What an exciting time to be a grocery store clerk. You are hailed as a hero just for showing up at work.
It’s a long way from storming the beaches of Normandy, but that was another America.
In this America, we’re encouraged to behave like frightened hypochondriacs while our political leaders induce an economic meltdown, and the media react in horror every time someone dies. (At least if the death can in any way be linked to COVID-19. You would think Americans have stopped dying of cancer, congestive heart failure, strokes.)
People have always died. There have always been dread diseases, epidemics, pandemics, plagues.
It might be years before we know which turned out to be worse in America – a pandemic or a politically-mandated panic fueled by the media’s hatred of President Donald Trump.
In early March, I went into a small neighborhood market where I occasionally shop. While chatting with a young Hispanic woman who works there, I asked if she was concerned about the coronavirus since she interacts with the public.
No, she wasn’t worried. She had heard a lot about coronavirus and had visited the Center for Disease Control’s website for reliable information.
“It’s the elderly and people who already have health problems, they’re the ones who need to be worried,” she said.
She was taking care of herself and following the CDC’s advice.
About two weeks later, I went into the market after Oregon Gov. Kate Brown instituted the lockdown. This time the young Hispanic woman responded by yelling when I asked her how things were going.
“I’m sick of this country being run by old white men!” she screamed, waving her arms. “They didn’t shut down everything during swine flu! They didn’t shut down everything because of AIDS! Old white men are dying, and everybody has to stay home!”
I didn’t completely agree or disagree with her. I did point out, “Kate Brown isn’t an old white man.”
I haven’t been back to that market. By now I might not be allowed in without a face mask, a mostly symbolic gesture and not always hygienic. Increasingly, if you don’t wear one, you’re treated like a leper.
Considering the history of pandemics, the lockdown in Oregon seems extreme and unnecessary, especially the school closures. Has the lockdown saved lives? Undoubtedly it has if you simply look at numbers. Shall we stay home forever and save even more lives?
We live in a world of almost 8 billion people and even more critters. That’s a lot of germs, bacteria, viruses. Things are going to go haywire occasionally.
Right now, in Oregon the panic is worse than the pandemic. I don’t know anyone yet who has died of COVID-19, but I’ve known three people in my life who died of AIDS.
I’m currently surrounded by people who are out of work and out of school. Some hate their low-wage jobs and consider the lockdown a timeout with unemployment benefits. Other people desperately need their jobs. Still others are in shock over how quickly their lives have come undone. Many small-business owners are watching their dreams and years of hard work disappear.
A friend of mine, whose daughter works at an Oregon hospital, told me there were legitimate fears that if the pandemic turned out as bad as it was feared, there would be an onslaught of patients. The sick and dying would overwhelm medical facilities. That’s what happened in 1918 when morticians and doctors couldn’t keep up. It has happened with this pandemic in New York City, likely because of its densely-packed, international population.
The people who presumably know best have been making predictions about another Great Influenza Pandemic ever since the last one 100 years ago. So how come we’re freaking out now?
Two years ago, the cover story on The Smithsonian magazine was: “The Next Pandemic.”
It was one of many anniversary stories you might have seen in late 2017, early 2018. The media love anniversary stories, and 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the Pandemic of 1918, which killed between 50 million and 100 million worldwide. That’s quite a spread – an indication of how imprecise the facts surrounding a pandemic can be. An example of how deadly it was: More than 12,000 Philadelphians died in a six-week period. The disease preyed on everyone, including the young and healthy.
Although public officials tried to play down the alarm, the death rate in 1918 was so profound the public – without being ordered to – locked down on their own. No school. No church. No community life. When Red Cross chapters begged for help to bring food to the starving, few volunteers stepped forward.
The Smithsonian quotes a voice now familiar to us – Dr. Anthony Fauci. More than two years ago, he was warning about how ineffective flu vaccines can be since the virus is constantly changing.
One of the curiosities of the Pandemic of 1918 was how suddenly it disappeared, and how quickly the public forgot about it.
In her 1999 book, “Flu,” New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata talks about her own ignorance and how the Pandemic of 1918 affected the health care she received as a child.
“My father insisted on heeding the advice of an old doctor who had lived through that flu and who decided, as a consequence, to blast every respiratory illness with erythromycin…,” she writes. “When I grew older and understood the overuse of antibiotics, I would disparage my father’s doctor, arguing that he was irrational.”
Kolata treats the search for the cause of the 1918 pandemic like a murder mystery with pathologists trying to find its source and why it was so deadly. Some virologists suggested pandemics appear at 11-year cycles.
