Unlike previous lethal viruses, this one will define a major election
For at least the fourth time in a century, voters will go to the polls amid a lethal viral outbreak, but unlike previous elections held in the shadow of flu, polio and HIV, the novel coronavirus — and the destruction it has unleashed — will almost certainly define the 2020 contest.
From a single case in Snohomish County, Wash., on Jan. 21, the coronavirus has mushroomed in less than 10 months to a widening scourge currently infecting nearly 100,000 Americans a day. As Election Day voters prepared to cast their ballots Tuesday, the medical examiner in El Paso was adding a fourth refrigerated “mobile morgue,” and hospitals in northwest Wisconsin were canceling elective procedures to save beds for patients with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
Two-thirds of the public now personally know one of the 9.25 million people who have tested positive for the virus — a new high — polls show. And even more think the worst of the pandemic is yet to come.
“We’ve never had an Election Day in the fog of a pandemic like this,” said Howard Markel, a medical historian at the University of Michigan. “It will, perhaps, be called the pandemic election.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/unlike-previous-lethal-viruses-this-one-will-define-a-major-election/2020/11/02/4b5f2574-1d2a-11eb-90dd-abd0f7086a91_story.html