Pandemic 13--COVID Comes Close

Dr. Fauci told us something like this would happen, that rates of infection would go down in some of the hard-hit urban areas with masks, isolation, quarantine, tracking, etc., but then spike up in rural areas as the virus creeps across the country.

Oregon, which has been sitting well, is now one of 21 states with an upsurge in COVID cases, and our neighboring Union County, with 218 cases in the last two days, is the big reason for Oregon’s big spike.

We—Oregonians—were so good and careful for weeks, following Governor Brown’s orders, closing down classrooms, stores, churches, galleries and non-profits. We supported our restaurants with take-out orders and arranged alternative high school graduations. We waited on routine medical procedures while docs and administrators prepared for the worst.

And then we reopened. Of course there had been some in the church and business communities who thought we never should have shut down—those who thought the whole thing a hoax, and those who thought we should take the Swedish plan towards herd immunity.

This week’s flare-up in Union County owes at least in part to church services and/or a wedding in a church that defied the Governor’s orders re crowd size and distancing. And it—and any further contagion expansion—owes to parishioners and community members who thought “hoax” or “herd immunity”—or who believed this is all about old and sick people and not about me.

In a Zoom presentation yesterday at the Josephy Center where I work, Dr. Clay Josephy surmised that we, individually, will take COVID-19 seriously when someone we knows dies of it. Those who think hoax and Sweden, birthday and graduation parties, the church in Union County, and a Baker County Judge who argued that Governor Brown’s orders were illegal, might all be bringing us closer to that reality.

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