“The central fact about influenza pandemic…,” she writes “is that every one that has ever been traced to its origin began in China’s Guangdong Province, formerly called Canton, which is in the south, next to Hong Kong.”
She is quoting Dr. Kennedy Shortridge, a virologist from the University of Hong Kong, who asked, “Could it be that the 1918 flu began as a bird flu in southern China?”
Virologists are always on alert for the next 1918 pandemic, and one came in 1997 when a 3-year-old, healthy boy in Hong Kong suddenly became ill with a viral infection and quickly died. It would turn out that he died of a flu strain that should have never infected a human being.
“No human would be immune to such a virus. The whole world was at risk,” Kolata writes.
One hypothesis had been that the 1918 virus originated in a bird but jumped to humans via pigs.
“Pigs bridge the gap between birds and humans – both bird flu strains and human flu strains can grow in pigs’ bodies…,” Kolata notes. “(T)he ‘Asian’ flu of 1957 and the ‘Hong Kong’ flu of 1968 involved virus strains that seem to have come, indirectly, from birds.”
Shortridge immediately thought of the “wet markets” in Hong Kong, where live fowl is slaughtered, and the guts (where flu virus thrives) are tossed in stalls open to the public. He visited such a market and came across a sight he found terrifying: A seemingly healthy chicken, pecking at its food, suddenly fell over with blood running from its cloaca (rectal area). Then another bird dropped, and another.
“We were looking at a chicken Ebola…,” he told Kolata. “I thought, ‘My God, what if this virus were to get out of this market and spread elsewhere?’”
The markets were shut down for a month, and 1.2 million chickens were destroyed, their bodies disinfected and buried.
That was in 1997.
Today, in 2020, any suggestion that COVID-19 began at a “wet market” in Wuhan, China is often countered by assurances that nothing racist is intended.
In the Smithsonian anniversary issue, writer Melinda Liu describes the scene of a wet market in Beijing:
“(A) man in sweat-stained shorts had stacked dozens of cages – jammed with chickens, pigeons, quail – on the pavement outside his grim hovel. I picked out two plump brown chickens. He slit their throats, tossed the flapping birds into a greasy four-foot-tall ceramic pot, and waited for the blood-spurting commotion to die down. A few minutes later he dunked the chickens in boiling water. To defeather them, he turned to a sort of ramshackle washing machine with its rotating drum studded with rubber protuberances. Soon, feathers and sludge splashed onto a pavement slick with who knows what.”
An American factory chicken farm is no paradise, either. In fact, the chickens Liu purchased might have had better lives than an American battery hen. But the slaughtering process – many Chinese believe freshly killed chickens are more healthful – is conducive to cross-species transmission of viruses. (Some American foodies have become equally fanatical about the freshness of what they eat.)
Wet markets include an array of animals, some of them exotic, all being killed in the same place while the blood flows freely. Before the lockdown was in place, there were stories in the media questioning whether the latest coronavirus was linked to a pangolin slaughtered at a wet market in Wuhan. (The scales of the pangolin, an armadillo-shaped animal, are supposed to help humans improve their sexual performance.)
It is now believed that a pangolin had an encounter with a bat carrying the virus. China’s long history of famine has taught them to eat anything and waste nothing. (See “Pity the Poor Pangolin” by Jason Goodwin.)
For all of the nonstop coronavirus news, wet markets haven’t drawn nearly as much attention as Trump’s press conferences and his ludicrous medical advice. He is an easy source of derision.
The Times recently promoted this story with graphics: “Three journalists from The New York Times reviewed more than 260,000 words spoken by President Trump during the pandemic.”
Three journalists from America’s premier newspaper to track Trump’s narcissism?
The Times’ all-consuming coronavirus coverage has veered from maintaining a tally of deaths attributed to COVID-19 (even if the decedent was elderly and suffering from cancer) to treating the lockdown as a lifestyle. In the latter category, the Times offered a selection of wines under $15 “for the quarantine.”
The pandemic and lockdown have given the national media a morale boost even as the panic has cost them ad revenue. The one thing Trump had going for him was the robust economy. Now that’s gone, and the media are almost giddy at times.
“This has been a great moment,” gushed NPR’s Michel Martin in a story on DJ D-Nice’s Club Quarantine, which livestreams musical events during the lockdown. Then she caught herself and tempered her exuberance.
“Well, great – that’s not really fair. I mean, people are seeing their tours canceled right and left,” she said.
A psychologist told NPR host Ari Shapiro that post-lockdown about a third of the population will suffer from post-traumatic stress.
“A staggering number,” said Shapiro, apparently swallowing it whole.
Undoubtedly, post-lockdown we will be treated to stories about store clerks and hospital employees facing the letdown of a return to normal life: How to cope when you’re no longer a hero.
