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How Does the Pandemic Feel a Year Later?

In March of 2020, the covid-19 epidemic was getting started. The country was locked down and the president had declared a national emergency. We were all wondering what we were in for. I tried to predict the future in a post: How Will the Pandemic Feel? I made mistakes but I also got some stuff right.

Today, we are at a tipping point. Cases are rising again here and in some other parts of the country, but we have three effective vaccines against covid-19. I, my wife Rebecca, all her siblings, and many, if not all, of my Waschke cousins are vaccinated. In February 2021, if you were a healthcare worker or first responder or old enough or sick enough to be eligible, you had to scramble in Whatcom County to find a vaccination appointment. I drove a hundred miles to the University of Washington to get mine. Today, all but subteens are eligible, and they will be soon. Our household received three invitations to sign up for vaccination appointments before noon today. Much has changed.

Vaccines

The rapid development and deployment of vaccines for covid-19 is a scientific miracle. In the March 2020 post, I mentioned that viruses, the cause of the 1918 flu pandemic, would not be discovered until years after the 1918 pandemic was almost forgotten. Vaccines were poorly understood then, not nearly as well as now. Just a year ago, vaccines, when they could be discovered, typically took 3 years to develop, test, and deploy. A 60% effective vaccine was considered good.

Risking enormous investments and making dicey bets on success like setting up manufacturing lines before there was a vaccine to manufacture, covid-19 vaccines became available in a third of the elapsed period that was considered usual a year ago. Two of the three vaccines available in the U. S. are over 90% effective— over 90% of vaccinated people who are exposed will not be infected with covid-19. The flu vaccines that save lives every year are typically only 40% to 60% effective. More important, but less definitively documented, all three vaccines almost totally prevent hospitalization and death from covid-19. Folks still occasionally get sick, but they don’t go to the hospital and they don’t die. A year ago, I felt such an optimistic outcome was unreasonable. I am so glad I was wrong.

Resurgence

Everyone I meet now is feeling hopeful and safer, but life is not all well. The New York Times rates Whatcom County at a “very high risk” level today. A person in Whatcom County is more likely to test positive for covid-19 today than they were when I wrote my prediction post. On the other hand, the probability that I or someone close to me will be hospitalized or die has plummeted because we are all fully vaccinated, but less than a third of the county’s residents are fully vaccinated.

Variants

The danger today, which I did not anticipate at all, is in the variants. The covid-19 variants hitting us today are more dangerous than the disease that appeared in China in late 2019. They spread and kill more easily. We have more evidence of long term damage; covid-19 seems to be like polio, which left some victims crippled long after the disease was over. Today’s vaccines are still effective against the current more destructive variants, but eventually, as new variants appear, boosters or new vaccines will almost certainly be needed.

As long as covid-19 rages on, variants are a serious threat. Make no mistake, although the overall numbers for the U. S. are improving, and the vaccines are giving us more freedom, more people are getting sick with covid-19 now in Whatcom County than were all last summer. Infections are down from the winter peak, but getting sick is more likely now than last summer. And covid-19 is a worsening catastrophe in places like India and Brazil, which makes the emergence of dangerous variants from those areas likely. One clear lesson from 2020 is that closing borders in our mobile and connected age can slow the spread of variants, but eventually they will cross over to us.

Variants tend to appear where the disease is rampant. Variants are random occurrences. The more cases of covid-19, the more chances that a dangerous variant will appear. Where the disease is spreading rapidly, a dangerous variant also spreads more rapidly. As long as there are covid-19 hotspots, variants will show up also; some of these will increase the danger and need for boosters and new vaccines.

Predictions

Currently, the death rate for Whatcom County is about 45 per 100,000 population. That is considerably lower than the 600 per 100,000 in the U.S. during the 1918 flu pandemic. I attribute this to several reasons. In 1918 the U.S. was sending troops across the Atlantic to fight World War I. Army barracks and crowded troop ships were ideal conditions for spreading the virus. Our healthcare system has become much better at keeping sick people alive in general and a few specific treatments for covid-19 have been discovered. And, of course, there are the vaccines.

