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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52. The Election and Covid-19

I write this on Wednesday morning, with Biden ahead of Trump 238-213 in the Electoral vote and seven states still not declared for either side. Four of the seven are leaning Trump; three leaning Biden, but the light reds and light blues have shifted back and forth for hours, and might well do so again today—and tomorrow—before they move to bright red or bright blue. The popular vote—Biden up by 2,300,000—is tucked away for another day and discussions of electoral reform. 

 

One thing is certain: millions of Americans have decided that the Covid-19 threat is less important than the economy, or that it is overblown. Last night, as the vote counts spilled across the TV screen, commentators commented on the president’s whirlwind appearances in the last week, and the enthusiasm of his crowds. “The economy” was cited by many voters. 

 

There was little talk last night of Covid-19, no talk that I heard of the spread of the virus from polling places or rallies. No fears in voting lines—although most seemed masked and distanced. And the newspaper and radio pundits I’ve heard this morning make no or little mention of the disease. It’s as if the election took our minds away from something that has been with us for too long.

 

Millions of Americans have explicitly or implicitly decided that Covid-19 is not as serious a disease as advertised, or that it is not a personal threat because of their age or station, or that if they happen to contract it, they will bounce back as the president has, or that a herd immunity and the imminent arrival of a vaccine will soon reduce Covid-19 to a historical footnote.

 

Meanwhile, the disease is raging again in many countries as experts quibble over a second or third wave, and 1199 Americans died of it yesterday. There were 94,463 new cases announced, with our largest yet hospitalization census—50,176.

 

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51. Election Day

The headliners are still hustling for the last votes. Pundits and partisans are comparing the “vitality” of the candidates; it’s an endurance race, and all candidates will collapse sometime tomorrow night. 

The pundits other favorite issue is fraud or no fraud, and its corollary, acceptance or no acceptance. An old friend recently emailed me about his concerns with mail ballots. He claimed that in some states, including Oregon, the number of ballots mailed in some counties was greater than the number of legal voters living in the same counties. I searched and found nothing—from left or right, D or R, that indicated any concern about this in Oregon, and wrote back to tell him so, and ask him to please let me know where he found the information. No word back.

 

I also reminded him of a previous election controversy that provided more opportunity for fraud and outright theft. As I recall it, several states were moving to all touchscreen voting—without paper backup. The systems, they said, were foolproof. At which point a computer whiz from MIT showed how easy it would be to hijack the system and redo the vote count. 

 

Those systems are mostly, quietly, gone. Georgia still has old touchscreens, but a new, complicated, paper backup system has been added. There has been no public concern about this kind of fraud, and no mention of the long-ago “perfect system” being easily hacked for demonstration purposes. We’re concentrated on drop boxes, mail votes, and the integrity of the Postal Service.  

 

This might be puzzling, unless we remember the overall acceptance of even the most controversial election results in our past. Popular vote winners have lost the presidency in the Electoral College. There is brief outrage, and then acceptance. Kennedy, the outsider, the Irish Catholic who inspired fear in protestant pulpits, won in a very close election, but there was an undercurrent that said that Mayor Daily of Chicago was managing the last precincts in Kennedy’s favor. Yet Nixon conceded.

 

I think most historians and political practitioners purposefully do not bring up the voting machines. Dr. Dennis Strong, a history professor of mine 57 years ago, told us that the most important factor in American political stability and success over centuries is orderly succession. 

 

We are being tested this year, the first time in my 56 years of voting.

 

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