Hold on. I’ll be right with you. First I have to wash my hands for two full minutes.

Unfortunately, I can’t turn over my one-minute hourglass or touch the timer button on my phone, or else I’ll have to start over.

And the water needs to be scalding. If all of my skin gets burned off, after all, I can’t touch my face.

Okay now, how long is that hand-washing good for? Is it two minutes under the faucet, two minutes out in the dangerous world?

Shit! Now I’ve touched my keyboard to type this sentence. And keyboards were already dirty, disgusting cesspools before the Plague-to-end-all-Plagues reared its ugly head. Nowadays, if I touch my keyboard or my face or a doorknob or a Kleenex, I’m taking my life in my hands. To say nothing of the lives of every other citizen in my house, on my block, in my city, and in my state. Not just the human citizens, mind you. All of our cats and dogs are susceptible. Put a mask on Fido! And you should probably devise a robot to feed the fish, too.

But crap, if I touch the robot as I’m building it, it’ll be just as infected as I am. So I need to make a robot that can then make another robot in a sterile environment. Based on the science fictions I’ve seen, the only way to do this is to make the first robot self-aware, and nothing bad can happen after that.

Oh, and Costco is now out of toilet paper.

Now don’t take this the wrong way, but have we lost our fucking mind?

Don’t get me wrong. Coronavirus seems like a bitch. The WHO puts the death rate above 3%, which is brutal if true. There’s question as to how many might be undiagnosed. But even if it’s not true, 4,000 deaths worldwide out of a global population of over seven billion is nothing to sneeze at. Sorry, bad analogy. But still, 4,000 deaths worldwide must be the worst disease of all time. Unlike that measly flu, which only kills… up to 500,000 people per year?

Clearly someone at CNN was absent the day their math class went over “greater than” and less than.”

But I’ve also heard that it mainly attacks those over the age of 70 with a history of respiratory issues or compromised immune systems. So is it only 3% of people who have been smoking for fifty years? Because if that’s the case, I’d really like to be able to wipe my ass again.

And if it mainly affects people that are already sickly, then it’s a good thing we aren’t letting professional athletes high-five each other anymore. I mean, just look at Mike Trout and LeBron James. Those guys look ready to keel over at a stiff breeze. Make them wash their hands every time they touch a football!

Of course, the death rate isn’t as important as the contagion rate. And the problem with the Coronavirus is that you can get it just by looking at someone with it. Or sharing the same zip code. At least as far as I’ve heard. But who the hell knows? It seems like every other headline in my news feed is about two more infected people in a country of three hundred million. So kiss your loved ones goodbye because statistically, it’ll hit you next. Your only hope at survival is to click on the link. Then go douse your infected finger in acid for two minutes.

Here are just a few of the things I’ve seen reported. Of course, all of these are anecdotal. But that almost makes it worse.

-A local school district just canceled school for a week. Not sure what good that’ll do, since the incubation period seems to be 14 days. Maybe they should just cancel the rest of the school year.

-Starbucks isn’t allowing customers to use reusable cups. Even though they wash them and hand them back to the very customer whose germs it has. This after Starbucks and all of its customers (and detractors) have spent the last decade bemoaning single-use cups as the single greatest threat to the survival of our planet. Can’t wait until California, which banned* single-use plastic bags years ago, tells us we have to start using them again.
(*N.B. We didn’t ban them, the stores just can’t give them away. They need to charge us. But only grocery stores. Department stores, restaurants, sporting good stores, bookstores, Target, and everyone else can give us plastic to their hearts’ content.)

-The four major sports leagues currently playing games have banned reporters from locker rooms. Because interviewing people right out of the shower, when they’re at their cleanest, is a bad idea. Much better to wait until you can get them all crowded into a press-conference room with carpeting and seats that have had thousands of ass-cheeks in them.

-Everyplace is out of hand sanitizer, which I sorta understand, and toilet paper, which I don’t. Even if it’s two-ply, it won’t protect you from a virus. But Costco is limiting the amount of toilet paper each customer can buy. It worked so well for Carter with gas in the late 1970s.

– We’re now assaulting people who sneeze on planes, or forcing the place to divert. Despite the fact that March is prime allergy month.

-Italy started banning fans from sporting events for the next month. Banning FANS! They’re legitimately going to be playing soccer games in front of empty stadiums. Because if so much as one virus gets loose in a stadium of 70,000, then all 70,000 will be dead by the end of the game. The team with the last fan standing wins.

