This is an opinion column.

In war, they say the truth dies first. But in pandemics, the truth lives forever, no matter who else does.

We need the truth on our side. Right now, I’m not certain it is.

I’m looking at a map. It’s a map of our country. States with reported cases of coronavirus are bright red. The dwindling handful of states without reported cases are gray. This map will change at any minute, but right now it appears to be a contest to see who will find their infected patients first.

Or last.

Alabama, as it always does, is trailing near the back of the pack. Mississippi got there before us.

This is not good news. It’s a false assurance that nothing is wrong and people in our state government are falling for it, even if everyone else realizes it’s hogwash.

As of Tuesday, Alabama had managed to test 20 people for the virus. That’s not data. That’s blindness.

Officials from the Alabama Department of Public Health said more are being tested now, but they wouldn’t yet tell my colleague Anna Claire Vollers how many more had been tested since Tuesday. Officials said they’d get back to us Friday.

Again, that’s not data. And it’s not reassuring.

Our inability to produce and deploy coronavirus testing has been an embarrassing measurement of our government’s aptitude, not just for our state but also for our nation. South Korea tests more people in a day than our country has tested this entire time. There, the ill and uncertain can be swabbed at drive-thrus, like they’re ordering cheeseburgers. Here, our people are met with a bureaucratic black hole, beyond which event horizon no answer returns.

Truth and data have not been priorities. Just last week, our president told reporters he didn’t want to release cruise ship passengers back into the country because he didn’t want those ill patients counted among our national totals. That isn’t truth.That is playing games with the numbers to hide from the truth, and you cannot defeat a pandemic with accounting fraud.

The president said anyone could get a test now. That’s clearly not true, either.

This week, as the pandemic worsened, the president’s defenders on Fox News and talk radio continued to call the disease a hoax or an overreaction meant to bring down the administration in the polls. When real reporters did their jobs — sharing what we know and asking hard questions — the president blasted the “Enemy of the People” on Twitter and called CNN “Fake News!” at the White House.

Still, there are people out there who believe this nonsense. Worse, some of them are in charge. As an Alabama Republican consultant I spoke to Thursday morning said, “We’ve got people here in the State House who believe this thing hasn’t come here because we love Donald Trump so much.”

And there are public officials in Alabama making public policy based on the president’s bravado and our public health system’s anemic numbers.

Earlier this week, I asked Alabama’s top elections official, Secretary of State John Merrill a simple question: What’s the plan for the runoff if there’s a public health emergency? He insisted that such a thing probably wouldn’t happen here and it was nonsense to even talk about it.

“The Office of the Alabama Secretary of State will continue to operate under the parameters of the law, despite what other states across the country are doing or what Kyle Whitmire wants,” Merrill said further in a press release after that column ran.

But what’s important to note here is that Merrill insists all this is premature because the state says there are no reported cases.

Who else believes that?

Fear and panic are dangerous things, but the only thing more panic-inducing than reliable data is a government that hides important facts or operates without regard for what we already know.

This thing is in Nashville. This thing is in Pensacola. This thing is in Rome, Georgia, right across our state line. This thing is in Mississippi, bright red on that map.

This thing is here. The truth isn’t.

Alabama has to do better. America has to do better.

We are behind. And we have to catch up with the truth before the truth catches up with us.

Kyle Whitmire is the state political columnist for the Alabama Media Group.

You can follow his work on his Facebook page, The War on Dumb. And on Twitter. And on Instagram.