158. Chaos Update

 

The recent surge in Covid cases and hospitalizations, CDC’s confusing “guidelines” on tests and quarantines, the airline turmoil over the holidays, the confrontations between teachers unions and school and city administrators in Chicago, schools and colleges dancing between in-person and virtual classes, job resignations and health care worker shortages, competition for hospital beds, and the open breaks between the masked and unmasked under the “Masks Required” sign in our local Safeway all bring chaos to mind. 

 

And “chaos” brings me to the book I am reading, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The two are married, and “Nic” Kristof is trying to run for Oregon governor from his childhood home in Yamhill. That is not the subject of this post! The book starts with the kids Kristof grew up with in Yamhill, and traces the severe declines in some families as blue-collar jobs are lost and alcohol, drugs, and violence increasingly permeate lives. The authors then go back and forth between Yamhill and other places in the country with stories of despair and others of hope. This morning, as I read this passage, the connection between Covid and Chaos and its impact on children sent chills:

 

“Evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and economics underscores that a crucial window for helping American children is in the first five years, partly because they often suffer lifelong brain damage when raised in chaos and deprivation… they are exposed to ‘toxic stress’ and their brains are flooded with cortisol, a stress hormone that changes brain anatomy.” 

 

With the pandemic, children are in school or daycare one day, and out the next. Rates of depression and suicide talk and attempts among teenagers are spiking. Parents are working from home one day, and not working at all the next. Parents disagree with each other or their neighbors on masks and vaccinations and Covid. My guess—although I have seen nothing official—is that stress levels in homes over work and child-rearing and housekeeping are on the rise. My guess is that alcohol and legal and illegal drug use are also on the rise.  

 

I don’t know where this leaves us, except to remember that the impact of our own actions and words on our children and grandchildren can be immense, and that kind words and caring for them and for all the small ones that are in our lives or just happen into them momentarily might be the most important things we do today. 

 

# # #

 

 

 

 

 

157. Chaos

The recent surge in Covid cases and hospitalizations, CDC’s confusing “guidelines” on tests and quarantines, the airline turmoil over the holidays, the confrontations between teachers unions and school and city administrators in Chicago, schools and colleges dancing between in-person and virtual classes, job resignations and health care worker shortages, competition for hospital beds, and the open breaks between the masked and unmasked under the “Masks Required” sign in our local Safeway all bring chaos to mind. 

And “chaos” brings me to the book I am reading, Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. The two are married, and “Nic” Kristof is trying to run for Oregon governor from his childhood home in Yamhill. That is not the subject of this post! The book starts with the kids Kristof grew up with in Yamhill, and traces the severe declines in some families as blue-collar jobs are lost and alcohol, drugs, and violence increasingly permeate lives. The authors then go back and forth between Yamhill and other places in the country with stories of despair and others of hope. This morning, as I read this passage, the connection between Covid and Chaos and its impact on children sent chills:

“Evidence from neuroscience, psychology, and economics underscores that a crucial window for helping American children is in the first five years, partly because they often suffer lifelong brain damage when raised in chaos and deprivation… they are exposed to ‘toxic stress’ and their brains are flooded with cortisol, a stress hormone that changes brain anatomy.” 

With the pandemic, children are in school or daycare one day, and out the next. Rates of depression and suicide talk and attempts among teenagers are spiking. Parents are working from home one day, and not working at all the next. Parents disagree with each other or their neighbors on masks and vaccinations and Covid. My guess—although I have seen nothing official—is that stress levels in homes over work and child-rearing and housekeeping are on the rise. My guess is that alcohol and legal and illegal drug use are also on the rise.  

I don’t know where this leaves us, except to remember that the impact of our own actions and words on our children and grandchildren can be immense, and that kind words and caring for them and for all the small ones that are in our lives or just happen into them momentarily might be the most important things we do today. 

# # #

 

 

 

 

155. Holy S(**&

The big difference between the 1918 Influenza and our Covid-19 can be said in a word: speed. The speeds with which news travels, medicine develops, and people and the virus we carry move. 

Here in Wallowa County we’d about settled in for a long winter’s nap, watching the snow fall from the sky and drift across our roads and yards. Some of us had tried to wash off the old year in New Year’s Day’s polar plunge in Wallowa Lake—while others vowed they’d never go in that lake in mid-summer.