-In the 48 hours since I started this post, the Italy decision has been followed by every other lemming in the world: the San Jose Sharks and Golden State Warriors, every event in Ohio, and probably, when opening day rolls around, the Seattle Mariners. But the Mariners are still playing in front of fans in Spring Training. But it’s okay, because only old people go to Spring Training. And their more susceptible.

-And this just in: all of March Madness! Holy shit! Bet and pick favorites. Usually the crowd likes to pump up underdogs and get behind them if they go on a run.

I’m reminded of before the Iraq War (the second one), when Colin Powell busted out his Anthrax presentation at the United Nations. He held up a vial and said a teaspoon of that will, like, crawl up inside the asshole of every infidel and treat us like 72 virgins. (I might’ve been paraphrasing). But based on the sporting bans, Coronavirus might as well be anthrax. I feel a little bit sorry for all the suicide bombers. Who would have guessed that all they needed to do to bring the entire western world to a screeching halt was sneeze in an airport.

Or maybe we could stop using The Walking Dead as a medical journal.

Because as far as I can tell, the Coronavirus is a pretty nasty form of the flu. Death rate is definitely higher. And maybe it’s more contagious? But it’s flu season. And really, shouldn’t we be washing our hands a lot during the winter anyway?

Speaking of which, are we still supposed to wash or hands after going to the bathroom? What’s a little fecal matter in the face of oblivion? Heck, it’s not like I was able to wipe with all the toilet paper gone, anyway.

The way people are acting, it’s the Black Death. If you’ve driven on the same freeway as someone, even if you’re in completely different cars with all the windows rolled up and no outside vent running, you are assuredly infected. And did you just look in the rear view window? Now the guy behind you has it. And now you’re both certain to die. Good job, asshat. How dare you drive your car? Quick, buy some hand sanitizer and toilet paper!

Because a 3% death rate means everybody dies. Said by the same people who claim the 2016 polls were wrong because someone with a 30% chance won the election. Percentages are hard, y’all!

A local junior colleges made the news because one of their medical students had been exposed to the virus. They reiterated that the county has no cases yet. So how the fuck was this student “exposed to” the virus? Is the virus going around wearing socks and a trenchcoat? Was it hanging out at the county line, unwilling to cross but waiting for a goody-two-shoes to look in the wrong direction? Seriously, how is one exposed to the virus if nobody around has said virus? Did she see a picture of it online?

I had it right the first time. This isn’t the Black Death. This is the Zombie Apocalypse.

Or maybe, with the run on toilet paper, we’re going for the Mummy Apocalypse.

I don’t want to blame this on the media. But come on, they’ve certainly been at the forefront of fan-flaming. They had such a good thing going with that whole impeachment thing. But with that gone, what’s going to get the people to click on ten different headlines featuring the same general content?

Coronavirus!

Boy howdy, that’s a catchy name. After all, we’ve gone through this rigmarole before, but back then it was called Swine Flu or Avian Flu or SARS. And those all sound comic. Scientific. And let’s be honest, foreign. But corona? That’s something I’ve heard of. SARS sounds like someone banging a gong, but I see Corona at the grocery store. It’s memorable. It’s catchy.

I bet Tecate’s pissed about all the earned media of their closest rival.

There was a poll showing 38% of people not willing to drink Corona, and the media (again, errantly) claimed this was due to the fancy new nomenclature. But if you look closely at that poll, only 4% said it was because of the Coronavirus. The other 34% are just sane human beings who don’t want to waste money on crappy beer. Have I mentioned before that beer shouldn’t need fruit added? I think I have.

Corona’s sales have actually gone up over the same period last year and the year before. Because people are nothing if not impressionable. If Tecate wants to get in on this shit, they better strike a deal to change the name to Covid-19, brought to you by Tecate. Or maybe Dos Equis can get in on the fun by calling it the Most Interesting Virus in the World. I don’t always wash my hands. But when I do, it’s because of Coron… crap, Covid-19.

Hey, did you know you can sing Covid-19 to the tune of “Come On, Eileen”? And… you’re welcome.

Here’s where I admit that I’ve been washing my hands a hell of a lot more often this past week than I usually do. Because it’s out there and it’s not a bad thing to be reminded of during flu season. But we can go overboard. At the bank, a woman demanded that they sanitize the pen before she signed her check. At my school, the librarian is making all of the teachers wash our hands before making copies. He’s got, I shit you not, four different soft-soap dispensers at the sink. I assume he watched which one I used and then used one of the others to clean its nozzle.

An abundance of caution. I get it. But I don’t think it was photocopiers that drove the Spanish Flu back in 1919. And I have yet to see a pen used on The Walking Dead. 

