Winter is here: the coronavirus winter. The much predicted and feared major surge is well underway, just about everywhere. That includes here in Humboldt County, which has recorded more new cases in the first two weeks of this month than all of last month. We have more than triple the number of active cases than we did just weeks ago. Like most of CA counties, our restrictions have become more stringent again. Elsewhere the impact is much worse, and because virus begets virus it will get worse still, as winter deepens across the country.
But the contours of the covid crisis may well have changed in recent days, with promising announcements of very effective vaccines, which may immunize for up to a few years. The vaccines have not finished final trials nor been approved, and even if all goes well it will be months yet before any vaccine becomes widely available. At best, expectations are that front line health workers could be getting their first immunization shots before the end of 2020 (both vaccines require two shots, about 3 weeks apart.) But the rest of us likely won't get them until spring, perhaps March or April.
Tbere's additional good news Tuesday in the approval of an at-home covid test. But I wouldn't count on that being available before the Biden administration, since the current government seems incapable of organized effort.
Here on the isolated North Coast, most of our covid infections come from people traveling into or out of Humboldt, attending large gatherings indoors there or here, and usually both. Some of them infect others before they know they are infected. In this we are a somewhat simpler microcosm. There is so much virus around now in many places that simply gathering is enough to start a superspreader event. As the covid crisis spirals out of control, more casual contact may be enough for infection.
How bad the winter becomes, and the level of devastation by spring, will partly depend on how many people behave, especially in the upcoming holidays. The way this country faced the covid crisis in its first months was so hopeful, but that's long past now. We'll see how many people can forgo Thanksgiving gatherings. Much will depend on that.
The news this winter--however it is subsumed by gaudier goings-on--will be of health care workers in crisis, hospitals in crisis, and many more covid dead. I don't think anybody needs this blog to keep informed on these matters, though I will check in from time to time on the current state of things. But it's safe to say it is a time of mourning. There isn't much more that I can do. I am in the high risk senior group. Except for one visit to my doctor's office, I have not set foot in a building other than my home since March. I expect to be here until next March. So Thanksgiving will not be much of a question for me.
Others, especially seniors, will also be staying home. It will be as if we are snowed in for the winter, more or less. We will--and I will--be thinking of other things, doing other things, looking to engage with other things, such as the work of our age, which includes reintegrating the past, especially now that the urgency of the election is over and the results will play out (so far, much as I expected), outside our doors.
So as I move on to other things here, I must first affirm that I am not otherwise ignoring the unfolding and largely tragic events around me, especially this deadly phase of the covid crisis. It is going to be the worst so far, though perhaps also the worst period of the covid crisis altogether when it is finally over. I will bear witness, even if I don't have much to say about it, just as there is little I can do about it except to stay out of its way, and avoid adding to the suffering.
Our winter rains have begun, a hopeful if uncertain sign. They complicate our lives--chiefly now our dog walks--but they nourish the spring. The flowers, W.S. Merwin writes, are "forms of water"---
see how they wake without a question
even though the whole world is burning.
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