Sadly, it doesn’t seem to be changing everyone’s minds. People just refuse to believe it even when they know many of the people who are dying. Some have bought into disinformation that it’s pneumonia caused by people wearing masks among other propaganda they’ve picked up on right wing media.
This story in the Washington Post about one small town in South Dakota is just harrowing:
News of Buck Timmins’s death spread quickly through town just hours before the first vote.
Kevin McCardle, the city council president, heard the news in a text from a fellow referee and was shocked. He had not even known Timmins was sick. How could he be dead when McCardle had seen him filling up his tank at the gas station just a few days ago?
Timmins fell ill with the virus Oct. 24, his wife said. She was pretty sure he picked it up at one of the many games he went to, where people were casual about wearing masks.
“You may need a mask to get in the door, but once you were inside, you looked around and there were 300 people in the seats watching volleyball, pretty much going maskless,” she said. “Mitchell, South Dakota, is a small town. We trusted each other.”
Nanci had stitched Buck a mask out of quilt scraps — in the most manly pattern she could find, brown with little yellow flowers — but she wasn’t sure if he always wore it when he was out of her sight.
They both became ill at the same time, but Nanci had a mild case. Buck seemed okay, too, until about a week in, when he became weaker and weaker and didn’t want to eat or drink, or leave his old brown leather recliner. She plied him with all the flavors of Gatorade, Smartwater and Ensure she could find, but he drank very little. Because Buck was not having trouble breathing and the hospital had patients who were far sicker, he stayed at home. Nanci, a retired X-ray technologist, administered his oxygen and insulin treatments.
That morning, Nov. 16, Buck woke after a restless night and called out for his wife. He mumbled something — she thought he said, “I love you” — so she wrapped her arms around his head and said, “I love you, too!” Just after noon, he was gone. They had planned on taking an Alaskan cruise together next year, but now she was alone, 10 days before Thanksgiving with a stack of bills on the table she wasn’t sure how to pay.
“It’s just — not there,” she said. “So much life left, and then it’s just not there.”
Three hours later, McCardle walked into the Corn Palace, the city’s civic center and auditorium, with Buck Timmins’s death heavy on his mind. Timmins had coached in his Little League. They had refereed high school sports together. Now his eyes rested briefly on the spot in the bleachers behind the visitor’s bench where Timmins, in his role as state coordinator for high school refs, always sat during games.
McCardle had a yellow legal pad under his arm with his daily tally of coronavirus cases in Davison County since March. The growth he had been so carefully recording had exploded in recent weeks, with 359 cases Oct. 1 to 1,912 that morning, a 433 percent increase. Locally, 10 people had died in less than seven weeks. South Dakota now has the largest increase in deaths per capita in the nation, according to Washington Post data from Dec. 8.
The positivity rate at two local testing sites — a key indicator of the virus’s hold on a community — was 33 percent at the beginning of November and would soar to 49 percent near the end of the month, according to Avera Queen of Peace Hospital in Mitchell.
Queen of Peace, which only has eight ICU beds, became overwhelmed and sometimes had to turn patients away, opening up a second covid-19 wing Nov. 8 that filled quickly. Doctors warned of a 50 to 100 percent increase in hospitalizations in the weeks to come. “GOD BE WITH US,” the pandemic-inspired sign outside a feed store read.
McCardle said he found the numbers as alarming as the public health officials did. He is a 57-year-old camper salesman whose biggest worry as council president before the coronavirus was cleaning up algae in the town lake. But when Susan Tjarks, the lone female member on the council, had raised the idea of a mask mandate a month earlier, he had ridiculed her for wearing one and grumbled: “You don’t see the grocery stores putting mandatory masks in. Nobody would go to ‘em. They’d lose business.”
But now McCardle and others on the council, rattled by Timmins’s death, listened attentively to Tjarks’s proposal, sitting at socially spaced tables on the auditorium’s basketball court in front of murals depicting their hardy pioneer ancestors. The draft ordinance would require masks in public buildings and businesses, with a possible fine of up to $500 and 30 days in jail.
Tjarks, who owns a drapery company called Gotcha Covered, is a conservative Republican. But she became convinced the city had to act as deaths began tearing a deep hole in the community’s civic heart.
“What we have been doing isn’t working,” she told the city council. “I don’t want to lose any more friends. I don’t want to lose any more neighbors. We have to do what we need to do to step up and prevent these cases from rising.”
So many town leaders have died in such a short time that the impact has been profound, Tjarks said. Who will fill Timmins’s shoes as a mentor for young referees in the state high school athletic association? Who will raise money for the veteran’s park and the rodeo stampede now that state legislator Lance Carson is gone? There would be smaller absences too: her neighbor, John, now missing from the morning group at the doughnut shop.
Throughout the autumn, towns all over the Midwest in conservative states where Republican governors have avoided mask mandates have tried to pass their own restrictions, often prompting virulent community debate. The town of Huron, S.D., just up the road passed one, as did Washington, Mo. In Muskogee, Okla., the city council finally passed a mandate after several tries; one of its pro-mask members had even wheeled in a casket as a prop
Read on for details about how the disease has taken over this small town — and how difficult it is to get people to behave responsibly. It’s mind-boggling.
By the way, the council ended up deciding to remove all the sanctions for failing to wear a mask so the “mandate” is toothless. And it was clear by the end that many people would still refuse to wear them. So, that’s that. People will continue to die until a vaccine is available. And even then, it’s highly likely that many of those same people will refuse to get it. But the upside, I guess, is that those people will no longer be able to transmit it to people who understand the science and do wear masks and follow the guidelines. They will only be killing each other.
Sigh. It’s all so tragic.
By the way, this sign strikes me as an effective way to signal that masks are required. It ties it in to other requirements that people have no problem with:
