My latest on KQED.
Day 10 of my infection and the rules don’t seem to apply. Infected in an outdoor gathering. Home rapid tests maddeningly inaccurate. Protection from booster wanes rapidly. I would gladly give up another two years of social interaction to avoid feeling like this again.
https://www.kqed.org/perspectives/201601142097/andrew-lewis-the-new-mandate
And the radio version is here.
On a recent October weekend we visited a local West County winery. Sitting outside in the brisk air we learned that they, along with their sister establishments, required indoor masking for all visitors and staff. All staff were vaccinated and all visitors were seated outdoors.
Later that evening we went to see the latest Wes Anderson movie at our local Rialto theater and a young employee diligently checked our proof of vaccination before we could enter.
And at a recent music event at our local Hopmonk Tavern, we were asked to be masked while the broad-beamed and imposing bouncer checked our vax status.
In each instance I thanked these employees for holding the line. In each instance they uniformly confessed that they rarely if ever received a kind word.Sponsored
Quite the contrary. Nearly every one that I spoke with had been attacked, screamed at, or abused in one way or another. Some teared up as they related their stories.
As public health departments across the country have become gutted, our service workers and small-business owners who, at times independently implemented and enforced mask, vaccine, and social distancing protocol, have in effect become front-line public health workers.
This is a job which they did not ask for, did not want, were not trained for, and that most definitely was not in their job description.
We may at last be on the verge of being able to experience a public life that feels almost normal. It’s happening despite uncivil behavior. And if we, in fact, succeed, it will be because of common citizens: baristas, and checkout clerks, hostesses and movie theater owners, exercised an uncommon valor.
With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.
And the radio version is here:
In the past year we’ve become friends with a young woman visiting from China. Trained at the Culinary Institute of America, she apprenticed as a pastry chef at a Michelin star restaurant in Napa. But with the latest shutdowns in California, she’ll be returning to China. The journey won’t be easy.
She’ll get tested 48 hours before her flight. Then fly 17 hours direct from LA to Shenzhen. She’ll wear an N-95 and protective glasses, including and especially after the flight has landed and people stand to disembark. She’ll be tested again. A bus will carry all passengers to a hotel where they’ll quarantine for 14 days. Food will be delivered.
All citizens are issued QR codes on their phones indicating possible exposures. You must scan your QR before entering a building, public space or riding on public transport. Those who have tested positive are not allowed to do so.
If a positive case is detected in China, public health officers do contact tracing and may shut down an entire region to stop the spread of infection.
This is what public health and a sound, fearless, and coordinated pandemic response founded in public solidarity can look like. It’s also the same playbook shared by other countries on the Pacific Rim, including New Zealand.
The consequence? Life for nearly 1.5 billion people has returned to normal. People go to work, ride the subway, go to nightclubs, go to school,
dine indoors and socialize with friends. Hospitals are not overburdened. Few are required to wear masks, though out of courtesy and habit many choose to do so.
On December 1st the New York Times reported the average number of daily new cases in China was 16.
In the US? 161,000.
It’s hard to imagine what it would feel like to have no cases. It might even feel like freedom.
With a Perspective, this is Andrew Lewis.
Dear Friends,
Feeling eroded by the vitriol poisoning so many of our online conversations these days, I recently posted my desire to leave Facebook.
The response from my friends surprised me. Nearly all urged me not to go and their advice and quips reminded me of a complicated fact: all those seemingly insignificant likes and angry faces and posts were all part of a conversation that, though virtual and disembodied, was no less real. A click on a thumb was equivalent to the daily salutations to the milk man or the smile to the grocery store clerk back in the day when we physically shopped.
In a diverse and civil society, a multiplicity of weak ties are the filaments that bind. And in a world where my friends are now scattered about the entire globe, and with many of us in some degree of isolation, Facebook offers the potential to perhaps keep some of those weak links intact.
Some folks asked for a deeper explanation, something that the truncated shorthand of social media posts makes difficult. A letter seemed in order.