 

We were finding routines, working from home again, but this time because it was too damned windy to go out and our cars might have blown off the road or been covered by a snowplow’s shower. When we woke from that January 2 storm and went to stores for milk and bread, we wore our masks or we did not. Those of us who are mask wearers put them on and off like a pair of mittens as we go in and out of stores. The unmasked don’t heckle us and we don’t heckle them. It’s a kind of standoff—although I know there is muttering from our side that the unmasked and unvaccinated should pay their own hospital bills when the Covid hit sthem, and I imagine the anti-vaxxers and maskers chuckle or fume quietly about our silliness. 

 

And then what? A month ago we hear about this new strain of the Covid that is faster than its predecessors, and that it seems to move right through the vaccinated. Yes, the second and third paragraphs in the news stories opine that the vaccinated suffer less and are hospitalized less frequently, and Dr. Fauci bravely takes the TV mike to say once again that our best defense is vaccinating the unvaccinated and wearing our masks. It is wearying.

 

And then yesterday, January 4, Covid explodes in Oregon, with 4540 new cases, and over 500 hospitalized. And we learn that a friend brought Covid back from a California holiday and another tested positive on returning from Arizona. And the news carries new warnings and directions on testing and quarantining and isolating (and what is the one and what the other?).

We’re well into the second year of this disease, and the second or third or fourth wave, depending on who is counting and where. 

 

A quick look back at 1918 shows an eerily similar trajectory. Mostly by train and troopship, the 1918 influenza circled the globe in 3 or 4 waves and infected some 500 million, a third of the world’s population. It killed 675,000 Americans when our population was 110 million. It petered out with less virulent outbreaks about two years after it started. 

 

We have vaccines—and we have airplanes and personal vehicles that allow us to go anywhere, and fast. Speed seems to be cancelling the advantages of vaccines, and if 1918-1920 patterns continue, the current omicron version will take its toll and play out in a few more weeks or months. Vaccinations and infections will continue to rise, but with luck, and following the path of its 1918 cousin, the Covid will mutate or wind down, and take its place alongside seasonal flu. Sometime in late 2022 or early 2023.

 

# # #

152. Coyote Story?

 If you know Isak Dinesen, the Danish author, it is probably through the book, or more likely the movie, Out Of Africa. The picture that comes to your mind will be of Meryl Streep saying “I had a faaam in Africa,” or of Robert Redford, as the dashing bush pilot, Denys Finch Hatton.  

 

I had a professor who was obsessed with Dinesen’s Seven Gothic Tales, romantic and darkly magical stories told as if spoken aloud with themes and people of previous times. It was written and published before Out of Africa, and gained American following in the 1930s. I took up his obsession, and read many of her stories and stories about her before I read or saw Out of Africa. 

 

It’s been decades, but Covid and the world’s responses have me thinking about those stories and Dinesen’s strange and utterly unusual life. The reason I say this is because she thought God was a jokester. The craziness and evil in the world did not elicit a kind and powerful God, and I guess the theology needed to explain such a one was too much for her. There was also good company in jesters to kings and American Indian coyote stories. And her own life.

 

Dinesen grew up wealthy. Her father committed suicide when she was young. She fell in love with someone from her social class, was rejected, and married his twin brother. That got her to Africa, which she loved. But the marriage got her syphilis, and a divorce. After the divorce she fell in love with a bush pilot and safari leader named Denys Finch Hatton (Redford), who died when his plane crashed. She returned to Denmark—and wrote.

 

***

Covid came on us, swept the globe but especially the United States, like a plague. Our medical teams and scientists developed a vaccine in record time—and during the Trump administration! Trump and his people minimized the disease and a sizeable part of the population rejected the vaccine. Many of the anti-vaxxers worshipped and praised their rejection to each other in churches. Churches have accounted for some “spreader” events.

 

Enough of us got vaccinated and/or got ill and recovered from it to slow the Covid’s progress. The virus bided its time while people fussed and argued over the efficacy of the vaccine, and over its distribution. The virus developed new variants that are worming through the population—especially attacking the unvaccinated. 

 

The numbers of new cases are skyrocketing—while the impacts of the most aggressive variant appear to be milder. What is next?

 

One could, I am sure, draft an outline of scientific and political Covid decisions that will explain—or at least fully chronicle it. Or one could think that some coyote was pulling the strings and laughing as we humans stumble through the next chapter of the Covid virus.

