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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.

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Masks For a Hard-Headed Dutchman

In my carpenter days, I thought I was a hard-headed Dutchman who feared nothing. My mother’s family is Lynden Dutch from the Netherlands. Outside Whatcom County, a Dutchman is usually a person of German descent. My father’s family is from Prussia, home to the hardest headed Germans. Both families were stubborn dairy farmers accustomed to hard work and bad weather. They formed their own opinions and stuck to them. I was turned out from a tough and hard-headed Dutchman mold.

Back in the late 70s, I was a carpenter. Sometimes I got orders to wear a mask, but I avoided them whenever I could, although I knew full well that masks were self-protection and for my benefit.

I didn’t need any stinking masks. I knew I was supposed to wear a carbon filter when I worked with hot solvents like acetone and lacquer thinner, but I was young and tough. Once, I had a job installing a Formica bathtub surround. I’ve installed acres of Formica laminate and my process was down pat. Paint the wall and the Formica with contact cement and let it dry, releasing clouds of solvent. Use thin strips of waste to separate the laminate from the wall until the surround was positioned perfectly, then pull the strips and roll the laminate down tight. I applied the cement, waited, then began to wrestle the surround into place, inhaling solvent fumes. My head started to swim, and brown clouds rushed in from the sides. I stumbled, opened a window, and turned on the exhaust fan as my vision constricted to a foggy tunnel. Fortunately, fresh air cleared my head and I was able to finish the installation.

At the time, I was proud of myself. I came through a tough spot and delivered a good job. Forty years later, I have a different opinion. I was a stupid kid who was lucky to have survived. The only good thing I can say is that I endangered myself, no one else.

In those days, I was also not as careful as I should have been around asbestos, which was all over construction sites back then. Not too long ago I heard of another tough Dutchman, a skilled craftsman whom I admired. He was my foreman on a few jobs. He died of asbestosis, a fatal lung disease caused by asbestos dust. Many of the carpenters I knew from those days are dead now, not all of them from lung diseases, but a fair number. My lungs are still good, but that’s luck, not being tough. I should have been more careful.

Forty years later, I still have some of that hard-headed Dutchman attitude. Well, so what? We tough Dutchmen make our decisions and don’t complain about the consequences. That’s what tough means to me. Back in the day, I acted like a first responder who doesn’t take time to grab protective gear. Yeah. A foolish hero. I made bad decisions but I was the one I placed in danger.

Today is different. The kind of masks that most of us are requested to wear now do not protect the wearer, at least not directly. To start with, since COVID-19 is infectious before its victims have symptoms, anyone in an area where COVID-19 is active, unless they have tested negative for the virus in the last three days, can transmit the disease without knowing it. Some people spread the virus without ever getting sick. That’s why public health officials in some places ask everyone to wear masks.

Water droplets laden with virus are the villains. Breathing, talking, singing, coughing, and sneezing all project droplets into the air. These droplets break up and evaporate into even finer particles called aerosols that hold the virus and float up to six feet before most have fallen to the ground. In cold air, they float longer. The aerosols are so fine, they are inhaled right through a cloth mask. Breathe in enough of these minute virus-carrying packets and you are infected with COVID-19. A cloth mask blocks the droplets and prevents tiny aerosols from forming. Healthcare personnel and first responders, who must get close to infected victims, don special masks that stop the aerosols, but the cloth masks worn by the rest of us only keep the droplets in, which impedes the spread of the virus, but does not protect the wearer from aerosols coming from disease victims. People wearing masks protect each other. Remove your mask and you threaten your neighbor.

If enough people wear cloth masks, and follow other practices like social distancing, frequent hand washing, and surface disinfection, the spread of the virus will slow, and we will all be safer and the daily death toll will go down.

Heroes sacrifice themselves for others; selfish wretches hurt others for their own convenience.

Where does that leave a hard-headed Dutchman who wants to own his fate? He makes his choice based on what he has learned.

