The Year of Covid

“Thought-Provoking Entertainment” isn’t just a This is True slogan, it’s an illustration of my mission in life: to promote more thinking in the world. If thinking was truly valued by society, the U.S. wouldn’t have had such a struggle with the pandemic.

A Story Arc that Perfectly Illustrates
Why I Concentrate on Thinking…

Social commentary is a weird profession, especially the way I do it: while each story has a point, it’s sometimes hard to see the big picture without putting the puzzle pieces together. My commentary on the pandemic came from many different angles, thus this interactive multimedia collection that, all told, covers the progression of the story, particularly in the United States.

Each entry shows its publication date, usually in the (source area) of the story. Unless otherwise noted, all dates mentioned are in 2020. Click each story slug to open the story text. Most of the photos and illustrations on the page get larger when clicked.

The Beginning

The first person to die was a 61-year-old man in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in China, on 9 December 2019. But, the New York Times reassured its readers the next day, “there is no evidence that it can spread among humans” — at least, according to Wuhan’s Health Commission despite the fact that they had already identified 41 cases of the “mysterious, pneumonialike [sic] illness.” It had first appeared in the city eight days before.

The first Covid-19 death in the U.S. was thought to be in late February, 2020 — an elderly nursing home resident in Washington state. But once medical examiners started to learn what to look for, they realized no, the first victim died much earlier, and much younger.

The first known U.S. death is now recorded to have occurred on 6 February. Patricia Dowd, a non-smoking manager for a semiconductor company in the San Francisco Bay Area who “exercised routinely, watched her diet and took no medication,” died at 57.

As a volunteer medic in my rural community in southwest Colorado, and as a journalist who constantly skims the news looking for commentary fodder, I quickly started monitoring the reports, not wanting to jump in immediately because I wanted the real details, not panic-fed rumors.

It all begins, of course, in China….

Worse than Daytime TV in the U.S.

State television in China is doing a series of reports on the “heroes” in the fight against the Covid-19 coronavirus, but they’re backfiring. One showed nurse Zhao Yu treating patients in a hospital in Wuhan; Zhao is heavily pregnant. “Can we stop all this propaganda?” complained a viewer on Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. “What is this, a show for political purposes?” another asked. Another report sparked even more complaints: it shows nurses weeping as their heads are shaved bald to “make it easier” for them to wear “protective head gear” as they treat patients. Viewers complained that there’s no reason to shave the women’s hair completely: if needed for “protective head gear,” surely simply cutting their hair short would be more than enough — just as it is for men, who weren’t similarly shaved. (1 March/BBC) …People who have been ordered to sit at home for weeks have lots of time to think.

• March 11: the World Health Organization finally declares Covid-19 a pandemic.

As the fear of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S. built, it was clearly time to confront those fears in my 30 March podcast (12 minutes, transcript):

065: Beating the Fear over Covid

• 4 April: The U.S. exceeds 10,000 Covid-19 deaths, 59 days after the first — an average of more than 169 deaths/day.

The Headline of the Week occasionally was pandemic-related. An example from 5 April:

Put Away Your B Cups
No, You Can’t Make an N95 Mask out of a Bra
CBC headline

A Side Feature in This is True is the Honorary Unsubscribe — an interesting obit which features “The people you will wish you had known.” The 5 April issue brought the first honoree to die from Covid-19, and it hit close to home for me after nearly 26 years as an online journalist:

Tech reporter Anick Jesdanun

Born in Pittsburgh, Jesdanun grew up in New Jersey. After finishing school at Swarthmore College in 1991, he got a job with the Associated Press, a cooperative news organization that supplies news outlets with stories. He was the first at AP — in the year 2000 — to get the title “Internet Writer”: he covered technology, and the online world in particular. He emphasized making sure he got the details correct, and providing context. “Before people knew the Internet was full of falsehoods,” says Michael Liedtke, another AP technology writer, “he was the guy who said, ‘We’d better check that.’”

