Virus Blog

10/22/20

Debate Night. The president is running low on money and time is running out. Tonight's debate is his last big chance to change the momentum toward a Biden win. In the last debate, before cancelling the second debate because the president caught the virus, the president brought his anti-decorum and behaved like a school yard name calling bully spewing his lies any barely letting his opponent get his points across. Tonight's debate has the new features of Plexiglas separators and a promise to mute the mic as appropriate. Given the state of the race and the importance of the outcome, in many ways tonight's 90 minute live event could determine much of the planet's trajectory for the few decades. How's that for pressure? My worry is that there is so much that can go wrong. Could you imagine if a candidate had a medical episode from the pressure? What if there is a mid-debate brain fart that causes one or both to completely lose their train of thought. In the VP debate a fly that landed on Pence's head became the headline probably because most of the debate was incredibly boring, but the point is that this is live and it's hard to say what happens.

This is a virus blog and it's important to bring this back to the virus. One candidate said yesterday that there is "virtually nothing" that he would have done differently to combat the virus apparently accepting that the US's performance as the worst in the modern world was exactly what he was aiming for. The other has a plan to test, to bolster healthcare and to use this as a means of investing in our infrastructure. The virus is clearly the number one concern of voters according to all the polls and yet it's a topic that the president wants to avoid. In some respects, for 90 minutes tonight, the world will see a new type of reality TV one where the outcome doesn't just impact the contestants but likely the entire planet.

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