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COVID-19 Contact Tracing Training

I finished the COVID-19 contact tracing course from Johns Hopkins online last Friday. This Monday morning I was surprised to find an article in Wired by a journalist who has taken the same class, an article in the New York Times on the huge numbers of people who have applied to become contact tracers, and the MIT Technology Review had both an item on why contact tracing may be a mess in the U.S., and a piece on what it is like to be a contact tracer.

Sonofagun. Sandbagged by a zeitgeist.

The class was easy but contact tracing is not. When I started taking the class, I thought it might be a nice way to volunteer and do my bit in the pandemic crisis. But as I began to learn what a contact tracer does, I began to have doubts that I am tough enough to be a one. If an opportunity arises, I’ll give it a try, but I am not nearly as confident that I can help as I was before I took the class.

Washington State already has a robust contact tracing program in place. Close to 1400 tracers have been trained. Most are from public health services. Around 400 come from the state Department of Licensing which has been idled by the virus, another 350 are National Guard volunteers. I may still have an opportunity to volunteer because experts estimate 30 contract tracers are needed per 100,000 population, in other words, our state may need another 850 tracers. However, an arthritic C++ coder with no background in healthcare is not likely to be among the best candidates.

Contact tracing has been used for centuries for controlling infectious diseases. Recent victories over the Ebola, SARS, and MERSA epidemics are the result of contact tracing. Social distancing slows the spread, but contact tracing defeats epidemics.

Essentially, contact tracers question each person with COVID-19, discover whom they could have infected, phone each of these, warn them that they could contract the virus, and ask them to stay home until the danger that they will infect others stops.

A number of things make contact tracing a tough job. Sometimes, a contact tracer is the first to tell a victim that they have tested positive. Asking someone to stay home from work and away from their family is hard. Tracers also warn victims of symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, or turning blue (yes turning blue) that mean they may die soon if they do not get help immediately. Some people will need help getting food, paying bills, and getting child or parent care. None of this is fun.

COVID-19 has some nasty characteristics. Each infected person appears to infect 2-3 others, some estimates are higher. Hence the soaring number of cases and deaths in just a few months. At present, evidence shows that a person can infect others from 2 days before they get sick. The danger continues until they are well. If you are exposed to COVID-19, it can take as long as 2 weeks for symptoms to appear. In other words, you are a threat to others and should quarantine for two weeks after you are exposed.

Perhaps the scariest part is that you may never show symptoms and still pass the disease to others. Remember the Typhoid Mary story? She was a cook who had typhoid, but no symptoms. She refused to quarantine and continued to spread typhoid, leaving a trail of misery and death. This is why we should all wear masks when we are out and about and close to others. The mask prevents you from becoming a COVID-19 Typhoid Mary.

One of the reasons I feel compelled to volunteer is that the virus is so deadly. Best estimates are that people infected with COVID-19 die 2 to 3 times more often than flu victims. The flu kills 12 to 60 thousand Americans each year. And that’s with a vaccine. COVID-19 has killed over 90,000 in 4 months. Early on, it was said that the virus doesn’t affect children, but cases have turned up in which children get severely sick and a few have died. There is some evidence that death rates increase where more people are infected. That is, in ten square miles where 100 people are infected, 2 or 3 may die, but in the same area where 10 times as many are infected, many more than 20 to 30 die. We have to stop the spread of COVID-19.

As is to be expected in 2020, a robust contact tracing plan is accompanied with a haze of vicious misinformation. Isolation and quarantine, contrary to what is being said in some circles, is not mandatory. A National Guard volunteer may call you, but they are calling to trace your contacts, not to force you into quarantine. If asked, quarantine yourself to protect your family, friends, and neighbors from misery and death from the virus. But no one will force you to do the right thing. The information collected by a contact tracer is confidential like health records in your doctor’s office and your name will not be passed to your contacts.

This is the way contact tracing is done in a free democracy. Places under authoritarian regimes force victims to stay inside at gun point and publicly shame them. Not here.

On the other hand, for the time being, the authoritarians are doing much better than we are against the virus. They will be glad to take over if a free nation can’t handle COVID-19.