As the first such writer at AP, Jesdanun taught new reporters in his specialty how to cover technology stories. “Nick was the steady bulwark of AP’s tech team for two decades,” says AP’s first technology editor, Frank Bajak. “He had the deepest institutional memory of AP’s tech coverage and patiently educated dozens of novice colleagues in all things digital.” For fun, Jesdanun ran marathons — completing at least one on every continent (yep: including Antarctica) — and watching films, usually in theaters since “There’s still no substitute for a movie theater.” In 2019, he watched 365 movies. “I feel fairly confident that there was nothing on his bucket list,” said Risa Harms, Jesdanun’s cousin. “There was nothing he wanted to do that he didn’t have a chance to do.” Jesdanun never left the Associated Press: it was his only employer. Anick “Nick” Jesdanun, who had risen to deputy technology editor for AP, died in New York on April 2 from Covid-19. He was 51.

• 8 April: The first Covid death in our rural Colorado county. My EMS colleagues, who had been briefed on symptoms and safety protocols weeks before, had transported the man to the hospital.

This is True has space for free-form editorials, such as this from 12 April:

This week my wife threw a virtual (Zoom video chat) birthday party for me, which was actually a lot of fun. She invited a lot of old friends, some of whom I hadn’t seen in quite some time, and the “cocktail hour” party lasted 3-1/2 hours! Probably the last hour was two guys, Matt and Matt, who had a lot in common, chatting. Weird times can also be fun times, especially as folks get more inventive about maintaining human connection.

The scenario discussed in my blog post Stay Put looks more and more likely: that pressure on government officials to let businesses “open back up” is growing, and it’s way too early for that. The badly named “social distancing” (we need to be social; it’s “physical distancing” that’s important!) truly has worked to blunt the rate of infection, keeping the death rate way down while we wait for a vaccine. Stop the isolation too soon and infections will shoot up, as we’ve seen before.

If you’re not already aware of how easy is it for a few sick people to create a huge number of infections, read this article: How a Premier U.S. Drug Company Became a Virus ‘Super Spreader’ (New York Times, 12 April). It’s sobering. If politicians do something stupid like let our guard down too early, I highly recommend “staying put” for a couple weeks anyway to see what happens.

I sure hope readers took the advice.

Obviously, not everyone was rendered stupid by the pandemic. My 13 April podcast features two women who stepped up to help their neighbors stay healthy (16 minutes, transcript):

066: Masking the Problem

I’d Like to See the Manager

John-Paul Drake, the Director of Australia’s largest independent grocery chain, Drakes Supermarkets, posted a video online telling the story of a customer who asked for a refund. The unidentified customer used 20 people to shop for him to stockpile goods ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic arriving in the country. But, the customer told him, his eBay store had been shut down — presumably for price gouging. So, he continued, could he return and get a refund for 150 packs of 32 rolls of toilet paper, and 150 1-liter bottles of hand sanitizer? In the video, Drake demonstrated his response to the man by lifting his middle finger, commenting, “That is the sort of person that is causing the problem in the whole country.” (19 April/7 News Australia) …Once the guy left, Drake needed to use one of his cleansing wipes.

The Lord Works in Mysterious Ways

Like most church pastors, Scott Mowery of Immanuel Baptist Church in Butler, Mo., is doing services by streaming video online. He was delivering a sermon via Facebook Live when his wife sent him a comment: “You’ve got filters going on,” the message that popped up on his screen said. “And I’m like, what? What’s going on? I can’t see anything,” Mowery said. Indeed, Facebook was overlaying multiple comical “masks” over his face, such as cat ears, googly eyes, space helmets, and wizard hats. His wife shared the video with a pastors’ wives forum, and from there it went viral, spreading around the globe. “I’ve never had a video with even 1,000 views,” Mowery said. “And I never thought this is what I’d be known for.” (19 April/WDAF Kansas City) …Is he sure that devil mask was from Facebook?

The 19 April podcast took a bit of a contrarian view: An American company that makes masks and other PPE chose not to ramp up production to help with the Covid pandemic. That sounds like a decision to be criticized, but it’s actually a true example of Uncommon Sense (14 minutes, transcript):

067: Counterintuitive

Everyone says they want to “go back” to “normal” rather than have the constant uncertainty of the pandemic. But what “normal” do we want to “go back” to? In my 27 April podcast, I argued it’s time to think about a new normal — what do we want to go to as this craziness ramps down? (11 minutes, transcript):

068: What Normal?

