currentaffairs | On a Saturday in early March, an exclusive private all-girls academy
in St. Louis, Missouri held its annual daddy-daughter dance. Unknown to
guests or the Ritz-Carlton staff, a father-daughter pair broke quarantine to attend after being exposed to COVID-19 for days.
The deadly virus had, up until that point, only existed in the news
for the St. Louis region. The elder sister of the girl who attended the
dance was the area’s first confirmed COVID-19 case; she had just
returned from studying abroad in Italy, at a time when the U.S. media
was saturated with apocalyptic images of an Italian healthcare system
under enormous strain.
Videos of Italian nighttime balcony singing, replete with accordions
and tambourines, became the bright point of quarantine solidarity, and
everyone knew the virus was headed for Missouri since it had already hit
New York, and was developing in Chicago. At first, local gatherings
over 1,000 were canceled, then 100, then 10. Much of the Midwest held on
to a sliver of hope that our lower-density region might fare better
than the big cities. Maybe we could pull up the drawbridges, as St. Louis did during the 1918 Spanish influenza, and isolate from the rest of the world; maybe our rusty, hollowed-out downtown would form a rampart against the wave.
Asymptomatic, the elder sister landed in Chicago and boarded an
Amtrak train to St. Louis. She quickly began to show symptoms, and on
Thursday, two days before the dance, she “went to Mercy Hospital and was
evaluated before being sent home to quarantine with her parents, who
were not showing any signs of sickness.” She was tested, her Amtrak
train was taken out of service to be cleaned, and a quarantine request
from St. Louis County was, reportedly, issued that Thursday, March 5th. Her “presumed positive” case was widely reported on Friday.
Panic set in on Sunday, March 8th, as attendees of the
dance—some of the richest families in St. Louis—were ordered by the
County Executive to quarantine inside their $800,000 estates. The
Ritz-Carlton shut down to sterilize its ballroom, bathrooms, and
kitchen. Before the dance, the father was rumored to have visited Deer Creek Coffee near their house in Ladue—locally
referred to as La-douche, one of the wealthiest zip codes in Missouri.
The coffee shop was forced to publicly deny having served the father.
St. Louis County Executive Dr. Sam Page, MD, held a press conference
that underplayed the point: “From everything we can gather, the patient
had conducted herself responsibly and maturely and she is to be
commended for complying with the health department’s instructions.” He added, “The patient’s father did not act consistently with the health department’s instructions.”
The family’s attorney, Neil Bruntrager, materialized to dispute every detail:
“These poor people are being pilloried and vilified,” he said. “They
were being proactive. They were trying to deal with this problem.”
Bruntrager, incidentally, was a well-paid legal representative of both STL Police Officer Jason Stockley, who murdered twenty-four-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith, and Officer Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown.
Starting with St. Louis’ white upper class, COVID-19 spread quickly
to the working-class communities. So far, a disproportionate number of
cases and deaths have been—much like the victims of police
brutality—working-class Black St. Louisians.
0 comments:
Post a Comment