The president* agreed to close the border with Canada on Wednesday morning but, luckily, the news still manages to break quarantine. When this Great Whatever is finally done, there are going to be thousands of small-scale heroes to whom we are going to owe a great deal. For example, as reported by the CBC, this fellow right here.

The first case of COVID-19 had just been reported in the province and a collective sense of panic had gripped many in the province and on the reserve. "People thought we were going into lockdown," said Chief Matthew Peigan. When a picture of the boxes being carried to two seacans outside the store was posted on the First Nation's private Facebook page, speculation spread. Peigan has since set the record straight — there was no lockdown. Rather, Pasqua First Nation is taking precautions, and a lot of them.

He had the foresight to get in the order a week-and-a-half ago before the first case of COVID-19 hit, as he imagined that people would start panic-buying and stockpiling goods, which did happen an hour away in the city of Regina about a week after the order was placed. It's one of many plans, some down to minute details, that Peigan started making months ago...

Peigan knows the exact date when he started digging into the coronavirus — it was January 7, 2020, the same day that the mystery illness that was spreading in Wuhan, China, got a name...That week, Peigan sent an email about regional preparations for when the illness arrived. At the time, he was told by the tribal council that covers his region that COVID-19 was low risk in Canada. "My comment was that, 'That doesn't matter. The way that this seems is that we're going to be impacted anyway and that we should be getting ready.'...

"I'd rather have a plan in place and nothing come about than having no plan and then we end up panicking," he said.



Every world leader should have that tattooed on their foreheads. I can think of one good forehead on which to start. From The New York Times:

The mayor of Seattle wanted “mass tents” from the federal government to rapidly build shelters to house people in quarantine. The state of New York pleaded for help from the Army Corps of Engineers to quickly build hospitals. Oregon’s governor repeatedly pressed the Department of Health and Human Services for hundreds of thousands of respirators, gowns and gloves, face shields or goggles.

Chief Matthew Peigan could teach world leaders a thing or two about crisis management. CBC

After so many pleas, President Trump moved on Tuesday to begin enlisting much of his government in what the White House had called for weeks a “whole of government” approach to the rampaging coronavirus...

Yet despite promises of a “whole of government” effort, key agencies — like the Army Corps of Engineers, other parts of the Defense Department, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Veterans Affairs — had not been asked to play much of a role. Even after Mr. Trump committed to supporting the states on Tuesday, the Army Corps of Engineers said it still had not received direction from the administration.

This is an astonishing tale of ineptitude and neglect.

Oregon sent a letter to Vice President Mike Pence on March 3 asking for 400,000 N95 masks. For days, it got no response, and only by March 14 received its first shipment, of 36,800 masks. But there was a problem. Most of the equipment they got was well past the expiration date and so “wouldn’t be suitable for surgical settings,” the state said. New York City also put in a request for more than 2 million masks and only received 76,000; all were expired, said Deanne Criswell, New York City’s emergency management commissioner.

Consider the comparison. The chief of a First Nations reservation in Saskatchewan sees this coming from months off and prepares to protect his people accordingly, and as well as he can. It’s now the middle of March, and the President* of the United States is just getting around to committing the fullness of the government’s power to the fight against the disease that Chief Peigan saw coming in January.

Each day, he is monitoring where the new cases in Saskatchewan are being reported, how people contracted COVID-19, and deciding whether he will block access onto Pasqua First Nation. Peigan wanted to premeditate his membership's concerns. He ordered the cleaning supplies because he knew that the high number of people on social assistance regularly have to decide between food and cleaning supplies.

One of these guys is a hero.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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