The Beginning of the End; The Beginning of the Worst

~ Laura

With the vaccine on the verge of release, just as we enter in midst of the heart of the pandemic, we’re in a funny spot right now.

On the one hand, a solution is almost here. Of course, there are many worries, like the numbers of people who say they won’t take the virus, and the logistics of unrolling the vaccine to a world’s population, but for the most part, this is all good news.

On the other hand, the virus is everywhere.

For months, I was relatively secure. Like so many privileged groups, myself, my family, and friends have been in protective bubbles. Mask compliance is 100% in my town. Adults have been able to work from home. Our jobs are secure with one stay at home parent to pick up the slack in schools. We have large backyards to hold gatherings safely. I haven’t met anyone who had the virus since the worst months this spring.

But over last weekend, things changed. Friends texted me to say that their 20-year old kids, or others in their orbit, tested positive. We started getting more and more emails from the school districts informing us about positive people in a school building. Schools here are opening and shutting more frequently. Ian is back in school, after a two week of remote education. Thank God. But it’s only a matter of time before he is locked in his bedroom with a Chromebook all day.

Rumor has it that the teachers and staff are bringing the virus into the schools, not the kids, but I have no evidence to back up those rumors. The emails from the district are purposively vague.

So, as the protective bubble around our professional community has been burst. I am making adjustments to our safety protocol for our household. Cutting out restaurants was an easy choice. Jonah is coming home from college next week, which is a concern; I need to find a local place for a rapid test. I am not sure if I should jog with a buddy outdoors without a mask. I am not sure if we should take Ian out of her in-person tutoring and therapy; it’s so important for his mental health. So, we have some tough decisions to make soon.

I don’t want to be the last person to get COVID. That would really suck.

I hate the term “COVID fatigue” to explain why folks let their guard slip and started visiting family and friends in person. “Fatigue” implies a certain laziness of the folks who are gathering and being less careful than the Virtuous Virus Puritans. Some folks have been suffering more than others during this pandemic. If you’ve lost your job, if your kids aren’t being educated, if your caretaking responsibilities are overwhelming, then being around family and friends is about the good thing in your life.

Our situation is comparatively awesome, but our kids have had a really tough time. Between his on-going health issues, the school chaos, and social isolation, Ian has suffered. A lot. Jonah just spent the past four months in a dorm room by himself. I am beyond worried about him. I am not “fatigued.” I am sick with worry, angry, and sad.

I’m going to keep our guard up and make some changes as the pandemic heats up this winter, but I have to be less than perfect than the Virtuous Virus Puritans would like, because I have to help my family keep their marbles. Safety definitely has its costs.

Published by Laura

33 thoughts on “The Beginning of the End; The Beginning of the Worst”

  2. “I am not sure if I should jog with a buddy outdoors without a mask.”

    There’s exactly one (1.00) person outside my household that I chat with at length without a mask, but it’s always outdoors and I try to keep some space. It is a risk, but that’s the one unnecessary, risky thing that I do routinely.

    We got our kids back to in-person school as fast as we could, but even just 5 months of weird, isolated at-home life has left its mark. One of my kids has recently acquired some compulsive rituals. The really good news is that it’s not a self-harming ritual. The kid has an exercise (!) ritual that allegedly needs to be done in a particular order and that they “can’t” alter or stop in the middle of. That could be a lot worse, but it’s still plenty weird to live with.

    Husband and I are in talks about doing Christmas Mass at home, because the chances of crowding are just so high. (On Sundays, I normally stay home with our youngest and whichever older kid is sniffly and we watch the 28-minute Denver cathedral Mass, while my husband takes the older kid(s) and wears an Antifa style industrial 3M mask and goes to the super empty downtown church.)

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  3. I’m not as put off by the word fatigue, because I think of it as being a medical term, in which your body breaks down. But, I do see sad and angry and worried and overwhelmed.

    I too am worried about kids who are generally doing OK and negotiating what they really do need in order to keep their mental health.

