We Will All Cough Together When We Cough

(apologies to Tom Lehrer)
[to the tune of “We Will All Go Together When We Go”]

When you go to the hospital
From Coronavirus transmittal
You will know COVID-19 has come to you
Though you doubted the pandemic
Now you wish for something chemic-
al, a vaccine or a cure to see you through
(You wish they’d hurry)

No more face masks, no more tissue
Gee, your family will miss you
You left the house and then you touched your face
For if the cough that sprays on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too
In three months we’ll lose half the human race

And we will all cough together when we cough
For we could not afford to take time off
Universal insurance
Might have been some deterrence
Now we will all cough together when we cough

We will all hack together when we hack
There’ll be too much morbidity to track
We will spread our pneumonia
From New York to California
All our Netflix marathons will fade to black

Oh, we will all wheeze together when we wheeze
There’ll be no ambulance despite our pleas
We will trade “see you laters”
From our matching respirators
No inheritors will claim our legacies

And we will all plague together when we plague
We’ll have left our last wishes rather vague
We will cause a complication
With the city’s sanitation
Let no one judge our hygiene but The Hague

Oh we will all ill together when we ill
No research funding, no vaccine, no pill
Just sing out a good nighty
When you catch C O V I D
In the afterlife you can skip the bill

Oh we will all phlegm together when we phlegm
There will no longer be an us and them
We will spread our contagion
To each Hoosier, Yank, and Cajun
We’ll unite in global chaos and mayhem

We will all go together when we go
Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco
When we all become infectious
And the hospitals reject us
Yes we all will go together
When we all go together
Yes, we all will go together when we go