 

# # # 

151. The Day after Christmas

 Day after Christmas

 

It came and went like a flash. I baked and gave away 30 some coffee can brown breads—my usual Christmas gifting. In return I was showered in gifts, real things like a bottle of Ouzo, a Pyrex bowl, a mystery spice that smells of Middle East, and 30 pounds of grass-fed beef; and gifts of spirit—kind words about my work and my own words in these short blurbs anchored by the Pandemic.

 

The gift that warmed my heart was the grandson who came home from his new mill job in La Grande, with the woman—girlfriend—I knew only from afar. He’s had a tough few years: an enthusiastic try at college broken by personal problems and the pandemic; a try at Portland with his mom in early covid days that brought him home without a job and with the disease. This was before the vaccine, and he weathered it as I quarantined it, and started writing these blog posts. 

 

He healed, had some lingering after-effects, but they stopped when he got his first shot of the vaccine. He went to work at Safeway, minimum wage, the night shift. Did not like the shift or the working conditions, but plowed on. The Covid rescue $1400 and his first paychecks let him buy his grandma’s old Subaru, and he kept saving money while he looked for other work. He landed the mill job a few weeks ago, and had enough money for first and last and deposits and all you need to set up house in an overpriced apartment. (They are all overpriced now. In my day they said housing should be no more than a quarter of your income; now it’s closer to half for young folks starting out.)

 

They came home and we had ribs on Christmas Eve, and opened presents on Christmas morning. It was a Christmas of what Dylan Thomas called “useful presents”: gloves and thermal socks, coats and cooking gear, the kind of gifts that would have been shoved aside with a shrug a few years ago, but were warmly welcomed this year.

 

The new woman in his life was a pleasure. She’s had her own troubled life, and has a job lined up working with troubled teens. And she has local family ties. I liked her, liked them together.

 

As we careen towards New Years, I think of these things and the granddaughter coming home for the New Years polar plunge. Last night, belly full of a fine Christmas meal with friends, I thought of Dylan Thomas’s Christmas poem, and “I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.”

 

Most of us will weather this Covid; some will grow stronger from it. We’ll do it by family ties and leaning on friends. 

 

The best of New Years to you and yours!

148. 1918

Frustration is setting in, and the more we go, the more we look like 1918.

In 1918 there was a war—and we have several. They had refugees and crowds, and so do we. They had flu deniers, and so do we. They wanted to get on with life, and so do we.

In 1918, the influenza virus attacked young adults in the prime of life. Soldiers, crowded on trains, in barracks and in trenches, were the virus’s perfect vectors. It could take its time and travel aboard ship across the ocean, through the barracks and trenches, and work its way to the far corners of the world over a period of two and three years. 

Health care people and systems worked hard to contain it. They closed churches and public meeting places, advised masks, tried to puzzle a vaccine. They fought to identify it, thought at first it was a bacteria, worked to sort its impacts from those of pneumonia, saw that it often moved to that more familiar disease. Some of today’s pneumonia talk—claims that it is not the Covid that kills, that a lot of deaths attributed to it are actually other things—sounds similar.

Scientists and historians debated at the time and for decades after on its origins and means of arrival in human hosts. Like our Covid, it probably started with a flier—most likely ducks in the American Midwest. The resolution of the mystery was quietly carried on by a few scientists while the virus itself raged. Like the fight over China and the potential of lab origins that sometimes finds voice today.

History says that these viruses, from Medieval plagues to AIDS to Covid, don’t care what we think; they make their own ways in the world, oftentimes booming and subsiding, but rarely, without massive human intervention like we had with smallpox and are trying to do with polio, going away completely. They mutate and hide in small places, small populations, waiting for another chance to surge. They use up a crowd, then slow until another crowd emerges. 

In 1918, in San Francisco, it was the Armistice in November and the Christmas shopping season—and fatigue—that once again crowded churches and stores without the masks they’d carefully worn only months before. 

Unlike the slow and workmanlike Influenza virus of 1918, Covid has to dodge vaccines and testing and tracking. But it gets to travel on faster planes in a more crowded earth.

# # #

147. Statistics—and nature’s own remedy

I can’t remember where I read or heard it, but I swear that President Harry Truman once said that a 5% unemployment rate wouldn’t hurt him, but that “when 25 percent of the population seriously fears being in the 5%-I’d be in trouble.” 

I think about this when I hear covid infection, vaccination, and death rates. And I wonder how the percentages will play out, how I might adjust Truman’s theory to fit today’s Covid facts. It’s of course more complicated, because infection itself ranges from mild to serious, and deaths might be miss-attributed to other causes.

