It has been barely possible for our small news team, let alone any single human, to keep up with all of the federal, state and local changes that have developed in order to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

We have had outstanding coverage by Emily Massingill and Adam Krebs talking about not only how our day-to-day lives are changing, but how popular culture is changing.

We are living in interesting, twisted times — both dangerous and frightening.

I started working in the professional media in Wisconsin in 1989. I have covered many, many stories — international, national, state and local. This is unique. It is something most working journalists have no experience handling. They may mention the Swine flu, Bird Flu, SARS, H1N1, Ebola … But have any of those shut down the NCAA men’s basketball tournament? Have any of those changed our society to the point where you can’t find a roll of toilet paper? Let’s not play revisionist history. We’re in truly new ground here.

Rather than covering the preventative measures, they’ve inflated the infectious nature of the virus. This is not Stephen King’s “Captain Trips” from “The Stand.” This is, right now, the regular flu without a vaccine.

Could it mutate and become much worse? Sure, that’s what viruses do. But it could also mutate and become less threatening.

We should be glad that about 10 days ago President Donald Trump stopped using his opinions to guide his public messages regarding COVID-19 and actually started listening to the best scientists in the world at the Center for Disease Control. Science is important, because it’s based on facts and its probabilities are based on series of facts. It’s not like some chump — “President Pele” — kicking his golf ball down the fairway and saying a 30-yard chip is a “gimme.”

But hey, I don’t want to get political, because I believe if Joe Biden were president he’d scream at people, “Your AR-14 ain’t gonna help you now! Want to watch me do push ups? How about watching me do some lunges while I chew on my wife’s fingers?”

Wow, we are truly living in trying times.

COVID-19 is a virus and it will mutate and change. Instead of thinking we’ve gotten through it in a month, it might come right back in a new form that is stronger and hit us again.

Wash your hands regularly and vigorously, practice good cough etiquette and stay home if you have a fever.

China — as I’ve printed before — is likely the horrific launcher of these viruses due to their wild-animal food markets where people love to eat bats, snakes, monkeys — and gosh knows what else — cooked in a very unsanitary and a poorly monitored environment.

My biggest hacked-off moment in the last week came on March 13 when Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian decided to manipulate reality to say the United States was the origin of the COVID-19 virus. He said it was planted in China by U.S. athletes attending the October 2019 World Military Games.

Without providing any scientific evidence, basis or even a flat fact to begin his tirade, Zhao said, the United States “CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in U.S.? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be U.S Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!”

Make no mistake, dear friends, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who recently obliterated all term limits and elections, thus declaring himself the totalitarian leader of China for life, has cronies like Zhao spewing incomprehensible conspiracy theories. Mr. Zhao, bird flu, SARS, H1N1, they’re all coming out of your unsanitized, unregulated, health-disaster food markets. Fact.

So, for the next several weeks to months, our country will go into major virus lockdown because China can’t have a couple health inspectors preventing people from making food from horrific ingredients our culture wouldn’t even put into dog food.

There may be just an enormous cultural misunderstanding here. Many people in China like to eat bats, some don’t have refrigerators, clean water, proper food storage facilities and they’re all oppressed and live in a pollution-filled bubble of respiratory death.

I wish I was wrong, but since China stopped public transportation, the skies above Beijing have turned blue — a color residents only see during transportation embargos during the Chinese New Year.

We must give thanks for our blessings and wish the same for our neighbors. We hope COVID-19 passes with few illnesses and deaths. Don’t think of China as a place where all wear gray, bow to statues of Mao and share their riches with their fellow man. There are 4.4 million millionaires in China. Certainly those at the top of China’s food chain aren’t eating tidbits from Wuhan’s food market.

— Matt Johnson is publisher of the Monroe Times. His column is published Wednesdays.