Today, I am trying to grapple with how the COVID-19 pandemic will feel here in Ferndale. The schools and the public libraries are closing. The stock market is thrashing. But the sun shining. It’s a loser’s game because predicting the future has never worked out well for me, but I keep trying.
People are confused by large numbers. I see this when I talk to people about computer security and I see confusion in the way people talk and react to COVID-19. And I feel it in myself when I look at the numbers on the Johns Hopkins dashboard. Hoard toilet paper? You gotta do something. Right?
No. Calm down.
Look at the coronavirus numbers. They are terrifying. I’m looking at 162,687 confirmed cases and 6,065 deaths. 3,244 cases in the U.S., 40 deaths in Washington State. By the time anyone reads this, those numbers will almost certainly be much higher. They grew in the hour I took writing this. The president has called a national emergency. The administration, congress, states, cities, and local health departments appear to be struggling to respond.
To get a sense of perspective, I have turned to the Spanish flu pandemic of 1919, a century ago. Spanish flu is a misnomer. No one knows where it came from. Xenophobia is nothing new.
Remember that in 1919, DNA and genetic sequencing were unknown concepts, penicillin was 20 years in the future; scientists would not discover that the flu was caused by a virus until the 1930s. They were guessing at how the disease moved from person to person. Although epidemiologists today don’t have all the details on COVID-19, we know so much more than we did in 1918 when the Spanish flu first appeared in the U.S. Vaccines and medicines to control and treat COVID-19 are not available yet, but the tools scientists have today to develop these remedies would not exist for 90 years after the Spanish flu appeared.
We are in a world’s better position to respond to COVID-19 than Spanish flu. When it appeared, the Brits were still launching cavalry charges. It’s no stretch to say that the 1919 pandemic response compared to the science of 2020 epidemiology in like matching a horse charge against a squad of Humvees backed by drones. A different world. That is not to say COVID-19 will be a walk in the park, but the 1919 pandemic is a worst-case, not an inevitable reality. It tells us about what could happen if we ignore the science.
What did happen in 1918-1919? The Spanish flu was first detected in the U.S. in March of 1919. By the spring of 1919, a little over a year later, April 1919, President Woodrow Wilson collapsed at the Versailles Peace Conference, presumably from the flu. He recovered but 675,000 American died in the pandemic. That’s roughly 600 per 100,000 people.
To put this in a local perspective, if the 1919 pandemic were repeated, roughly a hundred people would die in the small city of Ferndale. That’s highly unlikely to happen, but it would mean the current death rate in the U.S. would a little less than double.
Think about how that would feel. I’m old, over 70. Three people close to me have died in the past few years: a cousin and two close friends. All in the demographic most likely to die from COVID-19. I don’t think that is out of line for most people my age. How would I feel if that number doubled? Sad, of course. But terrified? No. I have many, many cherished relatives and friends. It’s the ones who survive that count.
We are likely to be in for a tough time ahead, but only a few will be taken down. Hold on tight folks. Keep your social distance. We now know that will blunt the force of the disease. It’s going to be okay.
And quit hoarding toilet paper.
Yesterday, I went out to the farm to check on the progress of awakening life. Snowdrops are showing up all over and have been for a couple weeks now. I missed visiting the farm earlier this season during our snow days, but I will bet the green blades and white flowers of the snowdrops were poking through the snow, justifying their name and adding welcome grace to the scene. Snowdrops are not a native species of the Pacific Northwest. I suspect either my grandmother or my mother planted them around the house. Now, patches of snowdrops show up in the woods and windbreaks, even along Waschke Road. They may be invasive, but I welcome the gentle little flowers and tender leaves that are the first proof of longer days. In a month, they will be almost invisible and forgotten.
Spring was certainly progressing in the woods. Tiny, tender nettles were showing. We never ate nettles, but some of the neighbors, I can’t remember who, used to pick tender nettle sprouts in the early spring and cook them into nettle soup. I never tasted their soup; never have I had the slightest desire to taste nettle soup. I know nettles too well from the stings I used to get on my arms and legs while running through the woods where the nettles grew in masses of emerald green, although, when I think of it now, nettles have a sort of refreshing smell. When I was a kid, I heard of old folks rubbing their joints with nettles for their rheumatism. The tiny new ones already have a sting.
The Indian plums, which my grandpa called “hardhack” along with all other species of pliant, tough, and hard-to-chop shrubs, had unfurled a few tiny leaves and white flowers. Despite the sweet name, the leaves and flowers have a sharp bitter smell when you crush them in your fingers. The floor of the woods was green with deer fern, which is not a sign of spring because deer ferns, unlike bracken or fiddlestick ferns, for which Ferndale was named, are green all year round. They say deer graze 
on deer fern during the winter, but the leaves are tough and leathery. My mother considered deer fern roots a treat. She would dig out the thick roots (rhizomes) brush off the dirt and chew the raw roots. They have a sweet licorice taste. I haven’t tasted a deer fern root in sixty years.