from Gene Collier of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,

Early in the week, before many Americans realized they had awakened in the middle of a Stephen King novel, Anthony Fauci was talking in Washington about COVID-19 and about the only way to beat it....

On Tuesday of this week, Fauci went to the podium in front of a fresh lineup of administration bobbleheads and said this:

“What I want to talk to you about today, just for a moment or two, is that we would like the country to realize that as a nation, we can’t be doing the kinds of things we were doing a few months ago. That it doesn’t matter if you’re in a state that has no cases or one case. You have to start taking seriously what you can do now that if the infections do come and they will come, sorry to say, sad to say, they will, but when you’re dealing with an infectious disease, you always have that metaphor that people talk about, that Wayne Gretzky — he doesn’t go where the puck is, he’s going to where the puck is going to be.

“We want to be where the infection is going to be as well as where it is.”...

Dr. Fauci was saying that’s where we need to be, and he said it in the full and apparent knowledge that we are, right now, on the other side of it, the fear side, the side former NHL goalie Mike Liut once described ruefully like this: “I’d see him come down the ice and immediately start thinking, ‘What don’t I see that Wayne’s seeing right now?’”

This is why Fauci chose Gretzky, both for the anticipatory brilliance and for the abject fear of its absence. We’re all chasing the puck and we are nowhere near our Gretzky moment; we have no idea where it’s going.

more