Turkey in the Straw

The Bovine and Barley bar in Houston, Texas, is suffering a massive business downturn due to the quarantine. If customers can’t come to them, they’re hitting the road and going out to customers with a new “adult ice cream truck,” which delivers frozen drinks like piña coladas, margaritas, and daiquiris. Delivery is free, but some sort of food purchase is required; their $1 home-made potato chips are a popular add-on. They post their route on Facebook, and hit the streets each day at 11:00 a.m. (3 May/KHOU Houston, Houston Chronicle) …Because it’s always 5:00 somewhere.

The Honorary Unsubscribe from the 17 May issue:

Ann K. Mitchell

Born in Oxford, England as Ann Katharine Williamson, Mitchell attended secondary school at Headington School in Oxford, and then was awarded admission at the University of Oxford. She was one of only five women in her class, and she had chosen an unusual concentration. “My headmistress firmly told my parents that mathematics was not a ladylike subject” and shouldn’t take the offer from the prestigious university, she said. “However, my parents overruled her and I pursued my chosen path.” It’s a good thing: upon graduation in 1943 she was recruited by Bletchley Park to work on the intense and secret effort to break Germany’s Enigma code machine. She worked nine hours a day, six days a week, from fall 1943 to VE Day. For her first Christmas on the job she wrote in her journal, “Worked like the devil all day. Good fun.”

“The majority of the girls at Bletchley were part of a factory — a conveyor belt, really — to deal with the component parts of codebreaking,” says historian Tessa Dunlop, who wrote The Bletchley Girls, a book about the women who worked to break Germany’s codes. “But Ann was exceptional in the work she did finding the formula for the codebreaking machines. She was discreet, intelligent, and modest, and although she would never describe herself as a codebreaker, she was recruited for her mathematical ability.” After the war, she married (taking the name Mitchell), and worked as a marriage guidance counselor in Scotland. She then went back to school, earning her Master’s degree in Social Administration at the University of Edinburgh, and studied and wrote extensively on marriage breakup and divorce, especially how it affected children. Once the veil of secrecy about the Bletchley Park operation was lifted, Mitchell gave her oral history about her role, and was commemorated on the Codebreakers Wall at the Bletchley Park Museum. “Her experience was in many ways like that of Alan Turing and will long remain an inspiration to many,” said James Turing, the great-nephew of Alan Turing, who led the effort. Mitchell died in Edinburgh May 11, from Covid-19, at 97.

• 27 May: The U.S. exceeds 100,000 Covid-19 deaths just 54 days after hitting 10,000 — an increased average in this span of more than 1,666 deaths/day.

This Randy’s Random item was set to run on 8 June after I made it a couple of days earlier. I had to remake it that morning just before publication to adjust the second line, which is to scale with the first — by then it didn’t fit inside the box:

The Headline of the Week from 21 June:

The City Plans an Online Meeting to Address the Matter
The Internet Is So Bad in this Community Some People Drive to Zoom Meetings
CBC (Halifax, N.S., Canada) headline

Take One Down and Pass It Around

During an online board meeting for the Western Heights Public School District in Oklahoma City, Okla., Board Member Linda Farley made a motion. As Board President Robert Everman was calling for a second, Farley could be seen drinking from a bottle of beer. Parents say she should resign. Everman claimed he looked at the video and admitted “it could have been” beer, but “I have no idea what she may have had.” Farley was more forthcoming: she sent out a written statement to apologize, and to explain she has been “suffering from a severe kidney infection,” and was drinking beer “to flush out my kidneys.” (5 July/KFOR Oklahoma City) …The thing that really upset parents: it was a Corona Extra.

