By the end of today, another 700 or so people will have died from this blight. By the end of the month the toll will have surpassed 20,000, and by the end of the year more than a quarter of a million people will be dead.
We’re talking, of course, about traffic deaths in China.
But where are the unnerving news reports from the world’s leading media outlets – CNN, Reuters, The Guardian, Bloomberg News, et al – about this mass slaughter? Where are the government authorities in China, Hong Kong, Asian countries and elsewhere hysterically warning of impending doom if their citizens don’t get OUT OUT OUT OF CHINA NOW MAN! lest they become, statistically and metaphorically speaking, more roadkill on Beijing’s superhighway to Commie Capitalist Nirvana?
Why, they are all hiding in their scrubbed and sanitized office cubicles and city-centre pied-a-terres, waiting out this year’s version of the Chinese flu – or, to use it’s much more sinister and panic-inducing name, COVID-19. It, too, is a killer. But as for sheer numbers, the seasonal flu this year in the United States alone has done far more damage. And yet that flu – lacking a name that conjures an image of a gigantic horned beetle that digs an extra hole into each victim’s heinie, where it lays its virulent eggs only to have the eggs hatch and eat the victim’s brain until death does it part – is pooh-poohed as nothing really special as far as killer diseases go because it’s just, you know … the flu.
Why? Because COVID-19 lives entirely outside our global blanket of anxiety, underneath which we keep all our common, and more important, known, angst-provoking obsessions in some semblance of order, as if that will keep them at bay. They are almost like our friends, these common denominators of Your Last Days on Earth: death by car crash, death by obesity, death by smoking, death by synthetic drugs that you snorted directly into the sensitive part of your brain because you saw it on YouTube.
But do our known besties underneath our blankets cause us any concern whatsoever? Of course not. We have heard about these things for so long that we just live with them, numbers be damned. But COVID-19! It just moved into your town like a diseased gypsy begging for spare children! Time to run around screaming to all your neighbours with your pants on fire to lock your doors, do not attempt to answer any phone calls and wait around potentially for many, many months before the authorities give the all-clear!
As we here at Breaking In Asia like to emphasize: To Be Sure.
To Be Sure, stock up on toilet paper for some reason. To Be Sure, do not shake anyone’s hand. To Be Sure, wear that medical mask, even though it has proven to be as effective as a Brazilian voodoo doll at stopping transmission of anything. And lastly, do not step outside your home, because even though you might get run over by a truck – a statistic we can all live with – you To Be Sure as Hell will not succumb to the horned beetle virus thing that’s going to split you open like a roasting chicken and dump all of humanity’s unknown death germs into you as if you were just begging for it.
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