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"...it would take a suspension of disbelief to ignore the barometer and announce the worst was over. "
(The Lab)--Talking more like a weatherman than a top HHS official tasked with tracking the next local virus outbreak, Admiral Brett Giroir gave a drawn out briefing on Friday on the testing forecast. Based on percentages and controls, the numbers might indicate where to dispatch a team of tornado chasers to an infected area, combined with the local labs' abilities to return the samples in a hurry. The plan meets the approval of the task force's approach to reopen the economy.
The first models were based on ill winds blowing in from Italy and Spain following the Wuhan typhoon. Prognostications based on worse case scenarios and lack of data showed a category five disaster in the making, and it soon spun up the Eastern seaboard and made landfall in New York City. The cone of probability rapidly expanded into the tri-state region. On the West coast, heavy gale warnings were posted a week before from Seattle to San Diego and governors, in spite of doubts from officials in the nation's capital, ordered forced shelter-in-place as businesses boarded up their shops with plywood and waited out the storm. It proved to be a very wise, life-saving decision.
Hospitals were flooded with patients, material resupply exhausted the Strategic National Stockpile and lines of communication were established at the White House with daily briefings by storm experts. The forecast remained bleak even as Congress kept candles burning late into the night drawing up contingency relief programs for a population caught in the grip of an isobaric nightmare.
Soothsayers were pronouncing the doom of mankind, people began paying less and less attention to NOAA, and more and more to Noah. Somewhere in the darkness, as relentless rain pounded the empty streets from the Big Easy to the Big Apple, there came an idea. It was given not some trick name by the NHC such as "Katrina" or "Sandy," but one by the federally appointed task force. It was called "Phase One."
The reaction ranged from relief to disbelief, from surprise to rebellion. But it would take a suspension of disbelief to ignore the barometer and announce the worst was over. Local officials, noting depleted resources with nursing homes the main targets of the cyclone, refused to accept the inevitable, that the federal government would eventually countermand the strict mitigation orders and lift social restrictions. The people didn't wait for that to happen. They swarmed the deserted streets in protest, waving flags and caravaning and cavorting as if the sun had blessed them since Ash Wednesday. Some governors allowed other than essential businesses with one removing riptide and sneaker wave closures on state beaches.
A new storm was brewing on the horizon, one of discontent. Rumor was blowing all the way from China that the typhoon that hit the mainland was man made, in a lab. In the meantime, the admiral will continue to make the daily forecast and the CDC will dispatch the tornado chasers to the trailer parks and nursing homes hardest hit by the twisters.
Tornado image, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/storms-us-tornado-louisiana-texas-coronavirus-weather-a9461986.html
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