    I am generally willing to believe that most of the people in my circle are doing the best they can and working really hard to avoid my own superstitious belief that being “Virtuous Virus Puritans” will solve all our problems. But, I am wary when there are those who seem to be flagrantly violating any responsibility for shared risk. An example, is the interview of nurses from North Dakota & Utah on NPR: https://www.npr.org/2020/12/07/943968708/rural-nurses-on-what-its-like-to-fight-pandemic-within-smaller-health-care-syste

    “JOHNSON: I think I have mixed feelings. Let’s start with that. I continually am just appalled by the way people behave in our state. We’ve heard our whole lives that we’re North Dakota nice. . . . If it doesn’t affect people personally, they just don’t get it. And whether that’s my husband, who is a welder who thinks – he’s never taken a flu shot in his life, and it’s politicized, he thinks. I think after he saw me a little sick and he knows what I go through, he may understand a little more. . . . He sees my stress. He sees what we do. It doesn’t personally affect his day-to-day life, and that’s what it boils down to.”

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    1. bj said, “I’m not as put off by the word fatigue, because I think of it as being a medical term, in which your body breaks down.”

      Or metal fatigue.

      ” But, I am wary when there are those who seem to be flagrantly violating any responsibility for shared risk.”

      That’s how I felt about the BLM protests…for 5 months. All mass public gatherings (including Trump ralies and Biden victory celebrations) annoy me.

      I’m also annoyed by everybody in authority who believes and acts on the principle that “rules are for little people,” making and enforcing strict rules on the public, while carving out exceptions for themselves, their friends, and “important people.”

      It’s also a problem when rules don’t make sense. Playgrounds closed, beaches closed, genuine outdoor dining closed down, drive-in events closed down, illogical rules with regard to occupancy (identical occupancy caps for spaces regardless of venue size), etc. It was also quite the error to believe that a pandemic was a good time to have a mass movement to “defund the police” and “abolish the police.” As everybody has been discovering, eventually you’re going to need the police to do something…like enforce pandemic rules.

      Let’s not kid ourselves that the only guilty parties here are YOLO red state folk.

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      1. I’m not a huge fan of the recently deceased Walter Williams, but he once wrote an op-ed that really resonated with me, and I’ve thought about it a lot over the past 14 years and especially over the last 4 years.
        https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2004/02/11/governed-by-rules,-not-men-n1169695

        His thesis is this: “The nation’s welfare is served best by focusing not on political personalities, but on neutral rules of the game and their even application and enforcement.”

        Very prescient, though probably not the way he thought it would be.

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      2. The red part of my state keeps trying to steal my vote and they have the active or passive support of most elected Republicans. If they don’t knock it off in the next couple of days, the BLM protests are going to look trivial. Fortunately, the BLM group didn’t seem to spread covid much.

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    2. I agree that outdoor Trump rallies, outdoor church gatherings, outdoor BLM protests should all be judged by the same standards. Masks seem to make a difference and that’s the biggest difference between the BLM & Trump rallies (when the Trump rallies were outside — indoor ones were held as well, and that was simply wrong).

      We can never be entirely certain, but no one has produced good evidence that the BLM rallies with masking have had signficant super-spreading events (unlike Trump gatherings, White house parties, choirs, and weddings).

      So yes, by all means we should have equitable rules and challenge ourselves when we thin that what we want to do or allow is safer than what the other guy wants to do or allow, but fuming about BLM rallies is probably an example of the wrong approach (applying different rules based on political preference.

      I am fuming about Giuliani sitting in front of state senators and shouting at them (and asking a woman sitting next to him to *remove* her mask) or Trump asking a reporter to take off his mask, but, I would indeed fume if any politician asked someone else to take off their mask.

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      1. bj said, “We can never be entirely certain, but no one has produced good evidence that the BLM rallies with masking have had signficant super-spreading events (unlike Trump gatherings, White house parties, choirs, and weddings).”

        The direct COVID impact was only a fraction of the total impact of the summer/fall BLM demonstrations.

        Aside from direct infections, the demonstrations also did the following: broke public solidarity with regard to large gatherings, violated COVID restrictions in pretty much every area that they happened, demonstrating that the rules were arbitrary, obeying the rules was optional, and that if enough people were breaking the rules, you could get away with it. The BLM mass demonstrations were the green light that you can do whatever you want. It was profoundly demoralizing to the public at large, while at the same crippling the ability of the police to enforce COVID restrictions going forward.

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      2. The implicit message of 5 months of illegal BLM protests was that rules are for suckers.

        Once you let that genie out of the bottle, there’s no putting it back.

        I think, going forward, there are a lot of people who try to be careful (according to their personal definition of careful), but there are way fewer people who are scrupulously trying to obey “the rules” than there were in March and April.