– Pamela Fitzsimmons
Related:
I had meant to comment on your other essay about the Monsters on MapleStreet. From everything on the news the monster is Donald Trump, not the virus.
It seems Dr Fauci is contradicting what he said in Kolata’s book. Maybe it’s easier now to get a vaccine. I haven’t read her book, but these times do call for serious nonfiction.
Stay healthy. You’re right about the hypochondria. It might kill us before the Covid does.
There are no shortages of recommended pandemic reading lists. I saw “Woman in Berlin” on one, a disturbing and true account of being female after Berlin fell in World War II. I read it several years ago and remember it vividly. Better to be at the mercy of nature than human evil.
It would be nice if COVID-19 rearranged our priorities instead of turning us into hypochondriacs. A friend of mine told me that a couple of weeks before the lockdown, a man she knows took his dog to one of Portland’s parks. He struck up a conversation with another park visitor, and during the exchange referred to his own dog as “he.”
“Why are you assigning gender to your dog?” the other park visitor asked.
What a luxury to have nothing more important to fuss about than gender pronouns. Now that guy in the park is probably trying to find just the right look for his mask.
I understand the need to avoid overloading the hospitals. At what cost to the rest of us? The politicians learn as they go. We’re their guinea pigs.
Your average cop has better business sense than most politicians of either party. The R’s understand corporations. They don’t understand small business. The Democrats don’t understand business, period. Cops know how hard small businesses work. The property crime never stops.
I’m retired so I’m lucky in that
Young folks aren’t going to be so lucky I’m afraid.
You probably heard how the hospitals are laying people off. So much for the onslaught. You’re right it’s going to be years before we really know what happened. Nobody will be interested by then because we move from one crisis to the next
Yes, I saw that. Some people will say the reason there was no onslaught was because the lockdown worked. Others will say, prove it. Unfortunately, politics sways everything now — even with people who insist, “I believe science.”
Science is so vast and infinite that to say, “I believe science” is meaningless. Scientists often don’t agree. They have egos and careers. It turns out the scientist who was doing the United Kingdom’s modeling for the lockdown didn’t follow his own recommendations. He was having an affair with a married woman; they were not observing the social distancing recommended for non-family members.
Lately, the local media have been citing a poll of 900 Oregonians, the majority of which supported Gov. Brown’s lockdown. But last Saturday, 800 to 850 protesters (that’s the Oregon State Police estimate) protested against the lockdown at the state Capitol. OPB’s Anna Griffin dismissed them as “a minority,” but she reiterated the support for the lockdown shown in the poll.
I rely increasingly on the foreign press. They seem to be more concerned about what the demise of America could mean to the world. Our own media hate Trump so much that their coverage focuses on him — their constant probing of who around him has tested positive is tiresome. (How many of the media have been tested?) If Trump gets sick, he gets sick. If he dies, the media will gleefully report there can’t be a funeral because of social distancing.
Like you, I worry about what kind of America the young will inherit. Then I see a cartoon on a young relative’s Facebook page, something to the effect that if COVID-19 leads to a Boomer die-off maybe millenials can afford to buy houses. Looking on the bright side.
You sound bitter. Do you want to talk about it? You have a lot of sympathetic friends here.
Thanks for your concern, but I’m not bitter. I try to keep a sense of humor. When I saw the Facebook cartoon about the Boomer die-off, I laughed and shared it with a friend. I’m surprised the media haven’t seized on that potential piece of good news — the housing market might open up if we have a large die-off.
On Friday, I stopped at a Whole Foods market. I was trying to find my way into the entrance, which had been reconfigured for the pandemic, and I wandered into an area with a sign that said “Temperature Check.” I thought, “Oh my god, now I have to have my temperature checked just to buy groceries.” I was ready to ask for a rectal thermometer, and then I realized the area was for employees.
I did spend the better part of yesterday angry over a story in The New York Times about how, when the Allies were liberating the concentration camps, sometimes the liberators were less than pleasant to the prisoners. Some of the young soldiers looked at the walking skeletons in horror. Imagine how that made the prisoners feel! Clearly, some of the liberators were anti-Semites.
Fortunately, the story allowed comments. One of the commenters nailed it: The Times had taken a micro-aggression and tried to expand it into a major problem.
Just like American politicians and reporters who insist on labeling it racist when someone suggests the Chinese should fix their wet markets.
So, Tom, did you get yourself a “Bat Fried Rice, No Thank You” T-shirt?
