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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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Our Civic Duty Is to Plant Trees

Fall on the farm is a reckoning and an endpoint, a closing of the books like the end of the corporate fiscal year. When fall arrives, you measure up the year’s crops and projects, report to the stock analysts gathered around the kitchen table, and look at what you have to work with for the year to come.

This fall, the analysts, Rebecca and I, recommended planting a few trees.

There are two fall seasons. One is astronomical. It arrived on Tuesday, the 22nd when, for the second time in 2020, night and day were equal. The other fall season is meteorological, usually starting weeks after the arrival of astronomical fall. This year, it arrived only a day later, or at least it felt that way to me. My grandparents used to say that when the weather changed, their rheumatism warned them. My joints ached when I got up on Wednesday morning and they reminded me of my age all day. I got a flu vaccination on Tuesday, so the aches could have come from the shot. I’ve had a day of aches after a flu shot before. Maybe it was the shot, maybe it was the weather, and maybe it was 2020 taking another swipe at all of us.

Whatcom County summer wasn’t bad. Our rain gauge has been off-line since we moved back to Waschke Road, but our neighbor near Deer Creek hauled in bale after bale of second crop hay this month. A good second crop always signaled a good year on the farm. Several deer have been stealing our son’s apples this summer and Albert the border collie has had more than enough squirrels to keep in line. Life thrives. After a peak following the 4th of July, the covid-19 infection rate has stayed relatively low in Whatcom, although we have had a late summer flurry of infections this month.

The wildfire smoke last week kept me indoors, but the gloom blew away over the weekend and we had blue skies and sunshine until the rain arrived. Still, fall and winter 2020 don’t look to me as if they will be much better than the spring and summer. The covid-19 pandemic has been brutal, possibly the worst year for death in this country since World War II. As I am writing this, we have close to 202,000 dead. The death rate in Whatcom County is not as high as it was in April and May, but it has held fairly steady through August after it plummeted in June and then rose in July. Many scientists predict covid-19 will flourish again in the fall like the flu does when we are driven inside by cooler weather.

There is talk of a vaccine soon, which I balance against equally credible talk that a vaccine won’t arrive until the grass greens up again in spring. A vaccine, or a dozen, will no doubt eventually arrive, maybe even in the next month or two. I’ll jump in line to be jabbed when a vaccine comes, but I liken it to the flu shot I got day before yesterday.

I am not optimistic.

I’ve been getting flu shots every year for fifty years. During that half century, every three or four years I’ve experienced head and chest congestion, body aches, and fever. Flu-like illness, if not genuine influenza. The vaccine doesn’t always work. I read the scientific literature on vaccination now as diligently as anyone. I don’t have a degree in epidemiology or virology, but I used the same types of statistical analysis on digital equipment performance that the medical people use on vaccines, so I have a passing understanding of what I read.

The experts talk about efficacy versus effectiveness. Efficacy measures the theoretical success of a vaccine in preventing disease. An efficacy of 60% means that under carefully controlled conditions and testing, 40% more unvaccinated people will get the flu than an equal number who are vaccinated. Put more practically, you roughly double your chances of avoiding the flu by getting vaccinated against it. Flu vaccine efficacy varies each year, but it bounces around 60%, which is a good enough number for me.

Vaccine effectiveness is a slightly different. It’s more realistic, but less precisely measured. Effectiveness gauges how the vaccine works in a real population where people have underlying conditions, vaccines are not always stored or injected properly, and not everyone gets vaccinated. These conditions are hard to control and compare, making the measurement less precise.

You can’t hold it against the vaccine that medical personnel sometimes make mistakes and people are sometimes sick and don’t always follow advice. Those circumstances increase the probability that you will be exposed to the virus and become infected. Therefore, effectiveness is generally lower than efficacy, but the data shows your odds of staying healthy are still far higher if you get the shot. That doesn’t mean you won’t get the flu, but instead of a yearly ordeal, the flu becomes about as intermittent for you as the Olympics.

Therefore, each year, I roll up my sleeve, look away, and am pleasantly surprised at how little the needle poke hurts.

But I still get the flu sometimes. Some years the vaccine works for me, some years I’m dealt the losing hand.

We know by now that covid-19 has sharper claws, bigger teeth, and jumps from person to person more easily than the flu. Influenza virus, when it kills, almost always asphyxiates its victim. Lungs cease to supply adequate oxygen and death follows. Covid-19 hits the lungs, but it also attacks the heart, veins, and arteries, the liver, and the brain. Autopsies of covid-19 victims show that they can die from harm to any of these organs.

Death tolls are not the only hurt. Covid-19’s damage can linger after recovery. Some victims who cleared the virus months ago still have heart or brain dysfunctions. Young athletes seem especially vulnerable to lingering heart problems. No one knows when or if they will recover or if they will die suddenly on the playing field in years to come.

If I were to get covid-19, my chances of survival are relatively low. I’m obese, I have type-2 diabetes, a heart condition, and I’m old. I expect to see spring 2021, but, realistically, I have to consider death by covid as a possibility.

Of course, I will get a vaccination as soon as one is available to me, but I still remember the many times that I ached with chills and fever from the flu I was vaccinated against.

Even with a vaccine, I plan to wear a mask, avoid indoor gatherings, keep socially distant, and amp up the air purification system in our house.

We’re planting a few trees in the yard this fall. I want to be around to prune them when they need it.