145. Germany

“By the end of winter Germans will be vaccinated, recovered, or dead.”

 

In the cacophony of news about Covid spikes, new vaccines, mandates, protests, and new variants of Covid-19, this is a sobering sentence. It slipped across the radio waves this morning, along with accounts of spikes in Germany, lockdowns in Austria, and a fight between France and England over refugees. 

 

I’ve become religious about reading the Oregon Health Authority’s daily accounts of diseases and deaths in our state, county by county. I feel an emotional lift when the state trendline shows “down”; the past couple of weeks of zeros and ones for Wallowa County have been good for the soul.

 

So, when Wallowa County jumped back to five cases on Tuesday and five again on Wednesday, my mood dropped. And then this quote from Germany on National Public Radio this morning. The whole Covid thing has a rhythm and a story line all its own—and we struggle to catch up and make sense of it: There are 7200 people in Wallowa County and a trickle of winter visitors. The trickle swelled this week with the holiday—the number of Idaho, Washington, and other “foreign” license plates on Joseph’s Main Street outnumbered Oregon this morning. The swelling will go down by Monday.

 

Some 60 percent of those of us who live here are vaccinated, 742 are recovered or in recovery, and 13 have died. New vaccinations plod along, and there must be hundreds of children under five, but still, what will four months of winter do to the 1500 or 2000 currently unvaccinated living with us?

 

In the best case, a good share of that number will be vaccinated, another, smaller number will be in recovery—the new “after” pill will be working its wonders, and Oregon and the nation’s trend numbers will keep going down. We’ll be in some semblance of stalemate, gaining on the semi-mythical herd immunity. 

 

On the other hand, legions of visitors from poorly vaccinated Idaho and vaccine deniers from everywhere will come with the spring, the new South African variant might gain strength, and Oregon and national trendlines will be going the wrong direction. 

 

In which case I’ll be counting—and remembering the quote from the November guy in Germany, looking for my next booster.

 

# # # 

144. Schools

I’ve been thinking. Years from now, when this pandemic is behind us or we are living in some kind of standoff with it, that we will look back and say that our biggest early mistake was in closing schools. We’ll say that we should have hired more teachers and raised the wages of teachers and counselors and teachers’ aides immediately, and paid engineers and architects and social workers, to design distance and masking programs. And then tested the hell out of everyone and kept kids in schools. 

 

The school tsar in New York kept kids in school during the great 1918 flu pandemic. He said that his students lived in crowded and poor conditions, and that school meant respite and food and some strength for the poorest. 

 

This current pandemic showed fractured lines between rich and poor right away. It meant less food for many students, and, we now know, left millions of students behind academically. My nephew, who teaches in Oakland, spent part of the early pandemic finding hot spots and lining at-home students up with digital access. Covid 19 did early and still does leave thousands of students depressed and some big number suicidal. Will they catch up?

 

Teachers too (and nurses, but that is another story) have become worried and exhausted. Would that we had hired more of them and supported the hell out of them, made their classes smaller and raised their salaries by 20 or 50 percent, and then made them first in line when the vaccines hit. I’m guessing that such early valuation of their importance would have led to wide-spread and eager vaccine takers. As it is, we are losing teachers—and bus drivers and school nurses and counselors. 

 

But, years from now, when Covid is subdued or a constant and controlled companion, we will look back at how hard this whole damned thing was on moms. Yes, dads have had to adjust, spend more time with children and help at home, but moms have carried the biggest burdens. They have become teachers and playmates and confidants of children away from peers. They’ve left jobs they loved and/or jobs they’ve needed to compensate for closed schools. Those who couldn’t quit have overworked and had to leave children on their own; those who’ve left work voluntarily—and often left the husband continue working—have sometimes spiraled into resentment and depression. 

 

Hindsight is easy. But there are lessons.

 

# # #

143. Variolation, Clean Water, Infectious Diseases, and Ducks in Kansas

Maybe one of the reasons that we have so much disagreement in our country about vaccinations is that we learned so little about disease in our history classes. Our textbooks were full of kings and queens, emperors, presidents, and generals. We named wars and religions, charted Columbus and Magellan on their journeys—and fixed dates to them. It was a story of progress from the ancient Greeks and Romans through Luther, the Enlightenment, the New World and the “American Century.” 

The 14th century plague in Europe and the great Irish potato famine got little notice; yet the impact of the plague—the dying of 25 million, a third of Europe’s population was tremendous. We learned about Irish immigration, but the cause of the potato famine—a blight due in part to the reliance on only two of hundreds of varieties of potato brought from the “new world,” was not part of our learning. 

Maybe some teachers passed on the story of Washington using variolation—dried smallpox scabs were blown into the nose of an individual who then contracted a mild form of the disease—to fend off smallpox at Valley Forge, but I doubt any in our generation knew that the technique went back to Asia and migrated to England in the early 1700s, or that it was brought to America by African slaves. How many of us know now about the British Doctor, Edward Jenner, who found in 1796 that English milkmaids, having been exposed to cowpox, seemed relatively immune to smallpox, and promoted vaccinations? How many of us know that the vaccination efforts of the World Health Organization have now eradicated smallpox from the globe?

