The Most Stressful Years in History

Covid-19 in the first month of 2021.

In December of 2020, 77,124 American citizens died from coronavirus complications, the deadliest month of the pandemic to date. The Thanksgiving occasion was almost exclusively to blame. The January surge that was about to pop would be consequences from our Christmas gatherings.

Total American cases: 20,981,000 at the penning of this entry in early 2021.

Total American deaths: 356,228.

About 1 in 5 people getting tested for Covid in Los Angeles were positive in that first week of January. That was five times the average we saw back in November.

SoCal was reaping what it had sewn.

Only about 4.8 million Americans were vaccinated so far, when experts hoped that number to be 20 to 30 million by then. At that rate it would take about ten years for all Americans to be vaccinated. Just over 17 million doses were distributed instead of the 20 million expected by the end of 2020. 60 to 70% of those doses sat on pharmacy shelves. Only about 15% of doses destined for nursing homes and caregivers were utilized. Fauci estimated about 200,000 doses were being given each day. He hoped we’d be at a million a day by then.

The problem was, it was easy enough to get the doses delivered, but without federal assistance and ramped up production, an expedited rollout didn’t happen. Ideally, if we wanted to get more on top of it before spring, members of the military and federal emergency service programs would be activated to augment the private sector’s manpower reserves. Federal personnel would be trained to give vaccines and add to existing civilian Covid measures, like having FEMA or military medics operate drive-through vaccination centers at large scale concert and sports arenas, same as we did with Covid testing sites early on. The states were floundering in methods of delivery because of our decentralized health care system and our regional politics. The vaccine rollout to the first tiers of medical professionals and nursing home patients was haphazard and subject to case-by-case policy, facility to facility.

It wasn’t an entirely unexpected triage process, given levels of inconsistency between state-sponsored and for-profit health care programs, and the discrepancies in which how every agency communicates eligibility to waiting populations. A pharmacy up in the Bay Area discovered their freezer broke down and they needed to use all their stored vaccines with a few hours or they’d be wasted, so they made a first come, first served announcement. You can imagine the free-for-all mad dash that happened next.

The vaccine rollout was a circumstance that clearly showed having one proven way to do things, one universal generalized method and practice that applies to all states and regional governance no matter who lives there or how they prefer doing things would’ve been ideal. We didn’t need so many cooks stirring the vaccine soup. It just needed to get done. Socialized medicine in the U.S. would’ve saved more lives. It did exactly that, in the 72 countries around the world with universal health care.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar expected 50 million people to receive their first shot by the end of January. That estimate was looking overly generous at that early juncture. He still believed every American who wanted a vaccine would get it by the summer. A number of issues weren’t helping the process, such as the unsettling number of front-line workers who refused to take the vaccine. 30% of Los Angeles County medical personnel who had first access to either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine declined to get their shots. An average of 50% refused the vaccines in nearby Riverside County. According to data from the Pew Research Center, 2 in 10 Americans were certain they wouldn’t get the vaccine when it was offered to them. 62% said they’d be very uncomfortable being among the first to get it. 70% of those surveyed who’d contracted and survived the virus said they felt no need to get vaccinated.

Vaccine hesitancy was a puzzling factor among healthcare workers. One would’ve thought they’d be lining up to get them not simply because of first dibs, but because they’re supposedly more versed in epidemiology science. The Los Angeles Times reported many of those surveyed refused because they went months without contracting Covid and they thought they had a good shot at surviving it, or overcoming its long-term effects should they get it. Naturally there were those among the professionals who like many Americans, were concerned about vaccine side effects, or they distrusted the haste in which the vaccine was created.

Medical pros weren’t the only front liners iffy about the vaccine. A startling number of police and fire personnel across the Southern Californian regions also refused to get the vaccine, their unions even offering incentives like free paid time off and swag gift baskets for those who elected to get vaccinated. If the public saw standard authority figures like doctors, cops, and firefighters dodging the vaccine, many of them were going to follow suit and the pandemic would stretch on.

Some were more fearful than others, however, as evidenced by Steven Brandenberg, a pharmacist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, who deliberately destroyed hundreds of doses of the vaccine by removing them from refrigeration. Enough vaccine was spoiled to inoculate 570 people. Brandenburg was arrested on charges of reckless endangerment, adulterating a prescription drug, and criminal damage to property. He was an admitted conspiracy theorist and told police he believed “the world was crashing down” and that the shots would mutate recipients’ DNA. Just a thought…it might behoove us to vet our medical professionals assigned to promote public health awareness, rather than let fanatics hold employment positions that might dictate life or death situations.

Morgues overflowed across the LA basin.

Funeral homes turned away bereaved families, having so much business they couldn’t accept any new clientele.

EMTs doing in-field resuscitation were told not to bother bringing in non-responsive patients to emergency rooms.

Rationed care had arrived.

A growing number of long Covid survivors claimed they’d permanently lost their senses of taste, or smell, sometimes both. Many lost extremities, appendages, or limbs from sepsis. Some distressing proportions of young survivors showed permanent long-term damage to their hearts and lungs. Plenty of folks had incurred neurological damage from their infection.

A new variant of the virus, B.1.1.7., was first noted in the U.K. and South Africa and spread to multiple other countries, including the U.S. The mutation seemed to be between 10 and 60% more transmissible, possibly due to the increased viral load infected people appeared to carry in their noses and throats. The good news was, it didn’t seem to bear an increased mortality rate. The bad news was, more people were gonna catch it.