Crying Over Spilt Milk

A Ralph’s grocery store employee in Los Angeles, Calif., informed a customer that he was required to wear a mask in the store, or had to leave. A witness says the man “was just screaming about the mask. He didn’t want to wear a mask.” The unnamed man used his shopping cart to repeatedly ram the employee. Another shopper tried to push the man away, but he kept slamming into the female employee. Fearing for her safety, she pulled out a can of pepper spray and hosed him down; it quickly stopped the attack. Medics took the man to a hospital, and it was unclear whether he then went to jail. Despite witnesses confirming that the employee was simply defending herself, and bystander video supporting that, Ralph’s — a Kroger brand — suspended the employee for “not following de-escalation procedures.” (2 August/KCBS Los Angeles) …Looks like a perfectly effective de-escalation procedure to everyone else.

Shocking Development

“It’s there for social distancing,” says landlord Johnny McFadden, who runs the Star Inn in St. Just, Cornwall, England. “People were not following social-distancing and were doing as they pleased,” he said, “but now people take heed to the guidance around social distancing.” How did he get customers to comply? He set up an electric fence around the bar, with a sign that warns customers. Yes, it’s real: a couple of drunk customers complained they were “electrocuted” by the fence, but McFadden was unapologetic: “It’s for everybody’s benefit.” (2 August/Cornwall Live) …Especially the onlookers’.

My 3 August podcast tells the story of a conservative man who “believed the virus to be a hoax.” He found out the hard way that it was anything but (18 minutes, transcript):

076: Leading Yourself Down a Path

Editorial from 9 August:

I Got a Note This Morning from a 20-year Premium reader — I’ve always noticed him because of his name: Mr. J.D. True. Really. If you thought I was Mr. True, nope! It’s him. I had noticed he let his Premium lapse this summer, and with his note today, I found out why.

“My Premium subscription recently lapsed,” he wrote, “but has now been renewed. I am just out of the hospital after spending weeks there with Covid-19. It was during my hospital stay that the subscription lapsed, as at my sickest I really had no interest in anything at all. But I look forward to getting back to reading your newsletter. I still have a long recovery ahead of me, and it will be a great comfort to look forward to each and every week.”

Well, the first thing I did after wishing him well was to send him the seven issues he missed so he could catch up. I also asked J.D. if it was OK for me to both run his note and mention his last name because, well, it makes it all so much more on point! I also asked if he had anything he wanted to add, knowing his note would be in this issue.

“I don’t really have any details to add,” he replied with the thumbs up to use his full name, “other than a plea to everyone to PLEASE practice social distancing and wear a mask in public. Too many people think this virus is no worse than the flu, and while that may be so for a lot of people, there are also a lot of people for whom this virus can be devastating. The mask is not to protect you, it is to protect anyone you might come in contact with. It is truly worth 30 minutes of the discomfort of wearing a mask in a store to get the virus under control.”

Boy, is he gonna love the seven issues he missed! 🙂

• 22 September: The U.S. exceeds 200,000 Covid-19 deaths, or more than 66 times the toll of the “9/11” attacks. It took 119 days to get here from 100,000 deaths, making the rate during this span more than 840 deaths/day. We were coming off the peak …until Thanksgiving.

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait

Jesse Katayama, a boxing instructor from Nara, Japan, arrived in March for a visit of a lifetime at Peru’s Machu Picchu — just in time for the country to shut down for the coronavirus. He had planned to be there for just three days, but has waited nearby in Aguas Calientes since March, unable to go to the Inca ruins — or leave the country — since. The government announced plans to open the site in November, but Katayama couldn’t continue to wait: he appealed to Culture Minister Alejandro Neyra, who granted him access to visit the site by himself. “The first person on Earth who went to Machu Picchu since the lockdown is meeeeeee!” Katayama posted on social media, with a photo presumably taken by site caretakers. “This is truly amazing,” he posted to his hosts. “Thank you.” (18 October/Japan Times, BBC) …Tondemo gozaimasen.

