49. Fatigue

I’ve heard “Covid fatigue” and “election fatigue,” and distance-learning fatigue is settling in with students, parents, and teachers. Add working from home fatigue; after a honeymoon period of working in pajamas, chatter about work and life over coffee and lunch sounds good. 

 I’ve taken my own fatigue to reading about the last really big one, the Spanish Flu of 1918. It killed a lot more Americans—over 600,000— than the World War I, but it got swallowed up in that war and in puzzlement over the disease itself. 

 

The puzzlement: 100 years ago health care officisals scurried after treatments and tracing; they quarantined, masked, closed theaters and opened schools to care for children at risk in crowded tenements. And like now, these efforts were global—as was the blame. It became “Spanish Flu” because Spain was a neutral country in the war and did not censor its newspapers. The flu was rampant in America and in the trenches, but nothing was written about it and when it was covered openly in the Spanish press it became the Spanish Flu. 

 

It’s eerily familiar now, with some wanting to name Covid for a country, and countries competing over vaccines and remedies; a small group plugs away at tracking origins, just as researchers have tracked and speculated on the origins of our 100 year old cousin flu. 

 

Meanwhile, the spread of the Covid-19 virus waxes and wanes. The numbers of positive and negative tests, of new cases and deaths, tick on giant doomsday clocks on our computer screens. 

 

It’s exhausting—fatigue sets in. But pay attention: Most of the people dying are young—no sweat off me, the frat party exhaustee says. “Underlying conditions,” you say, and you are robust and healthy and… but what about that recent sore throat and cough? And how well do you smell? And was that really someone you know who showed up on Facebook with a positive test and asked please for you to wear a mask? 

 

They wrestled with that 1918 version for at least three years, hid or disregarded it sometimes, thought it was over sometimes. Even today some researchers are chasing its chemical truths, settling on origins in pigs or ducks, worried that we humans keep getting into the ways of wild animals and that domesticated ducks are in the millions of ducks and still get involved with their wild cousins. 

 

It’s exhausting, and we’re not yet one year in.

 

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