But still, what might today’s numbers and rates of infection tell us about tomorrow? And how do we or can we compare this time in this pandemic with its own past, with what is going on in other states and countries, and even with 1918. For example, we have passed 800,000 deaths in the US; there were 675,000 US deaths with the 1918 pandemic. Our population—326.7 million, is over three times that of 1918—103.2 million. If we were at 2,500,000 deaths now, would it make a difference?  

Here’s another statistic: Covid deaths in Trump voting counties across the country are three times higher than in Biden counties. Will this make a long-term difference?

And here is the sweet one; nature—maybe—is finding its own remedy. First reports are that the new Omicron variant of the coronavirus might prove more transmissible but less deadly than past variants. Which might mean that the vaunted “natural immunity” that is touted by some, might actually rise up with massive, but light, infections across the Trump counties and the hold-outs elsewhere. When that happens, some might decide to get vaccinated, and, although all studies show that natural immunity is not as strong as the vaccines, enough people will be infected quickly enough to reach some kind of herd immunity.

Previous plagues and epidemics have wound down when the virus did not have enough ready hosts; a kind of herd immunity of 80 or 90% of a population was either vaccinated or had become ill with the disease. 

Uncertainty is our new best neighbor—but maybe…. 

 

# # # 

146. Hanging On

I’m reading Vilhelm Moberg’s The Emigrants, the first of a set of 1950s-60s novels that follow the lives of Swedish families as they leave what binds them in the old world to find something better to hang onto in the new. This first book describes shrinking landholdings as families grow, and the harsh laws that give government and church power over the lives of individuals—especially the poor. Some choose to leave. Moberg describes those who stay—rich and poor, and those who leave, mostly poor. 

The poor farmers and farm families who made the early emigrant voyages in the 1850s traveled on crowded sailing ships, adrift from land, at the mercies of sea law and the sea. They hung onto the rails above the sea, and when the sea roared they held onto their bunks in the locked hold. They were often sick, louse-ridden and doubtful of their consequential decision to leave the safety of home—which mid-journey appeared to some sweeter from a distance and the foreign life at sea. They hung onto religion—or despised it; held onto children and watched them die; blamed partners and blamed themselves for the journey; they practiced home remedies and used up the captain’s medicine chest. They hung on.

It might sound corny, but our pandemic is like a raging sea in a strange world—with an unknown world on the other side. Some of us get sick; some die. Children get left behind, and parents lose children. The weather and the Covid calms—and then surges again. No one knows whether it will be over in another six months or a year—or many more. Sometimes it seems a new variant might take off and kill millions before medicine, science, government and religion can make their next counter moves.

We all look for things and people to hang on to: partner, parent, friend, doctor, vaccine, diet, mask, religion, charismatic leader or soothsayer. The worst is to be alone—or to have a mother or grandfather trapped with Covid in a nursing home or hospital you can’t visit. Their aloneness is as bad as your own.

We hang onto the past—the way the world once was, or as we remember it. We hang onto a vision of normalcy, the way that things should have been and might be soon, the graduations, weddings, and trips we’re supposed to be on. And we hang onto dreams.

The guts of the grasping and the hanging on that we see on news shows and in social media, that erupt at school board meetings and in mandate protests, are all there in Moberg’s account of Swedes heading to an unknown world in 1850.

# # #

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.

# # #

 

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. 

138. Encouraged

This week and last, Covid numbers in Wallowa County are down significantly from the daily 5-20 cases registered in September and early October weeks. 

My first thought was that the tourist season is winding down, and there are fewer Florida, Texas, and Idaho license plates on Main Street in Joseph than there were just two weeks ago. We’re also further away from Josephy Days and the Pendleton Roundup, two big-crowd events in Eastern Oregon. 

When I read my new favorite New York Times columnist, Zeynep Tufekci, on Saturday, more good news. In “The Unvaccinated May Not Be Who You Think,” the Turkish-born sociologist says that we have not paid enough attention to who is getting and not getting Covid vaccinations. My tribe has been fixated on anti-vaxxers; Tufekci focuses on the vaccinated, and the “vaccine resistant.” Who they are and why.

Her first bit of data is that 95 % of people over 65 in the United States have had at least one shot. Our older Wallowa County population helps us. And—the biggest factors in predicting who, overall, gets vaccinated are health insurance and regular—and trusted—health care providers. She notes that “low vaccination rates in rural areas may be that they are ‘health care and media deserts.’” 

