Molly Beck
Mark Schultz has been hit on both sides of this pandemic.
For six months it was his Oshkosh bar and restaurant, both of which are closed for now after being hammered under state coronavirus restrictions.
Now it is Schultz himself, infected with COVID-19, lying in a hospital intensive care unit, laboring to breathe, unsure of when — or whether — he'll go home.
"I don’t worry much about me, but I got a 10-year-old son and my fiancée — that’s all I care about," he said through tears. "My family is all at home. They are all worried about me. I don’t want them to worry about me."
As he spoke by phone, he struggled with short breaths and was interrupted at times by fits of coughs.
"I don’t want them to go through this," he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "I hope I get to go home."
Schultz, 64, is the co-owner of Oblio's, a bar in Oshkosh that is beloved by a city that now has the highest rate of COVID-19 infection in the country, according to a New York Times analysis.
At Oblio's, Schultz said he has three simple rules before people can belly up to the bar: Don't talk about politics. Don't talk about religion. And don't talk about someone's wife.
Now, as he receives oxygen from a machine, Schultz says he has been pushed to break that first rule by President Donald Trump.
"I just want to punch him," Schultz said. "I always had to keep my politics to myself, but from where I'm sitting now? Those days are over.
"I shouldn't be here."
Trump, he said, should have been more upfront with the public from the beginning about the dangers of the coronavirus, should have acted quicker, promoted wearing face masks. If he had, Schultz believes, maybe the pandemic would not have struck his community so hard, might not have wound up at his door.
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