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xg8qnd/sadly-the-pandemic-could-be-millennials-best-chance-to-buy-a-house
Millenials might also ask their boomer parents if they have written up a will (that’s on our to do list). How to bring that up at the dinner table could be a funny cartoon for The New Yorker.
I was interested in reading books on mass-extinctions a few years ago. ‘The Great Dieoff'(?)about the Permian extinction was fascinating. It was caused by a series of massive volcanic eruptions and the land mass was one big super continent. I’ve been worried about an event like that for years since I heard that there is a super-volcano under Yellowstone. Another good book is The ‘Medea Hypothesis’ by Peter Ward.
I’m an introvert so I adapt well to shelter in place and social distancing and I always expect the worst because I’m very pessimistic. I posted on facebook ‘The Second Coming’ by Yeats the day after Trump was elected so from day one I’ve been expecting an ‘extinction level event’.
I’m amazed at how seamlessly I shifted into this new paradigm. Did you ever see the film ‘Melancholia’? I don’t think I’ll ever be able to go back to normal at my age and this kind of pushed me over the edge.
I am happy to hear that you are not bitter, you have the right attitude to get through this and I always look forward to your monthly submission to cheer me up and shift my perspective. Thank you and take care of yourself.
Tom, I first read “The Second Coming” as a freshman in college and loved it, especially the line, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” At the time, I thought it sounded like my generation.
I’ve heard of “Melancholia” but haven’t seen it. A friend of mine has had a minor obsession with apocalyptic books/movies since he was a kid so I asked him about it. He said it was comparable to “Last Night,” a movie I really like so I definitely have to check out “Melancholia.”
If you haven’t seen “Last Night,” it’s a Canadian film from 1998. Avoid reading the Wikipedia description because it includes details that aren’t in the movie. Perhaps they were in the original screenplay. The end of the world is coming, and the film follows several people as they prepare to spend their last night. The actors include Sandra Oh, pre-Grey’s Anatomy. Her character and her husband had planned to commit suicide on the last night. However, her car is attacked by vandals, and those plans go awry.
What’s fascinating is that it’s not a depressing film. Planet Earth had a good run, at least for a while and for some folks.
What’s the difference between bitter and angry? What’s wrong with either?
I’m trying to help one of my favorite restaurants survive. It’s the owner and his partner who’s running the place. I don’t completely get what’s going with the stimulus. He can’t rehire his wait crew. He can’t pay them what they make on unemployment, I guess. He can’t open up except partially. He can’t make enough that way. He’s got bureaucrats telling him how to run the place
I used to sit at the counter. I understand you don’t want people sitting cheek to jowl but what if you had couple of stools in between. He’s angry, bitter, pissed. Call it whatever
I hope your friend can find a way to make a go of it.
On the Friday after the governor instituted the lockdown, I stopped to buy a Street Roots paper from a vendor outside the Whole Foods in the Pearl District.
“How’s it going?” I asked him.
“Slow,” he said then added, “Understandably.”
We chatted for a bit, and it seemed he had a better understanding of the changes that were coming than some politicians and community leaders.
Public Broadcasting – it is not your friend.
Suppose old white men can take scapegoating better than the Jews. We’ll see. Until now I really hadn’t thought about the competitive aspect of the matter.
Old white men’ll prolly do alright. We often have.
I’ve been receiving a lot of Portland election porn lately. Guess it’s all about social justice.
I don’t see it getting better around here anytime soon.
Are they using the 1619 curriculum in our local schools?
Well, maybe Trump ain’t the best guy talkin’ pandemic-wise. But, hey I’d take his musings over those of the Lancet these days.
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“Portland election porn.” Very funny and true. The only thing I would add is “progressive porn.”
What we have in Portland elections is a choice of progressives. Non-progressives will not waste their time and money running.
I’ve been keeping all the mailers I’ve received. It’s stunning how much they all sound alike. Their endorsements are from the same mutual admiration society led by Deborah Kafoury, Barbara Roberts, Earl Blumenaur, etc. We keep electing the same crowd, and nothing changes.
What is especially galling is that some of those mailers are paid for with our taxes. Margot Black’s for example. She’s one of the few candidates I’ve met, and she’s thoroughly obnoxious.
Not even 10 minutes ago, I got a call from someone who sounded like a 14-year-old girl. In a squeaky, high-pitched voice that is now acceptable on public radio reporters, this person said she was calling on behalf of Chloe Eudaly.
That tells me Eudaly must be running scared. When she ran the first time, she focused on her own tribe. In her first race, I remember reading where she said she didn’t campaign in southwest Portland. I guess she thought southwest Portlanders were all rich, white, Republican landlords. She has probably figured out by now that all quadrants of Portland have active neighborhood associations that represent a variety of people.