Los Angeles and San Francisco imposed a long overdue quarantine on incoming, long-distance airline travelers. The new parameters of the stay-at-home order included the prohibition of renting hotel rooms for folks visiting as tourists, and the sequestering of incoming arrivals from other countries for ten days, something we should’ve been doing all along like more proactive countries such as Australia and New Zealand. It was too little, too late, in terms of that recent holiday surge that was about to pay the check. 

The unhoused community in SoCal took a dire turn. After many months of surprising lower contraction per capita rates among their ranks, derived from their isolation from society’s regular social channels, infections among the homeless in Los Angeles doubled after Thanksgiving, and were predicted to triple with the pending Christmas surge. LA’s Department of Public Health reported 547 new cases in the last week of December. Skid Row became another SoCal superspreader hot spot. The shelters and rescue missions were overwhelmed. Outreach teams encouraged campers to isolate in their tents or vehicles.

And still the city of Los Angeles authorized the resumption of forced cleanups at encampments, with zero regard for the dangers of displacing unhoused citizens during the surge. Covid-19 finally caught up with our drifting brethren. They would pay a stiff price. As they always do. They are our harbingers, after all, our heralds of how our society fares.

FEMA’s National Risk Index ranked more than 3,000 American counties associated with 18 types of natural disasters, including earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and volcanoes. They focused on places where those natural events were most likely to occur and which areas were likely to sustain the most damage, examining the vulnerability of the region’s populations and their respective abilities in rallying their manpower reserves and their economic infrastructures to recover. Given those parameters, large cities with expensive real estate and higher densities of humans would be at the highest risks from large scale catastrophes. Many government watchdogs claimed FEMA probably came up with this framework so that it might have an established baseline in approving future mitigation grants and claims from affected areas.

Can you guess which county in the United States was, according to FEMA, the riskiest place to live in the country? Let me give you a hint. The place in question has been operating under the ever-pending doom of The Big One for the last century plus. That’s right! It’s good old Los Angeles, the heart of SoCal, that is the most hazardous American joint to live within, city of fiery apocalypse and dystopian fantasy. Tell us something we don’t know, FEMA. Best be realistic, Angelenos. With a federally sanctioned study like that in play, the earthquake insurance checks might be a long time coming after our homes are reduced to rubble. 

A survey of 28 American and British historians conducted by Bloom, an app-based virtual therapy company, considered and ranked the most stressful years in human history. You can probably guess the motivation behind such an endeavor, given that damned year, with its disease, death, quarantines, economic losses, cultural and political wars, and racial reckonings. They agreed 2020 was the sixth most stressful year in world history. The gold medal winner in their considerations was 1348, when the Black plague killed a third of the European population, about 200 million people.

Other contenders included:

1944. Nazi Germany initiates the Holocaust and murders over six million Jews.

1816. A volcanic eruption in Indonesia blots out the sun around the world resulting in mass famine, food riots, and cholera and typhus outbreaks.

410. Rome is sacked by Visigoth barbarians.

Top honors in the United States?

1862. The Civil War’s Battle of Antietam results in 23,000 soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action, all in one single day.

1929. The stock market crashes and the U. S. falls into the Great Depression.

1838. The Cherokee Nation is forced to surrender its lands and then suffers over 4,000 deaths while they marched west on the Trail of Tears.

1919. After World War I, the Spanish Flu kills near 700,000 Americans.

1968. The Tet Offensive is launched in Vietnam, in which better than 15,000 Vietnamese people are killed, civil unrest at home is at all-time high, and both Martin Luther King Junior and Robert Kennedy are assassinated.

1962. We narrowly avert nuclear holocaust during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

2001. 9/11 takes the lives of nearly 3,000 Americans and permanently changes our sociopolitical world views. 

Yep, 2020 was a year of years. Not quite an accolade of which we can take pride. It didn’t have to be as hard as it was, same as a number of those other years whose signature events were man made in nature, be it through nation-state resource competition or sociological shortcomings. The sack of Rome, the Civil War, the Holocaust, 1968, those happenings all came about from some form or another of whiteboyism. Bubonic plague and volcanoes, less so. It’s hard to squabble with the choices, though I daresay 1520 A.D. was worth consideration, what with its smallpox epidemic eradicating tens of millions of Indigenous peoples in North, South, and Central America, brought to them courtesy of European colonialism.

I was born in 1968. I had an old girlfriend who used to tell me people born in that year were destined to become harbingers of conflict, either creating chaos and dissent, or providing peaceful counterbalance to the same. She claimed I pretty much split the difference. I don’t ascribe much anthropomorphism to the passage of time, so I didn’t buy into it. The tale of my coming into existence is little more than a couple of Santa Barbaran sixties beatniks getting toasted one night and having unprotected sex.

Nonetheless, 1968 seems to be a herald year of Americana, defining a number of directions our country would end up taking.

I’ll go to the mat defending 2020’s claim to its place among the royalty of all time misery, if not for quantity and quality of suffering, then for the 21^st century proliferation of passive aggressive online communication that now dictates our every thought and feeling, creating a national divisiveness I doubt is rivaled even by the tumultuous era of the Kennedy assassinations and the Vietnam War. Though if the internet and smart phones had been around back then, that would’ve been a different story.

*Compiled from January 4th, 2021