Covid vaccine proponents are more likely to point to the success of the polio vaccine in the 1950s and 60s. They don’t explain that the discovery of polio and its transmission—fecal contamination in water—was a long process, or that a higher and stronger incidence of an old infectious disease grew as public sanitation improved. Clean water erased the small contaminations that helped develop immunity in children; new and more virulent infections rose in America in the 1900s with sanitation, and were finally laid to rest by Sabin and Salk vaccines beginning in the 1950s. 

Our new pandemic seems an echo of 1918, and scholars still probing the misnamed Spanish Flu now think that it moved across the world with soldiers, that it struck some 500 million world-wide, and killed 25-50 million, and that it began in Kansas where it passed from ducks to humans.

# # #

 

142. A year and a half

The news today is that Covid has been with us for a year and a half. It’s been over a year since I did my 14-day quarantine, and hard to remember now that it was pre-vaccine, a scary proposition in those long-ago days.

 

The vaccines—even though only 65 % of us are fully vaccinated—have slowed but not stalled the pandemic. Many of the vaccinated and most of those opposing vaccinations are loosening up on masks and social gatherings. Covid keeps creeping around, primarily striking the unbelievers, but we the vaccinated are also susceptible and some of us are getting sick and a few are dying. Nevertheless, most Americans are approaching normal in their day to day lives.

 

The headlines look for the not-normal, and inflation, worker resignations, supply chain failures, and jobs going wanting are what they find. But behind the headlines other things are happening. One such is a big uptick in domestic violence. 

 

In Bend, Cassi MacQueen, director of Saving Grace, Bend’s emergency shelter, said that “From July to September of this year, Saving Grace saw a 20% increase in the need for its emergency shelter services,” and that “survivors have reported marked increases in the intensity and level of violence.”  MacQueen said that the pandemic has created great financial and personal stress on families and disrupted support structures. 

 

Those stresses and the “disrupted” support services—day care, distancing from family, —have led to overall increases in depression and suicide, especially among children. Women have been more likely than men to leave jobs for child care, and nurses, primarily women, have been worked to the bone and many are leaving the profession. 

 

And, of course, most of the abused are women. 

 

Even in Pandemic times, it’s a “man’s world.”

 

# # #

 

141. Endemic

I’ve come to watch the Covid reports from the Oregon Health Authority like some watch the stock market. My moods, and not my wealth, rise and fall with the days’ accountings. And lately the ups and downs have moved like a yoyo. Last week Wallowa County had its first “zero day” in weeks, maybe months. I was hopeful that the end of the tourist season and the gradual increase in locals vaccinated—and the mounting numbers of those who had contracted the disease and thereby acquired at least some immunity—made for good winter prospects in the county.

 

This week it looks like I bought the wrong stock, put money on the wrong horse. Numbers bounced like a yoyo until we hit 9 again yesterday. Biggest number of new cases in a couple of weeks, with daily numbers bouncing from zero up over that recent hopeful time—was it just a week ago that I wrote about the good prospects for winter?

 

Well, tourist season has been replaced by hunting seasons, and we still have many stores, storekeepers and customers who don’t want to wear masks. And we now know that vaccinations do not protect completely—two friends from nearby Umatilla County, completely vaccinated, had recent bouts with the virus. Happy to say they are both healthy and full-functioning now.

 

So it occurs to me that this is what “endemic” looks like. Covid infections rise and fall. More are vaccinated, but some of the vaccinated get at a little sick; some small percentage get more than a little sick, emboldening those fighting against masks and mandates. And t she vaccinated who do get even mildly sick pass on the malady to the unvaccinated child, and….

 

And up and down we go. Hoping that a new variant is not more potent than the one we are dealing with today. Those of us in the “older” category jumping to get our boosters; many of us still wearing our masks—though we often let them droop below the nose.

 

A friend who has visited China many times says that masks are routine—due mostly to air pollution. Looks to me like I’ll be packing my mask for months to come, maybe forever. And getting boosters, and watching the OHA numbers bounce, hearing now and then about someone I know who has died. Endemic. New Normal…

 

# # # 

140. Needles

Needles

 

Tonight, and last night and every night on the TV news there are video recordings of people being vaccinated: now the very young and the old, the Black and Brown, people in nursing homes, on Indian reservations and in neighborhood pharmacies. In every case, we are treated to the shot of the needle going into the arm. 

 

Most of the time we get a face, sometimes a wincing face or one turned away from the vaccinator, eyes closed, the sight of the needle entering one’s own flesh apparently causing mild—or severe—anxiety. Oftentimes the video clips are accompanied by experts touting the need for and effectiveness of vaccines, background music to the main story, a needle going into an arm.

 

Why, when we now know that some significant percentage of people—16-25% in a recent British study—have an inordinate fear of needles, are we given this same program night after night after night? 

 

Two close friends who don’t like needles don’t like to watch other people getting needled. They overcame their fears to get vaccinated, but it wasn’t easy, and our continuing use of the looped video doesn’t make them feel any better.

 

If those of us who believe that vaccinating as many people as possible is what we all need, why don’t we stop this nonsense right now? What good does it do? 

 

And what harm? What if some significant number of the vaccine resistant, and even a few of those espousing personal freedom over everything, are needle phobic? What if we publicly offered sedatives and more private places for them, if we helped rather than taunted?

 

Let’s start by asking our news shows to stop showing video of pained and scared, anxious and bold humans with needles in their arms.