Accidental hero Rudy Gobert makes North America sit up and take notice of the coronavirus

Rudy Gobert apologized Thursday. To a lot of people the seven-foot Frenchman was now a sort of le patient zero, the NBA all-star who tested positive for the coronavirus on Wednesday night and stopped sports in North America by Thursday afternoon. Gobert was reported to have been careless in the Utah Jazz locker room, touching the property of teammates, touching teammates, goofing around. Sure, there was a virus out there, whatever. It’s like the flu, right? I heard somewhere it was like the flu.

In the 24 hours after Gobert, the NBA, NHL, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, the ATP, the Champions League and more were suspended or postponed. All of NCAA sports, including the March Madness basketball tournament, were cancelled. The cascade continued: Broadway suspended the theatre season, the Junos were cancelled, schools were closed. Disneyland, too. It had closed three times since 1955.

Maybe we had been sleepwalking. Not everywhere, not all of us, not always. But one problem with the world right now, in the era of smartphones and falling empires and history, is that everything is too much to take in. The world flattens, and the shocks — a ferry sinking, kids in cages, earthquakes and wildfires and the death of a child — become a sort of mental wallpaper, if you let them.

That can apply to a pandemic, too. Washington state has an outbreak, right? Is that like how Flint had lead in the water? Italy and Iran are near collapse; wasn’t Greece, once? Isn’t the Middle East always hot? New Rochelle, N.Y., is under containment and the National Guard is delivering food. Isn’t that a Seinfeld reference? Glad I don’t live there.

And then Rudy Gobert, who treated the coronavirus as a joke, tested positive, and sports stopped. It resulted in the most significant public acknowledgment in North America that this was an emergency, that the coronavirus outbreak was real. Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, tested positive, sure, in Australia.

But Tom Hanks testing positive doesn’t shut down movies, TV, the theatre and high school plays. Tom Hanks testing positive just shuts down Tom Hanks.

“Honestly,” said one sports executive, sounding drained. “Rudy Gobert saved America. He really did.”

On Wednesday of this week, for the fourth consecutive day, the Centers for Disease Control indicated on its website that it didn’t test anybody for the coronavirus. The site shows the numbers: zero, zero, zero, zero. On Wednesday, public health labs in the United States tested eight people by the end of the business day. In the grand scheme of things, this was a scandal. In a pandemic, it was insane.

The United States, as of Thursday morning, had 1,242 positive tests. By the afternoon, 1,670. The real numbers are different.

“Frankly, the testing has been going very smooth,” President Donald Trump told reporters. “If you go to the right agency, if you go to the right area, you get the test.”

“The idea of anybody getting it, easily, the way people in other countries are doing it, we’re not set up for that,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the most trusted face of the American administration’s coronavirus task force, told a House committee of the testing gap. “Do I think we should be? Yes, but we’re not.”

In Ohio, health department director Amy Acton told a news conference that community spread patterns indicated that one per cent of Ohio residents were believed to have the virus. Ohio’s population is 11.7 million people, so that adds up to 117,000. Ohio, at that moment, had five positive tests.

Those numbers are a horror. If that pattern was only applied across the states of New York, California, Washington, Florida, Texas, Georgia and Illinois — all of whom are among the leaders in both population and total positives — that would make 1.4 million Americans walking around with a virus that can manifest as low-symptom, or even asymptomatic. It is, of course, not limited to those states. And perhaps that number.

Gobert’s teammate Donovan Mitchell also tested positive, on a day after Mitchell felt healthy enough to play in a basketball game that didn’t happen. It was going to be one of many, and would have been a prelude to more hockey and basketball and baseball games and gatherings of all kind right through Thursday night.

But Gobert stopped all the clocks, and Gobert said sorry. If it wasn’t him, it would have been somebody else. But it was him, first.

