During Wednesday’s coronavirus press conference, many key protocols and emergency measures were announced, including the invocation of the Defense Production Act and regulations enabling doctors and medical professionals to practice across state lines.
One call to action that was seemingly lost amidst the deluge of important information was made by official coronavirus response coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx, who appeared to ask for help from gamers in the fight against coronavirus.
“It may have been that the millennial generation, our largest generation, our future generation, that will carry us through for the next multiple decades… [there] may be a disproportional number of infections among that group,” Birx said.
While Birx’s description of millennials as the “future generation” may be technically inaccurate – millennials are between ages 24 and 38, which is significantly older than Generation Z – the call to action she later shared reasonated with many gamers.
“So again, I’m gonna call on that generation, that’s part of that group that brought us innovation, particularly throughout all of their ability to look around corners and skip through games, um, I always went level by level, I didn’t realize you could go from level 3 to level 7,” Birx said, apparently referencing the “warp whistle” from Super Mario Bros. 3.
Birx added, “That’s what they’ve taught us, they look for things we don’t see.”
Video of the conference was shared on Twitter with the caption “Did… Did the Trump administration just ask gamers to rise up?”
https://twitter.com/Trigg3rH4ppyDOS/status/1240328969775468544
https://twitter.com/TheRalphRetort/status/1240332190220763136
Gamers in the Twitter replies appeared eager to take up the mantle of defending America, just as they have in done in Black Ops 2 on Hijacked so many times before.