The year 2020 has been a perfect storm of death, dysfunction, propaganda, no-nothingism, cultishness, racial struggle, conspiracy theories, social unrest, economic collapse, and who knows what else. Amidst the multiplying stresses, large segments of us seem to be tuning out or losing our minds. All while those not worrying about losing their homes worry about losing their lives.
The dead and those caring for the sick have become footnotes to the drama going on outside our hospitals. Battles in the streets between civil rights protesters and the new “secret police” make more eye-catching footage. The acting president, never the sharpest tool, is decaying mentally and physically before our eyes. The press does what the press does, reflexively documenting the political atrocities for a populace by now numbed to them. The dead and dying become abstractions. The national death count rolls up like counters tracking the national debt, an abstraction until the coronavirus takes someone you love.
CNN profiles Dr. Joseph Varon who heads the coronavirus unit at Houston’s United Memorial Medical Center. He has worked for 134 days straight and is “running on fumes.”
While new coronavirus cases there are declining for now, Texas has seen the highest number of deaths per 100,000 over the last seven days, a total of 2,389. For Varon and his team, those numbers are no abstraction. Last week, he signed more death certificates than in his entire career.
Beginning at 4:30 or 5 a.m., he gets home most about midnight. But his entire team is just as spent:
“The nursing life inside a Covid unit is tough,” he said. “Every time they go in and they wear those spacesuits, they come out sweating like there’s no tomorrow. It’s like a mini sauna for them.”
The work is physically exhausting, with everyone on staff wearing several layers of personal protective equipment, or PPE. Varon has seen nurses slip on their own sweat.
It’s also emotionally draining.
“I have seen nurses, in the middle of rounds, just start crying,” Varon said. “Crying because they just can’t handle it anymore.”
One of Varon’s nurses, Christina Mathers, tested positive for the virus last week. Varon doesn’t know where she contracted it. In his layers of PPE, he is more comfortable on his unit than outside.
“That’s the hardest thing to ever hear. … It messes with you,” said Mathers, who had been working every other day since April 29. “But I wouldn’t go anywhere else but here.”
Perhaps the most frustrating is seeing the carelessness of people outside. While Varon’s team fights to save lives inside the hospital, people in the community treat the contagion as an economic or personal nuisance. Asking them to wear masks is an affront to their political beliefs:
“People are calling my office and leaving threats because of all the media I’ve been doing, because they don’t believe that what we’re doing is real,” he said.
Varon wants people to see: This is not a hoax. This is a real thing. People are dying.
“You have no idea my frustration when I leave the hospital, I’m heading home, and then in one of these outdoor malls I see a hundred cars, a bunch of young guys or young women having a party — no face masks, no nothing. That kills me,” he said. “People are not listening.”
When New York City was the outbreak’s epicenter, there were at least occasional images of mass graves and portable morgues to remind us there were bodies behind the statistics. Now, those are largely replaced with statistics. The Midas cult shovels the dead into the economy’s furnaces without even crediting them for giving their lives for it. Confederate generals landed on pedestals. The COVID-19 dead land on graphs.
In Congress, Senate Republicans led by sociopaths in the White House cannot simulate enough compassion to keep the living afloat financially much less provide the resources to keep them from dying. More than a third of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus “are not going to vote for anything,” he said. The $600 a week in unemployment insurance passed in March expired Friday at midnight. That money kept millions of struggling families’ heads above water.
Meanwhile, cultists out in the streets gather without masks to protest a Deep State cabal of Satan-worshipping, covid-hoaxing, Hollywood pedophiles who secretly run the planet when they are not eating babies. QAnon imagines these threats are more real than a microscopic virus.
Doctors and nurses in local hospitals will risk their lives to save them when Trump/QAnon cultists find out otherwise.
One wonders if QAnon is an enormous practical joke by Russian President Vladimir Putin, if less deadly than his Donald Trump prank.
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Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.