The worst pandemic in a century has outlasted our attention span – Roll Call

By this standard, we would have stopped following World War II in early 1944 because all those battle reports from tiny islands in the Pacific were getting so tiresome.

This is the month when the death toll from the coronavirus in America is estimated to have hit the 1 million mark. That’s greater than the population of six states plus the District of Columbia. Those who died from the pandemic would have been entitled, in effect, to two Senate seats and maybe two House seats.

Instead, our political culture has consigned the dead to a cubbyhole marked “Yesterday’s News.” Half-forgotten, as well, are those millions who are suffering from the debilitating symptoms of long COVID-19.
It remains baffling why, when it comes to the pandemic, Congress refuses to do what it does best — throw money at problems.

With the national debt at $30 trillion, why are we quibbling over $22.5 billion? Why, when new strains of the virus can circle the globe in days, are we balking at spending an additional $5 billion on worldwide pandemic relief?

Maybe it was inevitable that the pandemic would become just another battleground in our polarized politics. But the undeniable truth is that the coronavirus minimizers (“It’s just like a mild case of the flu”) and the anti-vaxxers have won.