“I have gone through so many emotions since learning of my diagnosis … mostly fear, anxiety, and embarrassment,” Gobert wrote on Instagram. “The first and most important thing is I would like to publicly apologize to the people that I may have endangered. At the time, I had no idea I was even infected. I was careless and make no excuse.

“I hope my story serves as a warning and causes everyone to take this seriously.”

These were the days the virus became undeniable. By the end of Thursday the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was in self-isolation because his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, had come back from the United Kingdom with flu-like symptoms; she tested positive for COVID-19. A baby was among the 17 new cases in Ontario, at North York General Hospital. And with cases flooding in, the Mayor of New York said, “we’re getting into a situation where the only analogy is war.” Meanwhile, Canada started to pull back public gatherings, here and there. We can do more.

Pandemics are bracing, if only because they cannot be bluffed, legislated, ignored, spun, or considered fake news, at least for very long. You can’t argue with them, and they do not go away unless you do the right thing. They are also a lesson in government: You find out who cut public health and who did not, who closed the pandemic office and who did not, who tried to dismantle the state in the name of low taxes, or red tape, or whatever else is code for drowning the government in a bathtub so the private sector can make a buck off it.

In America, Trump had spent a month promising the virus would vanish, claiming it was just the flu, claiming it was because of immigrants, claiming a vaccine was coming soon, something that makes you better, relatively soon. He said there were enough tests, tests for everyone. Media friendly to the president claimed it was a scheme to discredit his work on the economy, and attacked credible public officials. It became something to argue about. It was just, in today’s climate, how the game is played.

Trump’s televised Oval Office speech Wednesday night did not mention testing; while misreading his speech he did close the borders with Europe, but not the United Kingdom, where Trump has three golf courses and a sympathetic ear in government; in Canada, Conservative leadership candidate Peter MacKay said Canada should mimic him and cut off Europe, too.

England’s Premier League suddenly found the coronavirus everywhere Thursday and postponed matches, and the U.K.’s chief science officer estimated the peak of the outbreak will likely be between 10 and 14 weeks from now. At that moment, Britain had half the identified cases that America did. The NBA’s infectious disease adviser told the teams the estimate for total infections in the United States was between 50 and 100 million people.

Trump probably didn’t know any of that Wednesday. It felt, at that moment, like America had no government in any meaningful way.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford on Thursday said of potential March break travellers, “I just want the families and their children to have a good time. Go away, have a good time, enjoy yourselves and we’re going to be monitoring the situation, as it changes every single day. I just want (families) to enjoy themselves right now.”

And in Alberta and B.C., public health officials recommended against travel outside of Canada. In Quebec, the Premier asked anyone coming back from abroad to self-quarantine for two weeks.

A virus is democratic and tends toward the ruthless, sometimes fatal truth, and getting it wrong means people will die. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro called the virus a media fantasy, and one of his aides, who met with Trump, tested positive. Bolsonaro had to be tested, too. Trump, it was claimed, was not tested.

And this is how Rudy Gobert … well, he can’t save America. But he is an ignorant accidental hero of sorts, if only because he was so heedless and ignorant and important that after he got the virus people couldn’t pretend that life was normal anymore. Washington can burn, and New Rochelle can disappear, and a baby can get the virus in Toronto, one poor baby. And we could ignore it, if we wanted.

But one giant Frenchman acted like the virus was a flu, or a hoax, or just another report on the evening news that become the TV in the diner in the first reel of the disaster movie, if you thought about it. And he got the virus, and sports went kablooie, and so many other things followed.

By denying reality, Rudy Gobert forced reality onto centre stage, and closed Disneyland. He probably saved lives. Now we are having more real conversations about social distancing, about how this virus is so eerily contagious, about how we need to work together to get things done, about how it’s not the flu. It’s a start. It’s something.

The coronavirus is here, floating in the air or dancing in our airways, and the sleepwalking continent may finally be awake. It is a new day, and nearly everything has changed. What happens next, to a degree, is up to us.

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