53. Surge

Yesterday, Election Day, there were 108,000 new Covid-19 cases and 1201 deaths recorded in the United States. Oregon numbers continued to climb—near 600 cases again, and rural counties, long quiet in this pandemic, are showing upticks. Wallowa County recorded three new cases yesterday. The Wallowa School is still half shut down due to at least one official and more unofficial cases.

 

Why? Is this a normal uptick with colder weather and more indoor activity? Are immune systems compromised with fall colds and flus partially to blame? Is back to college—and back to school—responsible for moving it around? Could all of the close gatherings around electioneering and the election have contributed? 

 

I will remind people that in 1918, when the Spanish Flu, or Influenza, was circling the globe and the Great War was coming to its awful conclusion, war’s end in the fall of that year sparked a huge wave of disease and death in this country and across the world. The virus, which had baffled health experts on all sides of the war and in non-combatant countries, gathered strength in fall, worked its destruction in league with pneumonia and other diseases, and exploded with the celebrations of war’s end. 

 

US citizens danced in the streets after the November 11, 1918—some irony in the date—signing of a peace treaty. Soldiers came home, loved ones went to meet, and the virus danced the people towards 600,000 American deaths. Masks, quarantines, and other measures that had been carefully put in place to slow the disease in its earlier days were abandoned with relief from a greater evil—or so the people thought. 

 

What do we do? Common sense and the experts tell us to: ONE, wear masks; TWO, keep our distances; and THREE, restrict our travel. For the next three weeks, citizens in Greece will have to announce intentions by cell phone before leaving their homes! Let’s not go there. 

 

But let’s do the obvious, and now that the election is over, can we take all of the politics out of it?

 

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