Thunderdome

My girl’s birthday was in mid-December. I usually would have taken her out to some 4-star restaurant, load up on the yummies, a couple glasses of wine, toast her graceful aging, and cap it off with chilling on the couch back at home, watching late night TV, a pile of doggies sprawled about us.

Yep, that year was different.

I bought her some roses via Instacart. We Grubhubbed a birthday dinner for her from one of her favorite eateries.  She soldiered through the pandemic and the shit show that was American politics that year with much more panache than I did. Despite the world weariness, she still looked great and she was as trim as ever thanks to her steadfast following of her keto diet. 

Me, I definitely looked older by the end of the year. I gained weight from all the drive-through and take-out. The passing of my dogs put more a lot more salt in my beard. I’d thinned on top too.

But we were still alive.

We were not statistics.

I knew then that folks who survived the pandemic would either know how fortunate they’d been, or they’d embrace an illusory stance they were never in any real danger. 

The Pfizer vaccine rolled out. Health care professionals all over the country started receiving their first doses. The first American citizen to get vaccinated outside of trials was a woman named Sandra Lindsay, an ICU nurse at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, New York. New York experienced a downward trend all summer, but in December was under siege once again. America hit the dreaded yet expected hallmark number that month…300,000 dead from Covid. New York Governor Cuomo said he believed the vaccine was the weapon that would end the war.

Susan Bailey, president of the American Medical Association, called vaccine hesitancy the biggest challenge in the medical war against Covid, but it was hardly a new phenomenon. We’ve always been a suspicious species when it comes to new medical science. We’re a skeptical lot, worse now than ever before due to our collective susceptibility to internet clickbait gaslighting.

Kaiser released a new study that week which found 71% of respondents willing and ready to get the vaccine if it was deemed to be safe and it was free. 27% wouldn’t do it regardless of the science or safety-efficacy proof offered. Hesitancy was highest among Republicans, naturally. Better than 35% of those surveyed who didn’t want to take vaccine were Black, or they lived in rural areas. 43% still believed the risks of the virus were exaggerated by the media. Distrust of the politicization of the vaccines, as well as their rush to development and production, were primary factors for those respondents.

It really became a matter of how deep folks delved in their personal levels of research. Most medical professionals agreed two months of safety data collected after vaccine distribution would need to be compiled, because most adverse effects to vaccination occur within 42 days of administering it. Both the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccines ranked at safety levels well above average after trials were completed, but again, there would be unexpected side effects for some few when there were tens of millions of people getting vaccinated. The decision was the same as before. Were the risks of reactions from a vaccine greater than the immediate risks of Covid infection? As we’ve seen, survivor reports on long Covid vary from person to person.

You could either take the chance you’d be one of the lucky few who skipped the vaccine, get the bug, and brush it off easily, or you could run the risk of clots, sepsis, cardiac or respiratory damage, or death. All the pros backed the odds, like Dr. Fauci, or US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, or FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn. They stood behind the science and process of making the vaccines. The data transparency was clear and the integrity of the process was monitored down to every last decision.

Once we got our proper doses, we’d be more or less 95% protected against that deadly bug we’d all been dodging for nearly a year. That didn’t mean we’d get to stop wearing masks and start throwing parties just yet. At least 75 to 85% of us had to get vaccinated for us to head back to business as usual.

Also in that month, there came more dismal hallmarks. A single day recorded caseload of 251,000 new coronavirus infections. One million new infections in five days. 3,600 deaths in a single day. Total infections around the world reached 76 million cases.

If you’ve read your proper accounts of history, you might recall how most of the deaths in the Civil War occurred. The mortality rate count wasn’t high because of gunshot wounds or munitions trauma. It was high because of diarrhea and dysentery. Disease was the biggest mortality of that era, particularly in wartime.

Two thirds of Civil War deaths were due to illness. In 1860, there were about 31 million Americans or so. The number most often cited in Civil War casualties is about 620,000, though recent scholars have refined that average estimate to be as much as 750,000 - 850,000 deaths. Let’s just safely average that out to 750,000 deaths, two thirds due to disease, which puts that number at 500,000 dead from illness.

Then consider the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918, the last devastating global pestilence, which killed 50 million worldwide and just short of 700,000 Americans over the span of two years.

It hadn’t been a year yet in the early stage of the epidemic at the end of 2020, but we had already hit 300,000 dead, and we were looking to incur twice that in casualties, or more, before it was over.*

*Editor’s Note: The author underestimated the eventual tally. It’s now commonly believed at least a million died in America from Covid.

500,000 dead from disease, in the four years of the American Civil War era.

680,000 dead from disease, in the two years of the American Spanish Flu era.

320,000 dead from disease, in only nine months of the American Covid era.

Even given the proportional ratios of population numbers between 1860, 1920, and 2020, Covid needed to be taken as seriously as if its mortality rate was 90 percent. Even one life lost because of hubris was too much. Doctors and nurses died because folks were unwilling to shutter their salons.

Most counties in SoCal, especially Los Angeles where ICU capacity was at 0%, were mapping out plans to ration health care over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays because we pushed health care professionals to a point of absolute exhaustion with our lack of discipline. A database compiled at that time, by Kaiser Permanante and The Guardian, revealed over 240,000 health care workers had contracted the virus and over 900 of them died. 40% of those workers were direct care nurses, and at least a third of those deceased nurses faced shortages of PPE gear prior to their passing.

Many more first responders would end up dying unnecessarily because we insisted on observing Thanksgiving with our loved ones.

Many more were about to die because we were going to do the same thing on Christmas and New Year’s Eve.

It wasn’t right.

Our need to have Christmas with extended family wasn’t as imperative as easing the risks to our front line workers. We now have another permanent bruise on our shared soul as an American society, for that travesty in marginalizing the people who routinely care for us when our chips are down.

But the vaccines were finally rolling out.

2021 looked a bit brighter.

Cue ominous, foreshadowing soundtrack here.  

Rest in power, Tina Turner. We miss you. See you on the flip side.

*Compiled from December 14, 2020