Foreign Bodies by Simon Schama

There is a lot of material packed into this volume, and it is all good information, but for me, the message was a little muddled. I can agree that the health of a nation economically depends on the physical health of it's citizens, and therefore when pandemics inevitably happen, the powers that be are looking for someone to blame at least as much as they are seeking solutions. That happened with COVID and it has happened repeatedly through history. The 18th-century development of vaccination was spurred by the mutation of smallpox into a potentially fatal virus. The English discovery that a small dose of the pus from someone with active disease worked as a shield against full-blown infection. Meanwhile, inoculation by insufflation—blowing dried, powdered pus up the nostrils—was state policy in China. The Victorian age of globalization showed that disease moved as easily as goods through steamship and rail. The need for international coordination was obvious, but rivalrous powers resisted restrictions. So was born both vaccination and the skeptics who questioned it's utility and safety. The author goes on to tell the saga of cholera, and with it, all the prejudices that were fanned across the globe.

Delta Dawn

Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on Could it be a faded rose from days gone by? And did I hear you say he was a-meeting you here today To take you to his mansion in the sky? And so on and so on it goes. The delta variant of COVID is rampaging through the country, worst in places where there are no mask mandates and fewer people are vaccinated, but it is everywhere. We are now well over 100K people testing positive a day and we are starting to inch back up to a thousand people a day dying. And the real numbers of people who have the virus is likely to be well above that. The Provincetown outbreak taught us a lot. The first is that while for most of us this is our first epidemic, for gay Americans, this is the second round, and they learned a hard fought lesson that knowledge is power. We owe the largely vaccinated vacationers on Cape Cod who underwent testing for the knowledge we have going forward. But what good is it doing? The vast majority of those who are dying and severely ill are unvaccinated, but we now know that vaccinated people get sick with the delta variant and that they can definitely spread it. There are two thing that really break my heart about this. Besides just how insanely stupid it all is. The first is that there are more and more children who are hospitalized--many of them too young to be vaccinated. Just at the moment that they are trying to reopen schools. We cannot even for a moment prioritize children. The other is that for healthcare workers who have spent the whole pandemic watching people die are now watching senseless preventable deaths. It just has to take a toll on their mental as well as physical health. So mask up!

1 in 620 Americans Dead

I made this meme a few days ago, so it is worse now. To figure out the running total is very simple math. The numerator, which is the number of Americans, remains pretty stable (I used 332,309,730) and the denominator, which is number of people dead from COVID, keeps growing at over a thousand people a day, every day, week in and week out, sometimes surging far highter than that, seldom dropping, and all the while we continue to not stay apart, not wear masks, and not keep each other safe. In Iowa, where the governor has done one of the worst jobs of protecting residents, the number is 1 in 568 dead. The young go out, they get COVID, they may or may not get sick, some of them very sick but most of them will be fine, and then they give it to older people, who get very sick, some die, some lose kidney function, some are permanently scarred in other ways, and no one escapes the misery. Everyone knows someone who has died. There are families that have lost many members because they congregated together. We are no better at responding to a pandemic than we were in the Middle Ages. All the informationin the world, all the tools to beat it are now known and yet we still ignore them and preventable deaths continue to rise. The math is simple, the misery is far reaching, and the GOP has blood on its hands.

Hundreds of Preventable COVID Deaths in Iowa

The one question in my mind is will #COVIDKim be prosecuted, if not criminally, then civil court? I can only hope that the arc of history moves slowly towards justice, because the current day Republican party, both in Iowa and nationally, has so much blood on it's hands as to be worthy of criminal prosecution. COVID is just one of the wrongs perpetrated on the pwople of Iowa. It should not shock me. Kim Reynolds said back in August that Iowa still had hospital beds available so there was no need to increase restrictions in response to the rapid rise in the number of cases. On the record she made it clear that her job is not to protect individuals but rather herself and those who she is beholden to and not the public. The result was that young people got COVID, gave it to vulnerable elders and some of them died as a result. The hospitals had to create numerous new ICU beds and staff them with whatever resources they could muster, but there were beds for people to die in. Now, as over 50 Iowans a day die of COVID, she has lifted all restrictions, while bungling the vaccine effort more thoroughly than any other state. Iowa is dead last in administering vaccines, and people are dying as a result. The projection for total deaths from COVID if we had locked down completely was 300 people total--now that has on occasion been the weekly death toll. I hope there is a reckoning day, if not now then in the future. Kim Reynolds should resign and let someone else clean up her mess. She is not up to the task.

Quarantine Diaries

 Just before Christmas the thing that we had worried about and prepared for happened.  My spouse, an ICU physician taking care of a dozen patients who had COVID, tested positive for it himself.  We had etched out a plan for this in the early days of the pandemic, but as the months slipped by and we had negative test with each COVID symptom that emerged, we started to feel like we might get through it.  Once the vaccine became available we felt like there might be light at the end of a still lengthy tunnel.  COVID, however, had different plans.

On the eve of Christmas we had to enact our COVID plan to live under one roof separately but together.  We had to regather the masks, the cloves, the hand sanitizer and start masking up at home.  Luckily we had been doing it for months at work, so it didn't feel totally weird, and amazingly, we had choreographed it beautifully.  I did the food preparation, and delivered trays of food to the COVID patient.  We set up a table and chair so he could eat upright.  I left the kitchen so my son could eat but that was as close as we got for 2 solid weeks.  In the end, we managed to keep each other healthy and not go crazy.  The only silver lining is that we finally decided to get our groceries delivered, maybe even after the pandemic.  So have a plan, think it out, and hope you never need it.  But if you do, it will not be terrible.