There’s something McCarthyist about the whole thing. Everyone’s got it except you. Greet everyone with suspicion. Wash at all costs to kill the reds, cause the only good virus is a virus who’s dead!

Perhaps we should make a list of who is suspected of having coronavirus. Shut yourself in your house and spy out the window. If your neighbor’s water meter doesn’t go up every ten minutes, then they’re a bunch of filthy coronas.

We can give said list to John Procter. He seems like he’d do the responsible thing. What’s that? He’s been dead for 300 years? Hmm, put your lists and theories out on Twitter instead. Seems just as reasonable.

So, after canceling schools and sporting events and flights (I saw that airlines are canceling and combining flights to lessen exposure, but doesn’t that just put more people on each flight?), what can we do? Some people have taken to fist bumping and elbow bumping in lieu of shaking hands. Howie Mandel allegedly only first bumps because he’s a germophobe. Um, okay but… fist bumping is still skin to skin contact. As are your elbows, if you’re wearing short sleeves. And sure, your elbows haven’t been grabbing doorknobs or anything, but you also haven’t been washing them as regularly as your hands, have you? And you had this brilliant idea to start pushing open doors with those elbows to avoid grabbing those doorknobs. In the same spot that every other Wisenheimer is putting their elbows to open the door.

We’re also not supposed to touch our faces. But come on, that’s not real, right? Everybody touches their faces. It’s instinct. Right now my face feels fine, but if you tell me I can’t touch it, there will immediately be a colossal itch on my cheek, the type that feels like an inchworm burrowing into my skull. I just NEED to scratch it. AHHHHH!

I think that whole “don’t touch your face thing” is what they throw in to avoid coming up with real answers. Hey, why’d this perfectly healthy hermit who’s been inside since the first Bush Administration contract this communicable disease? Eh, he probably touched his face.

It’s like when your dentist asks if you’ve been flossing. Because nobody actually flosses regularly. We floss when something’s stuck in our teeth and the night before we see the dentist. And we touch our face to adjust our glasses or run our hands through our hair or put an Airpod in our ear. Or, back in the Dark Ages, to cover up our mouth and nose when we were sneezing or coughing. But now I’m being told that’s a big no-no, because now those germs are in my hand. We should instead sneeze into our shirt sleeve. Somehow that’s more sanitary. Perhaps the dried snot on my sleeve will become a way to signal that I’m woke.

To quote The Verve in The Freshman,  “I won’t be held responsible. She was touching her face.” I’ve heard conflicting theories over the past twenty years that that song was about either a drug overdose or an abortion. Turns out it was a CDC memo this whole time. And I guess when the Divinyls were singing, “When I think about you I touch myself,” they were actually wishing death and disease upon you.

So now we’ve successfully “self-quarantined” ourselves from any other human contact. Want to know another word for “self-quarantine”? It’s called staying home. Just like we’ve always told people to do with the flu. But it sounds fancier now. “Stay home” is a suggestion. “Self-Quarantine” is a directive. Maybe it’s not a mandate yet, but the niggling conspiracy theorist at the back of my skull thinks the government is paying very close attention to how this self-quarantine is going. Holy shit, they’re playing sports in empty stadiums?  Just wait when we tell them that bath salts fucker was really a zombie.

And yes, the niggling woke-dude at the back of my skull knows that we’re not supposed to say “niggling” anymore.

The last time they made up this large-scale of a “quarantine” was the Cuban Missile Crisis. And that wasn’t a quarantine either. It was an embargo. And this doesn’t feel like a “self-quarantine” either. The local news just reported on someone leaving a block that was self-quarantined. A block! An entire row of houses! Being volun-told to not venture out of their house. Because one person might or might not have “been exposed to” a particularly gnarly flu.

I overheard two people talking.

“I’ve heard someone might have tested positive for it in Elk Grove”

“Well… You live in Elk Grove, don’t you?”

Elk Grove, by the way, is a suburb of 200,00 people that encompasses close to fifty square miles.

Then again, they’re freaking out because Los Angeles County, with a population of four million, has twenty sick people. And they’re banning San Jose Sharks games because 50 people out of the 2,000,000 who live in Santa Clara County have it. And some 80-year old died.

As an aside, how many people have the flu right now?

And what about us poor souls whose seasonal allergies go crazy this time of year. How dare we show ourselves in public and make all those people worry? The wheezy cough. The weepy eyes. Why, I must be a zombie, mustn’t I?

Allergies, my wife and child can attest are not contagious. But the time for subtlety and nuance is over. It’s Coronavirus’s world now, mother fucker!

It’s like the old saying:

First they came for the toilet paper. But I was stocked up on toilet paper, so I said nothing.