That’s not us! And we consequently now have over 65% of eligible adults vaccinated, gradually adding a few more each day. When the vaccines are approved for children, our numbers and percentages will climb. 

We might even get a boost from the mandates. Although there is a lot of moaning and groaning with police unions and southern state governors, research shows that most of those not yet vaccinated who are in the “vaccine hesitant” group will comply with the mandates. Some because they need their jobs; many, including those with needle phobia—a category I had not considered—Tufekci argues, will obey they mandates because they can “cross the line… in a face-saving manor.”  

Taken all together—Wallowa County’s older population on Medicare; our robust health care system; the 65 % and growing vaccination rate; the 675 residents who have acquired immunity by getting the disease (almost 10% of our population!), and a quieter Main Street—I feel encouraged going into winter. 

Winter, that long-ago time when Wallowa County—and Oregon—were relatively Covid-free. 

# # #

 

137. Random facts and thoughts

The Floridian running for governor in Texas says his wife was vaccinated; but he’s not. It’s a matter of personal choice. He’s now choosing to go to the hospital and take the antibodies plus ivermectin and hydro-whatever—the other drug that has not been found effective. The press release said that his wife tested positive too, but said nothing about her going to the hospital. 

 

A healthy, 67-year-old member of Idaho Lt Governor’s task force on educational indoctrination—formed to root out leftist teaching in Idaho schools, died of Covid, according to Boise papers. He told people he was “vaccinated in Christ...”

 

A reporter in Germany says wearing masks on trains and indoors is automatic, as is taking them off outdoors. In America, the left wears masks indoors and out; the right not at all.  

 

Some on my side of the vaccination divide ask that the unvaccinated not be allowed into hospitals when there’s a shortage of rooms. Some say not at all; “put them in their own tent outside,” said one. 

 

My grandson asks whether anyone has kept statistics on the numbers of Republicans and Democrats who have contracted Covid. How many Republicans have died? 

 

In today’s New York Times, two prominent Republicans call for moderation and common sense, for a new collation of Centrist Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans to make sure that those in control of the Republican party are defeated in the short run, and a stronger, moderate Republican party emerges in the future. They are backing Liz Cheney, who has a challenger endorsed by the former president. I wonder how Covid and Trump will work in her primary campaign.

 

Masks—what’s so hard about them? Last winter I didn’t get a cough or sneeze; friends and doctors remarked on the same. But Masks have become a symbol, divorced from their purposes or even the ease or unease of using them.

 

When I was young—before 21—we found it easier to buy beer at 7-11 stores than most others. Occasionally, the San Diego paper would say that a fine of $100 or $500 had been levied against a 7-11 store. We chuckled at that, computing the amount of beer sold to minors that it would take to pay the modest fine. When I walk into the local grocery or hardware store and see that all workers and most customers are maskless, it makes me wonder…

 

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136. People I know

David died in a Boise hospital this week. He was 81—and unvaccinated. I didn’t know him well, but he’d grown up here and lived here for a time later in life. Frank died this week in Maine, after weeks in intensive care. I played football and baseball with his older brother in high school, and one college summer Frank and I played fast-pitch softball together. I have no idea about his vaccination status, just that Covid got him. 

 

Locally, three people I know have died of Covid. Not close friends, but people I know who worked at my kids’ school, the store next door, or Safeway, people I knew well enough to joke with on the street or in the post office. Of them, two were not vaccinated; one died before vaccinations became available. 

 

There are probably others. People who died of this or that “underlying condition,” but might have had the Covid as well. Sometimes people try to turn the tables: “it wasn’t Covid that killed her; she had a bad heart.” Or diabetes or asthma…

 

I’ve known others who have gotten sick and come out the other side. My grandson first, long before the vaccine. He is young and healthy, but still struggled with loss of taste and smell, and headaches. He says that that all changed after he did get vaccinated. 

 

Two friends from Umatilla County have been sick. Both were vaccinated, and both came through after a few days of sickness. I don’t know whether the Pendleton Roundup had anything to do with their illness, but the Oregon Health Authority reported the surge in cases after that event. The rodeo—the crowds, the lack of masks—certainly fanned Umatilla’s flames. The Umatilla Reservation has gone to near lockdown. 

