COVID-19 Changes Life Forever — Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro Just Tested Positive

I didn’t want to write this article, because the barely present optimist in me has been holding out hope that America will start to look more normal, more like its confident pre-COVID global pandemic self — but as a journalist, we do not create reality, we simply report on it, dutifully and accurately.

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is now one of the most high profile leaders to test positive for COVID-19; he is reportedly hoping hydroxychloroquine treatments will help him recover.

And this country is looking less normal by the day, it need be said. When FULCRUM led in breaking the extraordinarily bizarre but real Pizzagate scandal — intimately tied into Jeffrey Epstein, recently arrested Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, and many others... a kind of scandal of scandals at the end of the world as we know it…

When that broke in late 2016, and everything we went through as a result, I reasonably assumed no scandal could be bigger or more disruptive.

Yet here we are, shortly after a somber 4th of July in America, in the year 2020, and a far bigger scandal has smacked all of us in the face — won’t seem to leave us alone for a single hour or day or news cycle, in fact. COVID.

The deciding factor in writing this is that COVID, as of today, has even broken down the fairly secure process of receiving delivered food via popular delivery apps — a process already thoroughly stripped of its humanity and made “contactless” since COVID rocked the world… a delivery person using the app literally drops your food off in a paper bag, outside your door, and you retrieve it after the delivery person is a safe distance away. Seems to make sense.

Yet no more! Even that process has broken down!

“I have arrived,” the text message from today’s delivery guy read, somewhat ominously.

Seconds later my suspicions of trouble on the horizon were confirmed: “I’m sorry but due to the
Airborne virus, I do not enter enclosed buildings. Please meet me at the main entrance of your building. Thank you for your understanding during these crasy [sic] times.”

We exchanged a few texts and settled on him leaving the paper bag of food outside of my building’s main entrance. He snapped a photo of the meal, texted it to me, got into his car, and zoomed off as if escaping certain “Airborne” death.

Everyone has their own personal, non-scientifically derived “COVID-19 policy rulebook,” it appears — even delivery guys, now.

And untenably, everyone’s policy rulebook is different. Some haven’t worn a mask since the pandemic began, others don’t believe it is real, and some report businesses who operate for a millisecond without being masked up. Not good for national unity, nor national economics.

The world is broken. This is not normal and no one has answers that satisfy.

Why did this happen to our country and planet? How was it allowed? How did not one creepy crawler / watchful protector at the N.S.A. (or somewhere) back in December or January go to some higher ups, “You know, there’s an awful lot of coughing and sudden frightened pandemic chatter coming out of China, maybe we should shut it down hard.”

The world is broken, and shattering further by the day.

Airports are empty.

Unemployment rates have settled in to the double digits, perhaps for the foreseeable future.

As a silver lining, cryptocurrency markets may be seeing a renaissance as the world sits at home, not sure who to trust anymore.

But you can’t take money with you if the COVID takes you out.

We are living through a national nightmare that — in retrospect — will be viewed as “9/11 times 100,” as I predicted on a podcast earlier in the year. That may eventually be on the low side, of course: the number of deaths from COVID19 is starting to look very grim, even stacked up against the 3,000+ who died on 9/11/2001.

According to the latest CDC estimates released, before the end of the month as many as 160,000 in the US total will be dead from the virus since the pandemic began, or roughly 53 times larger than the death toll from 9/11.

So much for optimism.