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.

 

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