Last March, I predicted that by this time we would all have known one or two, but not many, people who died from covid-19. For me, it hasn’t been as bad as that. I know of two former co-workers from the east coast who died from covid-19, but they are people I haven’t spoken to in over a decade and who were, at most, just people I knew, not friends. If you allow degrees of separation, friends of friends, the number gets larger. My sister-in-law was in the infamous Skagit super-spreader choir. She lost two friends. There are others like that.

Social distancing, masks, and vaccines have all proven effective in fighting covid. We don’t have to be as careful about masks and social distancing now that vaccines are taking effect, but if more don’t get vaccinated, we run the risk of a variant that the vaccines won’t prevent. If that happens the only effective way to stop the deaths will be to return to lockdowns and continuous masking and social distancing. The countries of the world that combated covid-19 most effectively, like Taiwan and New Zealand, relied on masks and social distancing, not vaccines.

If you don’t want masks, social distancing, and lockdowns, urge everyone around you to get vaccinated. Now.

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Spring 2021: Perks You Up Like A Wooden Hairbrush To Your Bottom

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

20 March 2121, will be the first day of spring, but the season of renewal has already arrived for me.

On the second day of spring, I will receive my second covid-19 vaccine injection. Two weeks from then, the CDC says I can safely visit with small groups of other vaccinated people without a mask, indoors, no social distancing required. That’s the CDC rule, but my mood began to change a week after the first injection of the Moderna vaccine.

Yet to be verified but plausible reports say a single vaccination confers substantial protection. I’m sure those reports are in the back of my mind, but we have also had long sun breaks for the last few weeks in Whatcom County, and they too have touched my mood. With the sunshine, I’ve ridden over a hundred miles on my bicycle so far in March, which has done a lot to relieve the crotchets in my arthritic joints and equally age damaged psyche.

When I was a kid, we called this February Spring. It’s a comic act the climate pulls in the Northwest towards the end of February or the beginning of March. The rain stops, the skies clear, a little warm air blows in from Hawaii, dusk quits cramping the afternoon down to not much more than a coffee break, and we get a few days’ reprieve from sullen clouds and soaking drizzle. The baseball mitts come out for playing catch, and maybe an hour or two of workup baseball, or scrub, if that’s what you call it.

One year, to my mother’s chagrin, I grabbed a pair of her sewing shears and converted my jeans to cut-offs on the second or third day of February Spring. My mother and mother nature both pulled the skids out from under that. The next day was the first day of forty days of continuous showers, rain, and drizzle: all the cold damp magic that a marine climate can cast over the land. If it hadn’t been for a few whacks to my bottom with the backside of my mother’s wooden hair brush warming me up, it would have been uncomfortably cold.

But, somehow, I think this spring is different. I know. Nature has fooled me many times before and she sure can fool me again, but I don’t recall a February Spring lasting past the Ides of March like this year. The Indian Plum is blooming, the hazelnut trees have yellow catkins, the tiny pink and blue violets my grandmother planted a hundred or so years ago are popping up in the lawn, the forsythias are flashing their bright yellows, cherry blossoms are peeking out, and I see early rhododendron blooms in front of the covid-vacant school down the road.

Indian Plum
Forsythia

If I weren’t so stinking old this week, I’d have cut the bottoms off my pant legs, dug out a mitt, ball, and bat and found a game of workup this afternoon. Will nature bust me again for over optimism? Maybe. But I have to say, today, I’d give anything today to have my mother take a hairbrush to my bottom for cutting off my jeans.

We’re breaking free of the pandemic. The Whatcom County Library System has opened its branches at twenty-five percent capacity. I think I will wait until after my second shot before I venture inside, but the day is coming. In a month, planning a haircut will no longer be a soul-shuddering existential calculation.

Covid-19 had me spooked.

