Wednesday, October 21, 2020

The virus finds our vulnerabities

Every morning I look at the little red graphs on the "first page" of the Washington Post's website. And these days I focus on the picture of new heights reached in North Dakota and think of my friend's 84 year old mother. She lives by herself, by her own choice, in a tiny town right in the middle of that red spike. She's an active person; she just completed another manuscript of rural history. (The E.P. and I stopped over with her during a book tour.) She's all too aware that her neighbors and family have not been taking precautions to avoid the coronavirus. She knows some in her family have been holding big birthday parties and cheering at high school basketball games. Nobody wears masks. One rancher cousin hopes for herd immunity.

Meanwhile the nearest grocery store, some twenty miles away, was closed for deep cleaning. In that same town, all the bank employees but one were out sick with COVID for awhile. According to her daughter, "she is prepared to learn to drink her coffee without milk or cream if she has to avoid grocery stores for long stretches."
 
The pandemic may seem to have abated in some areas. But those spikes could easily return anywhere if we get casual. Though mortality among the infected may be lower because medical personnel have learned something about treatment, the disease is still spreading wherever we let our guard down.

But our mood has changed; we live in pandemic shock.
“In the spring, it was fear and a sense of, ‘We are all in it together,’” said Vaile Wright, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association who studies stress in the United States.

“Things are different now,” she said. “Fear has really been replaced with fatigue.”
This isn't going away. Even if we elect a new administration that takes mitigating the health and economic disaster as its duty, we'll be living in the backwash of the epidemic for years. As the days shorten, it's hard not to fear a winter of despair. But we're a tough and ingenious people; I wouldn't bet against us, for all our trouble and strife.

3 comments:

Cop Car said...

Our news purveyors have told us that Norton County (in the far northwest part of our State of Kansas) has a nursing home with 60+ residents, all of whom have been infected (10 have died), plus some of the staff have tested positive. Being sparsely populated, Norton County has held the dubious distinction of having identified the most cases per 100,000 of any county in the USA.

Bonnie said...

Wanted to share this with FB but today Google Chrome sends a can't do announcement. The last paragraph says it all.

janinsanfran said...

Sorry you couldn't share Bonnie. Odd because Blogger (this platform) is a Google product and I shared this successfully. Ah, technology ...