        That’s one of the reasons that the fall response from local authorities has been generally so anemic, even in areas that are experiencing a surge. Public officials know that they can make as many rules as they like, but that the public may or may not respond. Heck, the police may or may not choose to respond to COVID enforcement calls.

        And a lot of that is brought to us courtesy of BLM. If you look back at the summer messaging for BLM (the police is bad, calling the police for any reason is bad, send a social worker instead, etc.) it’s not exactly a mystery why there are so many problems with COVID enforcement, or why local governments are generally pretty timid and/or ineffectual.

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  4. “The red part of my state keeps trying to steal my vote and they have the active or passive support of most elected Republicans. ”

    I am really fuming about the attempts to throw out the votes of Democrats (and the Republican complicity) and they are not trying to take away *my* vote. And, it’s not just the Republicans in your own state, it’s also the indicted, Republican AG of Texas. The Texas AG asking the Supreme Court to throw out the votes of 4 states (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin). It occurred to me that someone should have filed a case to knock out Florida & Texas’s votes, but I couldn’t think of a single Democratic AG who would be willing to do so. Looking forward to the antidemocratic pseudo-coup failing and seeing some normalcy again, but the actions of Republicans are not making me feel sanguine.

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    1. I can’t really control much of what happens in Texas, but I’m pretty sure I can find a way to help defeat Republican state legislators in my own state so that’s where I’m going to start.

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      1. There’s not much I can do about Pennsylvania or Texas except fume (though I did briefly look at the houses that are available in Gilbert, Arizona — did someone link to the walk in pantry here?), which might do something about Arizona. So, I hope there are more people who think hard about whether they can support a Republican who is focused on throwing out people’s votes as a means of staying in power.

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  5. Yes I’m annoyed at Democratic politicians who ate at the French Laundry, but I’m more worried about the effect of the actions of Republicans who tell people not to wear masks and then say COVID is no big deal while being pleased that they get celebrity treatment when they get COVID (and admission to hospitals out of “an abundance of caution”, Remsdivir, and monoclonal antibody cocktails): Trump, Giuliani, Carson, Christie, . . . .

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    1. bj said, “Yes I’m annoyed at Democratic politicians who ate at the French Laundry, but I’m more worried about the effect of the actions of Republicans who tell people not to wear masks and then say COVID is no big deal while being pleased that they get celebrity treatment when they get COVID (and admission to hospitals out of “an abundance of caution”, Remsdivir, and monoclonal antibody cocktails): Trump, Giuliani, Carson, Christie, . . . .”

      Democratic politicians’ partying and traveling fuels the perception that COVID is a hoax, a scam, and a power grab.

      A lot of normal people see that stuff and wonder–if COVID is really a big deal, why are they having a dinner with two dozen people and jetting across the country?

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  6. I haven’t yet seen any COVID outbreaks linked to BLM marches though it is possible. I have seen outbreaks reported in the local Black community traced to family/friend gatherings. But here in Denver at the marches they were aggressive with masks and social distancing and had folks with boxes of masks walking around. I wish things were that well handled at my grocery store.
    Sadly the nearby Colorado Springs Trump rally did not have the same emphasis on safety:

    https://gazette.com/multimedia/photos-pro-trump-rally-in-colorado-springs/collection_64204e74-214b-11eb-9535-b7d9a61cd30d.html#6

    Certainly any group can be reckless. But the politicization of the pandemic has led to some groups just skipping any kind of harm reduction.

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  7. The biggest spreaders are not outdoor events, which includes rallies and marches of any political variety. It’s indoor gatherings of family and friends, especially when people are not wearing masks and hanging out for long periods of time. That’s it. Sunday dinner with the grandparents is the biggest, biggest issue. Thanksgiving caused problems. Christmas will be even worse.

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    1. As I read somewhere else, it is indoor gatherings (not just indoor gatherings at home). When that’s Sunday dinner with grandparents, that’s because that is what people are doing.

      Indoor includes includes weddings (for example, the wedding in Ritzville, WA, which was held inside an airplane hangar), indoor rallies, parties (in a house or in other venues), restaurants. There have also been some incidents of outdoor gatherings (the wedding in Maine, Amy Barret reception) when people were unmasked (and, potentially too close to one another).

      I wish we had sequencing to link transmission chains and am so jealous of those who do.

