A Journal of the Plague Year

Yesterday, back-to-back announcements from Boris Johnson in the UK, Doug Ford in Ontario, and Donald Trump in the US. Johnson was belatedly, but firmly, shutting everything down. No gatherings of more than two people. Ford was shutting all non-essential businesses.

And Trump was talking about getting people back to work.

Without his medical officer Fauci present, he was speaking more expansively of the hoped-for chloraquine treatment. He called it possibly “a gift from God.”

My notes say “evidence of the hand of God.” I’m not sure if those are Trump’s words, or my own.

Because I see evidence still of the hand of God. I previously thought it might be meaningful that the virus hit in China, where it is apt to destabilize an anti-religious government; and in a millenarian cult in South Korea, probably killing it. And in Iran, with an unstable Pharisaic regime that has been causing trouble in the region. Yet it was mysteriously sparing other countries. In hitting Europe hard, it seems to be targeting the “open-borders” concept of the EU.

Now it is in the US. In the US, where is the outbreak concentrated so far? In New York City, and along the West Coast. This is the heartland of the Democratic Party. Of more relevance, although the two overlap, this is the heartland of the postmoderns, the intersectionals, the woke.

At the same time, the various reactions to the virus seem to separate the sheep from the goats.

I think there is still room to suspect this is the hand of God.

If the chloraquine treatment does prove effective, and rolls out soon, this feels like the best divine end game. Like deus ex machina, a sunbeam breaking through the clouds.

In his speech, Trump seemed to give an explanation for the mystery I have mentioned here several times: why the virus seems to have largely spared several nations close to China. The Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore, all should have been harder hit, but, until recently, seemed largely exempt. It looked to me and others as though it were related to climate. And Trump apparently thinks so too; but in an indirect way.

It is, he suggests, because they are malarial regions.

As a result, their hospitals and pharmacies stock a supply of chloraquine. It is used to treat malaria. Italy or Iran did not. Hearing of early success with the drug—as I did myself, on the internet, from Thailand—doctors were perhaps prescribing it for the cases they encountered. The cases tended to clear up quickly, and this reduced the time during which folks were infectious. So, less spread.

If things are starting to get out of hand now even in these countries, that kills the climate hypothesis, but does fit the chloraquine one. They have probably now depleted the local supply of the drug, and are unable to get more in, given growing international demand.