I’ve studied the risk calculations with all the engineering and mathematics on my resume. I have enough going against me that the odds look about fifty-fifty that I would go to the hospital if I contracted covid, and one in ten that I would not come out alive. I’m not brave, not likely to venture a round of Russian Roulette, which is close to my odds if I ever “catch the covid,” as I heard somebody say.

A few months back, I seriously doubted that I would see next Christmas, and was awed and grateful when I saw my fourth grandson, Charlie, back in November when the death count was climbing.

But today, I’m contemplating that I might just see Charlie as a young man, looking to find himself in the world. See our eighteen year old twin grandsons as established adults, and six year old Dario perhaps starting a family.

Yeah! It’s spring folks.

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Nero Wolfe Mystery. By Marv???

 I have more fiction to offer in addition to the beginning of my Chicago detective novel. A while back, I wrote a short story that uses Rex Stout’s cast of characters and style from a  Nero Wolfe mystery, although I could not help letting my personality slip in. And I admit, to impertinence in stealing from Grand Master Stout.  If I did my job well, the readers will enjoy the story, although I would be gobsmacked if anyone mistook it for the real thing. Read it here.

Readers with a sharp ear will hear more than a little Rex Stout Nero Wolfe mystery in my Fenton Herzman and Reggie Haskell.

The Nero Wolfe Mystery

A little background for those who are interested. Rex Stout started writing the Nero Wolfe mysteries in the 1930s and he continued until he died in 1975. He created a repertoire of characters that appear in most of the novels: Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, of course, but also NPYD Homicide Division Inspector Fergus Cramer, chef Fritz Brenner, freelance operative Saul Panzer, tomboy femme fatale and ballroom dancer Lily Rowan, and more. Part of Stout’s charm is the comfortable familiarity of the setting and characters.

An old brownstone in midtown Manhattan is a much a part of the stories as any of the characters. The building has a penthouse greenhouse where Wolfe retreats morning and afternoon on a schedule that is not to be changed or interrupted. The globe in Wolfe’s office is the largest anyone has ever seen. Wolfe knows the precise location of every volume on his floor to ceiling book shelves and a peephole is hidden behind a trick painting.

I like to think of Stout’s characters as deep caricatures—more realistic than burlesques, but magnified beyond life; often comic, but facing profoundly serious issues. The putative main character, Nero Wolfe, is a genius detective who prefers eating and raising orchids to detecting. Archie Goodwin’s real job is to goad Wolfe into action. Archie is the true center of the stories, a wise-cracking innocent whom some critics compare to Huckleberry Finn. He does Wolfe’s leg work, and more.

A&E produced a Nero Wolfe television series in 2001 and 2002 starring Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin. There have been several radio, movie, and television productions based on Nero Wolfe, but I like the A&E series best. It’s as faithful as television ever is to an original and the sets are lavish chiaroscura that remind me of a Merchant Ivory film. I recommend seeing it if you have a chance. I have a DVD set of the entire series.

There was a Canadian CBC radio series that is good listening, but it is hard to find. The voice characterizations are superb, and, if you have the right kind of imagination, the sets are more vivid than A & E. Try here.

Like almost every Nero Wolfe mystery, my story begins with a potential client at the door. It’s close to lunch time. Archie tries to send him away, but the client is insistent and, in some way, disturbing. Archie relents and parks him into the front room to wait, locking the door so he can’t wander. Wolfe, of course, won’t see him. While Wolfe is on the phone, Archie checks on the client and finds him dead. Wolfe is annoyed but, uncharacteristically, he allows Archie to call 911 after a ten minute head-start on lunch instead of insisting on delaying until the meal is over. Archie gets a hunch that Wolfe has something up his sleeve. He’s right.

I wrote my Nero Wolfe mystery over five years ago for a few self-indulgent laughs. I reread it the other day. I had forgotten the story entirely. I was surprised that I enjoyed reading it, so maybe a few folks will enjoy it too. Wolfe’s lunch is heavy but the story is light.

I called it  Lunchus Interuptus.