HOW TO TELL IF YOU'VE GOT CORONAVIRUS
By Adrian Bonenberger
Many people are unclear about the specific symptoms associated with coronavirus, or COVID-19, and even if they had the virus, they wouldn’t know what to do about it. We reached out to Echo Crumb, “MD,” medical and spiritual pseudoscientific expert, to help answer some of the biggest questions about the virus.
What is coronavirus?
First of all, a virus is basically a “bug,” which is why people will say “I caught a bug,” or “a bug is going around.” How would you treat a bug you found in your home? You would slap it with your palm, or beneath a boot. Now obviously it is impractical to, say, surgically open a person’s lungs and then just squish all the coronavirus bugs in the lung by slapping them or stomping them. We can all agree that such a notion is totally absurd! What we can do, if we have coronavirus or are afraid we have coronavirus, is accelerate and decelerate rapidly, such as… precisely! In a car, starting and stopping very abruptly (an accident, say).
What are the symptoms?
Symptoms of coronavirus include a fever, coughing, not being able to smell or taste, and not being able to breathe. The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re wondering if you have coronavirus instead of, say, the flu (very similar), or are in a Langoliers-style parallel dimension where time has stopped (the loss of smell and taste), or are drowning in the ocean or a lake (can’t breathe), is assess one’s surroundings. If one doesn’t have the flu, is on dry land, and isn’t in a terrifying Stephen King-penned nightmare scenario, then my friend: you have coronavirus.
How you can tell if someone you’re talking to has coronavirus.
There’s a lot of racism-driven fear about coronavirus, and we’d like to be the first to dispel rumors that any Chinese or Italian person has this disease. Okay? That’s a scurrilous lie, intended to deflect attention from the people (?) who are truly responsible for the disease. I’m talking of course about the Langoliers. If you’re talking to a Langolier, not only do they have the disease, the disease is their fault! I want to underline here that this isn’t racism, it’s nationalism, which is a very different and okay kind of prejudice to have.
I definitely have coronavirus, aka COVID-19. Now what?
This is very important. If you don’t have a car to accelerate and then crash in, there’s a small chance you’ll get better, and a big chance you’ll get worse. Do you really want to die in a hospital bed, surrounded by pretentious assholes telling you to breathe and trying to do surgery on your lungs to get at the bugs infesting them? No! You want to go down a hero, like Brünhilde in Der Ring Des Nibelungen! Whatever that means to you. Go be Brünhilde!
But what about social distancing?
As someone who’s been practicing social distancing most of my life—you can’t see or smell me right now, but if you could, you’d know why!—I think social distancing is always a good idea. The real question is, can you have too much of a good thing? Probably! Only time and science will tell.
I’m also terrified about the economy.
Buddy, listen, I hear you. My grandfather came over to America after Germany’s economy was ruined in WWI, and he told my dad, Echo Sr., “Son, in America, even the dumbest guy with tiny hands can be president.” I think about that a lot, now. Like, did my grandfather have prophetic powers? There’s a lot we still don’t know about the brain, it’s a powerful thing. Anyway, I don’t know too much about the economy, but I do have a diverse portfolio, about a year’s worth of rice in my basement, and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun, so ultimately I’m not too worried about it. ◊
ADRIAN BONENBERGER is a writer living in Connecticut. His latest book is The Road Ahead, an anthology of fiction about America’s “Forever War.”
This article appears in The American Bystander #15. Buy it here.
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