 

Did it fan Covid our way? This week’s Wallowa County new Covid cases: Monday-20, including weekend numbers; Tuesday-2; Wednesday-22; Thursday-6; and Friday-11. That’s 61 cases in seven days. I don’t know how many were vaccinated, have no idea about the seriousness of their cases. I don’t know who they are—but I surely know some of them well enough to hail on the street. 

 

And I know that no close friends or relatives—other than the grandson who came home from Portland with it early in this Covid saga—and no one I work with has become ill with Covid. I also know that this group of friends, relatives, and co-workers wears masks and embraces vaccinations.

 

This is all anecdotal to be sure. Anecdotes add up. 

 

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135. Border county

Border County

 

Wallowa County is in the northeast corner of Oregon, with Eastern Washington acres of rugged country and a bit of the Grande Ronde River to the north, and Hells Canyon of the Snake River the natural separation from Idaho to the east. South and west is more Oregon, but not over easy ground. 

 

We’re a buffer: the Snake River a buffer and border with Idaho to the east; a windy road up and down to the Grande Ronde River and then to the Clearwater and Snake River corridors at Lewiston buffers the north. 

 

It seems we’re also a border and buffering place against Covid. At home, Wallowa County is relatively Covid-aware, with a vaccination rate higher than Union and Umatilla counties (Baker County’s is better). Our medical system has been diligent in testing and tracking, hospitalizing when necessary. 

 

But we have a vocal minority asserting personal choice above community health, just as they have in neighboring Idaho. And we have stubborn locals joining Idaho visitors and escapees from the other Oregon—many of them unvaccinated Oregonians—in refusing to wear masks in stores and other public places. 

.

A couple of weeks ago, one of the unmasked and admittedly unvaccinated West-side Oregonians attacked our Joseph restaurant table’s conversation with the news that the Covid is a huge political plot. And here’s the news from Kooteni County in Idaho: “It’s gotten so bad in northern Idaho that some Kootenai Health employees are scared to go to the grocery store if they haven’t changed out of their scrubs,” said hospital spokeswoman Caiti Bobbitt…  “Some doctors and nurses at the Coeur d’Alene hospital have been accused of killing patients by grieving family members who don’t believe COVID-19 is real…”

 

We have a Wallowa County version of that: deaths attributed to heart conditions or bad lungs or diabetes. Yes, Covid has easy pickings among people with “underlying conditions.” That term is so hackneyed I hesitate to use it, but this is exactly what it means. Patient A has had some heart issues, refuses vaccination, gets sick, refuses testing, dies at home and the post-mortem test shows she had Covid. Patient B is diabetic…. Their anti-vax friends attribute the deaths to heart and kidneys. And to the vocal minority of locals and the anti-masking visitors from Idaho and the rest of Oregon, vaccinations—and the medical establishment and vaccinated majority who take Covid seriously—are deserving of contempt. 

 

We, the fatigued and sometimes intimidated majority, grumble about the lack of masks, and wait in this border county while Oregon’s overall Covid stats continue to look better—and Idaho’s situation sees no good end in sight.

 

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134. Resilience

Resilience

 

I used to be a night person, but that’s all changed in the last dozen years. Now I go to bed about 9, fall asleep easily and sleep until 12 or 1:00 am. Then back to sleep, maybe with help from the radio or a podcast on my phone; but this sleep is more troubled, often interrupted by dreams. Not horrible dreams, though two nights ago there was a volcano pouring out of Bonneville Mountain at the head of Wallowa Lake, and I went to higher ground on the school hill. 

 

On good mornings I wake lazily sometime after 4, and turn on the BBC, which takes me sleepily into Morning Edition on PBS. This morning the BBC had “mixed” quests, young men and women whose parents came to England from China, Guinea, the West Indies and East, and then married White Britishers or one another. This crowd, this morning, exulted in their mixed heritages, and I came awake slowly with a good feeling about the world.

 

Volcanoes—and the Covid—rage on in the world. Vaccine deniers trouble my mind, but the world is so much bigger, has seen horrible pandemics in the past, and those of us on the earth now are descendants of survivors of all of the earth’s past horrors.

 

There is an odd comfort in this, in knowing that there have always been volcanoes and always been deniers of pandemics—and that there have always been survivors. 

 

All of this fits right into the book I just finished reading, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, by University of Oregon historian Jeffrey Ostler. Ostler follows the inexorable westward movement of the Euro-settlers, and the displacement of the original Americans, by threat and force, treaty and missionizing, and incessant European diseases. 

