminded Edgar of the opening montage of every disaster, apocalypse, or zombie movie he’d ever watched. Edgar consumed horror movies in about the same quantity as he consumed news media, that is, anytime, and all the time. Low-budget movies with dystopian themes always used this same sort of deterioration, collapse of society montage. Once you know what you’re looking for, they stick out like a sore thumb. Whenever you see an actual news media clip from ten years ago, that has been repurposed, and taken out of context, in order to set the stage for an apocalyptic event, you know you’re in for a low-budget, dystopian masterpiece. It’s a good way to convey the collapse of human civilization on the cheap. Big-budget movies do it differently. They build expensive sets of newsrooms, and hire actual news media personalities like Wolf Blitzer to set the story up, and they usually spend more time showing you the collapse. Either way, to Edgar, this felt like the first ten seconds of a five-minute disaster montage.
He’d didn’t yet know how serious it would become, nobody did. The seasonal flu kills tens of thousands every year, and Edgar had lived long enough to see the new media’s foretelling of disaster from SARS in 2003, and H1N1 in 2009, neither amounted to much, and neither had worried Edgar at the time. There was no indication that this was anymore serious than any of the dozens of outbreaks the world deals with every year, just a feeling.
Edgar was an attorney, and had spent most of his adult life trying to mute that part of himself that most people called intuition or instinct, in favor or rationality and reason. He certainly made his best efforts to never let that part of himself start making decisions for him. At best, a hunch was just a reason to take a closer look at something, but every once in a while, your instincts tell you to move quickly when you feel yourself being followed down a dark alley. To Edgar, this felt like the dark alley.
Edgar always flipped to the back pages of the newspaper first. Edgar was forty-four, and because of that, he’d lived about half his life in an analog world, and the other half in a digital one. One consequence of being in this transitional generation was that he maintained numerous antiquated habits, having an actual newspaper delivered to his doorstep was just such a habit. Edgar preferred to read his paper in the evening, and he also preferred reading the newspaper backwards. Reading the front page was typically a waste of his time. By the time Edgar got around to reading the paper, after work, he would have received fifty news reports on his phone, and seen CNN segments at the gym. Even at dinner time, the local evening news would cover most of the big local stories, so the back pages were the only part of the paper that still had fresh information for him to consume.
If you want to know what the city council did today, or how your national or state representatives voted on bills that never made it to the front page, you read the Roll Call in the back of the paper. Similarly, if you want to read about service workers on strike, or a police officer being suspended for some sort of misconduct, you flip to the back pages. On this occasion, if you wanted to see an obscure blurb about an, as yet, unidentified virus and proto-pandemic, you flipped to the back pages. Edgar remembered similar blurbs in 2003 and 2009. Those blurbs were SARS and H1N1 respectively. Edgar mentioned it to his wife Audrey and left it at that.
By the time the first death was reported in China, on January 11, 2020, Edgar had noticed that little blurb from the back page of the Seattle Times had grown daily. The exponential growth in news coverage of the virus in the newspaper, as well as everywhere else, walked in tandem with the exponential growth of the virus itself. Edgar read intently and daily. That day, it was a half-page article on page A2. That was the last time COVID 19 would be second-page news. From then on, COVID 19 would be on the front page daily. In fact, by the end of March, COVID 19 would be seventy-five percent or more of the Seattle Times, and based on what Edgar observed, approximately one-hundred percent of CNN’s broadcasting.
The rapidity with which COVID 19 went from back page, to front page, to every page reminded Edgar of the opening montage of every disaster, apocalypse, or zombie movie he’d ever watched. Edgar consumed horror movies in about the same quantity as he consumed news media, that is, anytime, and all the time. Low-budget movies with dystopian themes always used this same sort of deterioration, collapse of society montage. Once you know what you’re looking for, they stick out like a sore thumb. Whenever you see an actual news media clip from ten years ago, that has been repurposed, and taken out of context, in order to set the stage for an apocalyptic event, you know you’re in for a low-budget, dystopian masterpiece. It’s a good way to convey the collapse of human civilization on the cheap. Big-budget movies do it differently. They build expensive sets of newsrooms, and hire actual news media personalities like Wolf Blitzer to set the story up, and they usually spend more time showing you the collapse. Either way, to Edgar, this felt like the first ten seconds of a five-minute disaster montage.
He’d didn’t yet know how serious it would become, nobody did. The seasonal flu kills tens of thousands every year, and Edgar had lived long enough to see the new media’s foretelling of disaster from SARS in 2003, and H1N1 in 2009, neither amounted to much, and neither had worried Edgar at the time. There was no indication that this was anymore serious than any of the dozens of outbreaks the world deals with every year, just a feeling.
Edgar was an attorney, and had spent most of his adult life trying to mute that part of himself that most people called intuition or instinct, in favor or rationality and reason. He certainly made his best efforts to never let that part of himself start making decisions for him. At best, a hunch was just a reason to take a closer look at something, but every once in a while, your instincts tell you to move quickly when you feel yourself being followed down a dark alley. To Edgar, this felt like the dark alley.
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