Put On a Happy Face

Several days before Halloween, the Oregon Health Authority did a “Facebook Live” video with Trick-or-Treat safety tips. But before Dr. Claire Poché got to those details for the kids, she wanted to report 390 new cases of Covid-19, and “Sadly, we are also reporting three deaths today.” The problem: she is delivering the news wearing clown makeup, which is not even referenced in the video until several minutes later. “I’m sorry,” tweeted Portland Oregonian editor Samantha Swindler, “but who at the Oregon Health Authority thought this was a good idea?” Finally, 12 minutes in, Dr. Poché referenced her makeup. “As for me, we clowns kind of took a backseat to Halloween,” she said. “But I’m hoping to bring us back as the fun-loving and happy clowns that we have always been.” (1 November/Portland Oregonian) …Don’t worry, that will happen once we ramp back up to more than a thousand Covid deaths a day.

11 November: revisiting the Randy’s Random post from 8 June (above) was so sobering, I don’t want to do it again as I post this retrospective in late December:

Also in the 15 November issue, a short editorial that leads to a long explainer response:

A Long-Time Friend and True reader complained — in the context of today’s Randy’s Random post — that she was “tired of the state telling me I have to wear a face diaper as a method of control. That is what is at stake here.” Happily, she ended her paragraph with “I would like to hear your opinion on all of the above.”

Well, I started to reply by email, but then decided that her thoughts, which are held by many, needed a more public reply. Thus, it all went on my blog instead: Covid: Think for Yourself (Dammit!) As you can probably already tell, I was not reserved in my comments. The post also includes today’s lead story (“Blatantly Obvious”), since it directly applies, though Terry didn’t see that story before she commented.

The 22 November podcast is about resilience vs burnout in these trying times. The irony: it was late largely because my research for it was interrupted by a tough ambulance call that took hours from our sleep (11 minutes, transcript):

084: Why You’re So Tired

The Honorary Unsubscribe from the 29 November issue:

Honestie Hodges

On December 6, 2017, Hodges headed outside her Grand Rapids, Mich., home with her mother to go to the store. They were confronted in their yard by several police officers. One yelled, “Put your hands on top of your—” before being interrupted by Honestie’s mother: “She is 11 years old, sir!” The officer said “Stop yelling!” and ordered the young girl to walk backward toward him with her hands up. He then grabbed her arms and handcuffed her as Honestie cried, “No, No, No!” Police explained they were looking for Honestie’s 40-year-old aunt as a suspect in a stabbing, but didn’t explain how they could mistake the child for a 40-year-old.

“Listening to the 11-year-old’s response makes my stomach turn,” admitted Grand Rapids Police Chief David Rahinsky. “It makes me physically nauseous.” But after an investigation, he did not discipline any officers: they didn’t violate any departmental policies, but said officers made a “mistake” in how they handled the situation. Honestie was released minutes later — once they decided the 11-year-old wasn’t 40. The department was already under scrutiny for an incident months before, when officers held five teens at gunpoint, and took 10 minutes to handcuff them all. The boys pled for their lives thinking they were going to be shot. They had done nothing wrong: they were simply playing basketball. Officers were looking for two men who — someone said — had a gun, but none of the boys met the mens’ descriptions. The Honestie Hodges case spurred a national dialogue about how police deal with children. “We need to look at everything, from our hiring to our training to our supervision,” Chief Rahinsky said. “We do have a problem.” The result was the department’s “Honestie Policy”, which dictates officers use “good judgement” and act in the best interests of juveniles they encounter.

On November 9, 2020 — Honestie’s birthday — her mother took her to the hospital. The hospital diagnosed her with Covid-19, and sent her home. By evening an ambulance was called to her house: the girl was critical, and admitted to intensive care. Five days later, she was put on a ventilator. Honestie had no underlying health problems: she was “healthy and happy,” her grandmother said. “The world was open to her.” Honestie never regained consciousness, and died from the virus on November 22 at the Helen DeVos Children’s Hospital in Grand Rapids. She was 14.

A Premium reader actually canceled his paid subscription over this one, claiming it was partisan politics. I just don’t quite see it that way:

Headline of the Week from 13 December:

See? It Could Be Worse
Hitting Quarantine Violators with Sticks ‘Not the Best Way to Address Pandemic’
Philippine Star headline

• 14 December: The U.S. exceeds 300,000 dead from Covid-19. The rate is much higher than the previous 100,000: it only took 84 days, for an average of 1,190 deaths/day. In the 313 days from the first death on 6 February, an average of more than 950 men, women, and children have died per day, not counting an unknown number who died from Covid without it appearing on their death certificates.