 

Ostler’s story is the miracle of survival, explained by the ways in which tribes fought, adopted and adapted to the relentless pressures of colonialism. One of the tricks they often performed was to adopt members of other tribes or adopt themselves into other, stronger tribes, reestablishing diminished populations time and again. 

 

Which brings me to the mixing that is going on in England—and in our own country. Yes, it’s an old story, held at times quietly, erupting at other times dramatically and violently. But it seems as inexorable as the volcanoes, and it goes to explain the diversity we show today, and foretells greater diversity we can expect tomorrow. 

 

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133. Letter to the Editor

To the editor and Wallowa County Friends,

 

This summer marks 50 years for me in Wallowa County. I came to spend a year—and I stayed. I stayed because the land is wonderful; I stayed because of people. In the fifty years countless tragedies—fires, accidents, and diseases—have hit Wallowa County families. And again and again neighbors, friends, and strangers have stepped up to comfort and help get people and families through hard times. We haven’t erased bad things, but we have dealt with them honestly and selflessly. We’ve not asked about religion or politics, wealth, or which end of the county the afflicted are from. We just help.

 

And now we have a crisis. Over 500 of us have had or have the coronavirus, and 11 have died as of September 11, according to the Oregon Health Authority. We’re getting 5-10 new cases each day, and our hospital is operating on the edge. Cases in Idaho, with one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country, are exploding. Umatilla and Union counties ditto. A Boise nurse says her overwhelmed staff has PTSD. We cannot send serious covid patients—or serious patients of any kind—to nearby hospitals. 

 

There is fear that our hospital and assisted living center will lose staff with the vaccination mandate. The Soroptimists and Rotary are rounding up volunteers to work at assisted living!

 

Our friends, neighbors, and relatives are in the hospital and nursing home right now. I am 78 and healthy—but I’m at risk. A good many of my friends and neighbors are at risk due to age, asthma, weak hearts or lungs, diabetes, etc.

 

I am asking all of you to put aside politics and religion, vitamins and health regimes, and embrace vaccinations and masks. If “mandates” bother you, remember that you complied with the state to get your driver’s license, to go to school until you were 16, and to go into the military when called. 

 

Your neighbor’s house is on fire and we’re all the volunteer fire department. I am not asking you to change your political or religious affiliation, or to donate blood or a kidney (which many of you have already done). Just a shot in the arm—yes, sometimes painful for a day or two, but overwhelmingly effective—and a mask on the face (when you have time, I’ll share my story of how a mask kept me safe from Covid).

 

Thank you, friends,

Rich Wandschneider  

132. Visible signs

When Smallpox ravished the earth, those who didn’t die were left with terrible pockmarks. English Queen Elizabeth’s came down with smallpox in 1562. She nearly died from the disease, and her skin was so scarred that she covered the pockmarks with heavy white makeup made of white lead and vinegar, which slowly poisoned her.

 

When polio stormed across the US in the 1950s, pictures of children in iron lungs were ubiquitous. And when August’s “dog days” hit in my northern Minnesota town, the bus no longer took us to the nearby lake to swim. 

 

We were afraid of polio, and the pressure to help those in the iron lungs and to find vaccines and cures impelled a national March of Dimes campaign. As a boy scout in Southern California, I and my fellow scouts solicited dimes from passersby and marched them up the curb along one of Oceanside’s main streets. Meanwhile, mothers went door to door in their March of Dimes. Defeating polio was not left to the scientists and doctors; we all participated. Nationwide empathy—as well as fear—raised money which contributed to the development of the vaccine. 

 

Covid is a trickier customer. For those who survive, it leaves no lasting marks—with the possible exception of the wasting bodies of some of the “long-haulers.” There are no pockmarks or limps to mark the survivors you encounter on the street, in schools, and the marketplace. 

 

I was talking with our smart, short-term cataloger, Charlotte, who has a degree in medical history, about the difficulties this poses. Maybe if the faces of survivors all turned bright red, or their head and body hair all fell out, vaccinations would be an easier sell.

 

The reinstatement of empathy is an even tougher task. We have watched TV screens show New York workers get bodies from homes and unload them into freezer truck temporary morgues. We’ve listened to exhausted doctors and healthcare workers describe their days and their patients. And still there are deniers, some of them working in health care. 

 

The way out of the current Covid crisis is still unclear, and the unintended consequences of the lengthening world-wide event are as unimaginable as the danger of lead poisoning must have been to Queen Elizabeth almost 500 years ago.

 

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