In the bitterest days of last winter, ice dams building in the valleys on my roof, every room’s wall heaters thrumming away, my social media news feeds were pocked with videos out of China - from a city called Wuhan - and these videos, which everybody has seen by now, showed city workers in hazmat suits spraying sidewalks, playgrounds, business entrances while an actual phalanx of tanker trucks were slowly driving along city parkways misting entire neighborhoods with god-knows-what.
At first, I thought, this must be a hoax.
And then, other information and videos came out and it was clear something serious was going on.
Despite having the 45th best president and administration in the history of our nation, I remained calm because, first of all, who am I to sound the alarm? And, second of all, no one would hear it. But mainly because, despite the known government incompetence, I figured the Center for Disease Control or Human Health Services or the Surgeon General (whatever he does) would make certain it would never reach our shores.
Which is the exact opposite of how I felt about the Ebola virus outbreak that happened during the Obama administration. To be completely honest, I might have been watching too much of The Walking Dead at the time. My imagination was stoked.
And don’t forget the other virus alarm bells that have gone off since 2000. with each of those the American public responded with a collective ho-hum.
This pandemic has turned out to be the ‘real deal’ - but not for all of us.
I still know only one person who tested positive. I do not - personally - know anyone who has been hospitalized or who has suffered badly from the virus. Obviously, I know no one who has died from COVID complications.
I know their stories. I know of the owner of Seattle’s Leschi Market who died late in the winter. I know people who know people. I heard secondhand of someone in their twenties dying.
I am in no way a doubting Thomas, I am just stating my experience.
Of course, I have been socially distant and sequestered in my single level ranch house for the past 7 months. I have not been shy about mingling socially under the right circumstances - outdoors, indoors with ceiling fans going and all exterior doors wide open. I’ve sat in one restaurant (on their outdoor patio) and one brewery (under the wide open and airy circumstance and high ceilings). I’ve taken lots of precautions.
But it is easy for me to do so.
I am not an essential worker. I live alone as often as not. I trust my partner to be as diligent as I. I am able to oversee my business from a distance which is an enormous luxury.
My business is seasonal. We provide rafting tours for the general public and tourists out of one of the nation’s quintessential tourist towns.
It didn’t look good for my business in March of this year. Once the shutdowns started happening and more and more information began to accumulate about the nature of the virus it was difficult to envision how we could operate this season. Yet we managed by taking as many reasonable precautions as we could. The fact that 99% of what we do takes place outdoors was pivotal.
We had guests wear masks while checking in and being outfitted and while they were being shuttled to and from the river. We reduced the number of people in a raft and rarely mixed and matched customers. We reduced the number of guests we shuttled in one vehicle, instead of the usual SRO situation in the bus. When we did mix groups, we got their permission to do so. We sanitized every piece of gear used each day when, normally, we only do so with the neoprene on loan.
We had one COVID scare during the season amongst our staff - who live communally on three acres - that would have shut us down. But we dodged the bullet.
We took an economic hit but we adapted. We also got lucky.
My point with all of this was going to be a reminder that the virus is still with us. It is still deadly. It is still capable of spreading like wildfire under the right circumstances. It is easy to be dismissive about it because two hundred thousand deaths is a lot but two hundred thousand deaths over seven months spread out over three million five hundred thousand square miles and a population of three hundred and thirty million can get lost in the weeds.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s like the number of American families affected by military actions. So few of us these days have any connection to the military. So few of us have any reason to think about the military, except when it comes up in the news. The unrest in the Sixties was partially due to the draft. That was an era when you couldn’t help but think about the military, because a draft that would send you to the jungles of southeast Asia, loomed large.
For those of us who are privileged, and don’t have to go to work daily somewhere it is shoulder-to-shoulder work conditions, or continual intermingling with the general public or being in a classroom with whatever number of kids it might be, it is easy to lose our edge or “forget” about the danger that exists.
That danger is likely to grow now that we are headed back into the months where it will be more difficult to achieve adequate air ventilation. Because as our president was aware of as far back as February,
"It goes through the air," Tr*mp said. "That's always tougher than the touch. You don't have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that's how it's passed. And so that's a very tricky one. That's a very delicate one. It's also more deadly than even your strenuous flus."
I intended to take a day off today. I wanted to share fellow Substack writer Betsy Bowen’s latest thoughts about the pandemic. She’s a doctor and a musician and an excellent essayist on the subject of the pandemic - along with a host of other things. She also has some terrific suggestions for how to keep sane while living through a pandemic and - in this article - where you can get trustworthy information.
Thanks for reading!
Two years ago the news in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest was of an Orca, Tahlequah, carrying her dead calf for two weeks. We all mourned with her. Concern increased that her health was in danger. Happily, she survived and now has a new baby. It is a boy and seems happy and healthy. Extra good news came today of a second calf born to the J-pod of Orcas that live in Puget Sound, the southern part of the Salish Sea. We needed some good news right now.
These are the times that are both full of misery and delight. Fear for tomorrow is palpable, but can vanish in an instant if we are blessed with something that wakes us up. It may be seeing a certain bird fly across the sky, noticing a blossom start to flower, or awe from the spider web that was built from my car to the cherry tree overnight and now covered with raindrops so it hangs in the air. We can be moved by music, something we read, or by speaking to a brother or friend. Or a story about resilience and hope, like Tahlequah’s. These are moments we all need for our resilience and our souls.
Our minds are overwhelmed with information blasting at us. I have spoken about the “Infodemic” of misinformation, but the truth is there is also a “pandemic” of new scientific information. It can be impossible to keep up and filter the reliable from the unreliable, the good studies from the not so good, and the significant from the not so significant. I find it exciting to read and hear about new ideas and new data, but sometimes I need a filter. I expect you do too. I found this article in Medium helpful which lists 50 experts to trust. Twitter has a site that you can follow that sifts and sorts through early studies that are in the “pre-print”phase. These are articles that have data that hasn’t yet been peer reviewed, but may have important information in it. I also read Journal Watch which compiles medical information from medical journals, to help keep me up to date. Their section about COVID-19 is free, with no subscription necessary. I also have started getting Science Daily’s newsletters that are interesting to peruse.
All of this extra information comes at a cost. Trust in science is at a low point. People are questioning guidelines and data, spurred on by changes in recommendations that has occurred since the beginning of the epidemic, not surprising since knowledge has increased about how the virus behaves. Also, trust is stressed by leadership giving mixed messages. It is exacerbated by trolls, bots, and conspiracy theories spread virally on the internet. Check out these cool tools from Indiana University to help with filtering misinformation.
Wash your hands, cover your nose, keep safe six, and check your sources!
And finally, my caveat is that this is my experience and my opinions, which are subject to change as more information is available, and not related to the organization I work for. Thanks for reading.
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AAR Shan Perera shared this feature length film from Patagonia that deals with the current status of our public lands. Long story short - things have been better. This administration has been busy hastening the harm being done on lands that all of us have a claim to.
I watched Enola Holmes last night on Netflix. If you were wondering if you should watch it, I’d say, it’s delightful. The gal who plays Sherlock Holmes’ much younger sister and the character of the title, Millie Bobby Brown, is adorably talented. It’s along the lines of Nancy Drew.