I urged readers to listen to December 21st’s podcast episode “before you get the Covid vaccine or, perhaps even more importantly, decide not to get one.” (12 minutes, transcript):

086: Beating the Vaccine Scare-Mongers

• 27 December (the day this page was posted): Worldwide, according to the World Health Organization, 1,754,493 have died of Covid-19 as of today, from a total of 79,232,555 cases. Since the first death in China on 9 January, an average of 4,956 people have died per day. The WHO data show that newly diagnosed cases are currently coming in at the rate of more than 430,000 per day, and more than 7,300 are dying per day.

The 27 December podcast reflects my surprise at getting vaccinated for Covid-19 two days before Christmas. It recounts “My ‘Reaction’ So Far” (16 minutes, transcript):

087: I Got the Moderna Vaccine

Not the End

When there’s a significant amount of untimely death, statisticians have an interesting way to look at the loss to help put it into perspective: YLL, or “Years of Life Lost” — a “more insightful measure than death count,” says a researcher from the University of South Florida in the Journal of Public Health.

The idea: pair the statistics of the gender and age of the individuals in the group who died with the life expectancy each of the people of that age using data from the U.S. Social Security Administration and the U.S. Census Bureau. They then add it all up.

“While death counts are a vital initial measure of the extent of Covid-19 mortality, they do not provide information regarding the age profile of those who died,” said Dr. Troy Quast, a professor of health economics at USF’s College of Public Health, the lead author of a study on the idea. “By contrast, years of life lost tell us the extent to which deaths are occurring across age groups and can potentially help healthcare providers and policymakers better target clinical and governmental responses to reduce the number of deaths.”

The team used data from February 1 to July 11, a period with about 130,000 confirmed Covid-19 deaths.

The result of their number crunching: the pandemic had caused 1.2 million Years of Life Lost in that timespan.

The study came out in September. Now that we are reaching the end of 2020 — and will probably exceed 350,000 lives lost from the pandemic by then — let’s extrapolate the numbers. Assuming a similar assortment of age ranges and gender, we’re rapidly approaching 4 million Years of Life Lost …and counting.

Who wouldn’t give just about anything to have even one more week with a deceased parent. A dead spouse. A lost child? Yet we’re well over 200 million Weeks of Life Lost …and counting.

We Americans could have granted a huge percentage of those extra weeks or years to our family members, neighbors, and friends if we had simply all followed the scientifically based guidelines common to any contagious disease: wear a mask, stay home when feeling ill (or tested positive!), maintain distance from others. Wash your danged hands!

But hey: “Freedom!”

Many chose that freedom for themselves, but so many others paid for that choice without having the same freedom to make that choice for themselves.

“Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins,” said a theoretical judge in an essay by legal philosopher Zechariah Chafee Jr., published in the June 1919 Harvard Law Review. Yep, Americans certainly have rights. But the other side of the rights coin is responsibility, and so many insisted on the former and ignored the latter.

Meanwhile, as the vaccine rolls out, politicians — including those who downplayed the seriousness of Covid-19 (or sowed fear of the vaccine) — pushed themselves to the head of the line, taking priority over front-line medical workers, and those most at risk of dying if they contracted Covid. I’m not referring to President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President Mike Pence getting their shots on TV: that’s a great way for each to demonstrate confidence in the vaccine to their respective sides of the political spectrum. That’s a bandwagon other pols didn’t need to ride on. (Example source)

But they did it anyway because they are fully assured from past experience that by the time they come up for reelection, most voters will have long forgotten.

– – –

3 January Update: The CDC reported a record one-day high of 3,764 Covid deaths in the United States on 30 December, a total of 347,795 dead through 31 December, and more than 350,000 on 1 January — uncomfortably close to my prediction above.

The European Union beat the U.S. to 350,000, but it took the EU’s 27 countries combined to do it. The New York Times reported on the milestone on 27 December.

– – –

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