It needs to be said. Again.
This is not the time for voluntary stupidity.
If you have something to say about the coronavirus that is not supported by proven truths presented by experts, you should really, really just keep it to yourself. People are dying and you are almost certainly not an epidemiologist. Be quiet and listen.
Yet there exists a sub-sect of well-meaning dopes on social media, who over the last two months have shared their belief that they’re pretty sure they contracted COVID-19 in early February or January or even in 2019, before anyone was testing for it in the U.S.
And because there was no testing and they got over it, there’s no proof they ever had it. But because the symptoms, many of which are synonymous with the flu and other more common viruses, were akin to COVID-19, that’s what it must have been. They are survivors, plain and simple.
Like Belleville Mayor Michael Melham, who claims he caught the dangerous disease in November at a convention in Atlantic City — months before New Jersey’s first confirmed case. His doctor diagnosed him with a bad case of the flu. He had no respiratory symptoms and never tested positive for the coronavirus, but a recent blood test revealed he had coronavirus antibodies, which suggest but do not confirm he may have had the virus at some point.
Guys. Please stop. New Jersey is in crisis. There is no room for conjecture right now, especially from public officials, who should be keeping all our little panic planes grounded in fact.
And let’s be real: Even if you say you’re spouting speculation with the best of intentions — “my fear is that there are many who dismissed a potentially positive coronavirus diagnosis as a bad flu,” Melham told NJ Advance Media Thursday — there’s an air of self-serving superiority to such proclamations.
But the coronavirus is not like seeing Bruce Springsteen perform in 1971 and later bragging about how you knew about the thing before everyone else knew about the thing.
In the unlikely event that you did get coronavirus before anyone knew about it and fended it off without issue, you are not cool — you are lucky. More than 7,500 New Jerseyans didn’t have the same fortune.
Back to Melham: Imagine being one of the people he interacted with at the New Jersey League of Municipalities Conference in Atlantic City. Your mind must be racing. “Wait, did I get sick afterward, too?” “What if I was asymptomatic like thousands of New Jerseyans and passed it onto someone else?” “When’s the last time I saw my grandparents?”
That’s a whole lot of panic at the hands of one man, who, again, cannot say for certain if the illness he suffered in November and the antibodies test results he received five months later are related.
There has been some speculation that the coronavirus did come to America sooner than widely believed, with a rash of deaths in California in February and March adding fuel to that fire. One doctor in that state went as far as to suggest that it may have been around “back in December.” But Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says it’s “plausible but not likely” that the disease was here in November and December.
Don’t we have enough uncertainties already? We don’t know when public places will reopen, we don’t know when we’ll safely be able to visit elderly loved ones again, we don’t know (and may never know) the full scope of the coronavirus in New Jersey.
And guess what: you don’t know anything either. Stay safe, listen to the experts and unless you have something in writing, do not so willingly add yourself to the statistics that will define a generation.
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Jeremy Schneider may be reached at jschneider@njadvancemedia.com.
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Stop saying you think you had coronavirus - nj.com
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