With news that President Donald Trump is in the hospital being treated for COVID-19, it’s normal to feel confused, scared, overwhelmed, and upset. There’s a lot going on. It’s hard to know what’s true and real.
As the editor in chief of a health magazine, I’m going to try to make this simple: Listen to the public health experts, not the politicians. Because this virus doesn’t care about your politics. Clearly.
With that said, here’s what public health experts say you need to know about how to limit risk for yourself and your loved ones:
Wear a mask when you’re indoors around other people who aren’t in your immediate bubble. Yes, even if they’re farther than six feet away—the virus can linger in and perhaps even travel through the air, and ventilation is a serious issue that we need to be paying more attention to when it comes to transmission.
Wear a mask when you’re outdoors and within six feet of someone not in your immediate bubble.
Practice social distancing as much as you can.
If you’ve been exposed to someone who has COVID-19, get tested and do everything you possibly can to quarantine until you’re in the clear, even if you’re feeling just fine—you can spread the disease even if you have no symptoms.
If you have symptoms of COVID-19, get tested and isolate (even from others in your own home) until you’re in the clear. (Check out “What’s the Difference Between Social Distancing, Quarantine, and Isolation?” for more details on these points.)
If you contract COVID-19, work with contact tracers to help them alert everyone you might have exposed or infected. (See “How Does Coronavirus Contact Tracing Work?” for more information on this.)
Wash your hands often.
This should all sound very familiar, because it’s basically the same information that public health experts have been sharing, on repeat, for months now. Unfortunately, in spite of the fact that the president and a growing number of people in his orbit have contracted the virus, there are still folks out there arguing against these recommendations. And there are also still a bunch of people just ignoring them altogether.
Case in point: Over the weekend, Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz appeared on Fox News and said that if the president of the United States can get COVID-19, then it’s proof that no lockdown is going to be sufficient to protect everyone. Other prominent Republicans espoused similar sentiments. The implication: Let’s not even try. Full steam ahead, open back up.
As if the only options here are complete and total lockdown or complete and total return to normalcy. As if the economy can get back to normal without getting the virus under control first. As if other countries in the world haven’t already figured this out. As if the president was actually taking proper or recommended precautions in the first place!
Let’s focus on that last point. Because the COVID-19 outbreak in the White House isn’t an example of a president taking all necessary precautions and contracting the virus anyway. It’s actually a clear and enraging example of a president who explicitly did not take all proper and recommended precautions, and then got the virus, pretty predictably.
From frequently eschewing (and even mocking) masks to regularly gathering in groups indoors, he, his family members, and his aides behaved recklessly, foolishly, and irresponsibly, ultimately endangering the health and safety of themselves and those around them. In an apparent effort to project that everything was normal and fine, COVID-19 be damned, they behaved accordingly—COVID-19 be damned. Unluckily for Trump, this resulted in the obvious outcome of a COVID-19 outbreak and his resultant hospitalization. Luckily for Trump, he has access to some of the best doctors around, as well as fully taxpayer-funded health care (something that isn’t actually the case for his own constituents—another equally urgent story for another day).
If there’s one lesson to take away from this horrific and historic event, it’s this: If you want things to return to normal, we all need to work together and do what we can to beat back this virus, which means listening to the public health experts and wearing masks, avoiding large indoor gatherings, self-quarantining after exposure, and so on.
Because pretending that everything is actually fine is a recipe for a super-spreading event.
Related Content:
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These Are the 3 Riskiest Places to Go During COVID-19, According to Dr. Fauci