I would like to have had a grandfather. He was a cowboy, got into bar-fights, and twice disarmed badguys who tried to hold up his mother's business. My poor parents sweated out summers in the 1950s when swimming pools were emptied and movie theaters shut down because nobody knew what caused crippling poliomyelitis or how it was transmitted (when was the last time you heard the horrible phrase "iron lung"?). I had one kind of flu after another in my adult years until I started refusing flu shots.

Yesterday I became so thoroughly disgusted with the wall-to-wall, run-for-the-hills, hide-under-the-bed coverage of the Corona Virus on FOX News that I finally changed the channel and watched Ancient Aliens all day. The occasional, possibly accidental occurrence of the truth was vastly greater. Being a science fiction writer, and a firm believer in historical conspiracies, I have entertained the notion that this buglet was deliberately fabricated by the Chinese government as a bio-weapon to inflict on Western Civilization, but that, with typical communist incompetence, they let it escape to backfire on them (lost in all the drama is the fact that Chinese mortuary workers are complaining—as they did in Nazi Germany—that the crematory furnaces are burning out from being overworked) but that it has generally been a bust wherever else it has spread. Where was John Galt when they really needed him?