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      1. Indoor gatherings include underground sex parties: https://www.aol.com/news/underground-party-california-leads-158-145600448.html

        stripper parties: https://nypost.com/2020/12/08/cops-bust-covid-flouting-underground-stripper-party/

        parties in New York, especially Bushwick: https://www.thecut.com/2020/11/nyc-underground-nightlife-covid-19.html

        raves: https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/cbs47-investigates/cbs47-investigates-hundreds-attend-kings-county-rave-from-the-grave-as-covid-19-cases-surge/

        this one’s in Paris: https://www.straitstimes.com/life/entertainment/underground-paris-party-defies-lockdown

        I know there’s the theory it was Thanksgiving, but really, looking at the curves (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/new-cases-50-states), it looks to me like colder weather, i.e., as it gets harder to stay outside, people go inside. There is less fresh air.

        I would not be at all surprised to learn that HVAC systems are part of the spread. Forced air is very, very popular, because you can heat and cool on the same system.

        One fascinating thing would be to track the way the virus moved through social networks. Although it looks like the eastern part of the state is red. It’s even reached Nantucket. https://www.wcvb.com/article/massachusetts-coronavirus-covid-19-community-spread-risk-map-color-coded/33646711

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    3. What I want is the linkage analysis I’ve seen from New Zealand & Korea, where it can be shown that the say, the people who went to the wedding in Ritzville & the nursing home patients who died have the same strain of virus.

      One of the true challenges with this virus is the long chain to significant consequences. Some of the wedding attendees might, like Kristi Noem said about her grandmother, feel that people in nursing homes are ready to die. But others might consider the consequences if they could understand the connection. But even I, who understands the chain of transmission, find it hard to really understand that breathing the same air as someone with covid might mean three weeks later, I am responsible for someone’s death. It’s a tough consequence to understand. Knowing that your virus killed them, might help the understanding.

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  8. Republicans who think Biden couldn’t have won Pennsylvania, please come to the (formerly Republican) Philadelphia suburbs. Speak to my sister-in-law and her siblings, who were reliably Republican two minutes ago and will likely never return to the fold.

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  9. BTW, my husband’s family is filled with doctors. Doctors used to be 60-70% Republican (in about 1980–when my father-in-law, who was less Republican than most but not a Democrat, voted for Anderson). In October 2019 the WSJ had an article about how it has flipped–doctors in 2019 were 60-70% Democratic. Wonder what the numbers are post-Covid. The Republicans are hemorraghing professionals.

    I have a theory that the reason the election predictions are so bad rn is that the pollsters are relying on the traditional view that Democrats are less likely to turn out to the polls than Republicans, and therefore that a high turnout election (Presidential races, Presidential races like 2020 that get lots of attention) will favor them, when the parties have changed so much–with disaffected, les organized voters now more likely to be Republican–that high turnout is more likely to favor Republicans. Of course that would suggest Democrats should be favored (more than they were traditionally–of course other forces are always at work) in midterm elections. Fingers crossed.

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    1. lisasg2 said, “I have a theory that the reason the election predictions are so bad rn is that the pollsters are relying on the traditional view that Democrats are less likely to turn out to the polls than Republicans, and therefore that a high turnout election (Presidential races, Presidential races like 2020 that get lots of attention) will favor them, when the parties have changed so much–with disaffected, les organized voters now more likely to be Republican–that high turnout is more likely to favor Republicans.”

      That is a really good point.

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  11. Wendy said, “73% of the spread is from household/social gatherings. Wow.”

    The flip side of that is that it means that people are being very careful in public. By and large, I think people did a pretty good job with Thanksgiving (less air travel, lots of testing), but I haven’t seen a lot of specific Christmas advice yet. Christmas should be easier, because you typically have so much more time to prep for Christmas compared to Thanksgiving.

    I was just dropping by to post this:

    https://mobile.twitter.com/UNICEFmedia/status/1336099373026045955

    UNICEF tweets:

    “A recent study using data from 191 countries showed no association between school status and #COVID19 infection rates in the community.”

    “With little evidence that schools contribute to higher rates of transmission, UNICEF urges governments to prioritize reopening schools and take all actions possible to make them as safe as possible.”

    I think what they are saying is what we were talking about earlier–while COVID spreads at school, open schools do not amplify COVID rates within communities.

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