I’ve never been a sophisticated social media consumer. I haven’t created friend’s circles. I don’t limit the audience of what I post. I don’t consciously seek out content. I willfully accepted whatever the algorithms dished up to me without establishing rules or filters. If I didn’t respond to someone’s post it was most likely because I hadn’t seen it. Show me the wild ecosystem, I thought. Serve up the stuff from varied quarters of a varied life in a varied world. Leave it all to whimsy and chance.
My daily drip included lovely images of my friend Larson’s cakes that he would bake at Hopi as well as inspiring updates on his weight loss. I had a daily window into my classmate Jonathan’s lawyerly reposts of fact-based reporting on the duplicity of the Trump administration. And even more lawyerly and rage-filled posts by my elementary school friend Robert about much the same thing. And justified rants about meth dealers in Polacca, Arizona. And consoling words from friends. And truly heartwarming posts from an acquaintance on the wonder and difficulties of being a first gen college student while raising her two young children on her own. And my friend John’s encyclopedic knowledge drawn from the far recesses of an encyclopedia that has not yet been written.
It was as if I was frequenting a neighborhood bar where I found bar stool commentary and consolation. It was friendship in that it engendered camaraderie. And yet not quite friendship, because it was after all just a darkened bar. But in the barren desert of the 21st century, you take love where you can find it. It allowed me to remain in touch where I might not have been.
I make it a point not to unfriend anyone. I think it’s important to at least have an inkling of where other people stand and how they feel. To pretend that they don’t exist may make my life easier, but possibly poorer. I feel that at its’ most basic, my job as a citizen is to simply be a welcoming and sometimes dry-humored friend.
And despite what we all know about the moral complications of Facebook, it seemed largely good. But I didn’t fully consider how the algorithms themselves would come to shape my experience.
Social media companies want their machines to learn as much as possible about us. The more the algorithms know, the more effectively they can learn how to act like humans. And the more the algorithms know, the more effectively they can push product. The thumbs and angry faces are one of many currencies in this economy. Users get a low-grade endorphin bump: “Yea! Someone likes me! Yea! Someone shares my anger!” And every like and dislike adds to FBs ever fine-grained understanding of who we are, what we might like, what we might buy, where we might travel, what hot button issues might divide or shape an electorate, and with devastating accuracy even who we might vote for. As a predictive agent, FB might have a more nuanced understanding of me than I do. They may even know the secrets that I am keeping from myself.
Facebook’s viability depends on my reactions. The more I react, the more the algorithms know about me and my friend network: our needs, our desires, and what we believe in. Every year roughly 1,500 petabytes of data is pushed through data sausage grinders on vast server farms in Eastern Washington and the deserts surrounding Phoenix to later reappear as ad placements or memes on some screen trying to sell some shit or some point of view, or encourage uncivil behavior, or cajole one to follow the lead of a miscreant politician.
Facebook doesn’t care how I react, only that I do. So the algorithms float me posts that in high probability will make me happy, at least enough so to toss a thumb. But they’ll also intentionally serve up things that may make me angry. A glowering face becomes just another data point.
With the emergence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus now stewing in the soup of our already poisoned politics, the tenor of our virtual conversation became ever more disturbing. I would step into the bar hoping for a cheap cocktail, and instead encounter vituperative rage from friends or acquaintances blaming Democrats and fascists and the left and scientists and doctors and illegal aliens and abortions and vaccines and voters about this and that and the other. Hoping for camaraderieor emotional release, against my better judgement I sometimes even joined in.
In some room way in the back (you know, that room that you might not normally go into), I detected the sound of raging voices and the crack of pool sticks breaking over skulls as a full on brawl unfolded. And it was getting nasty. People were gathering material to make pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. Some were brandishing guns. To one of my sensitive temperament this watering hole felt neither a safe nor happy place to be.
The ever diminishing shared assumptions only amplified the discord. I felt as if a pack of mean-mouthed and mean-spirited bullies were challenging my knowledge of Santa Claus. I know he exists and I know he is good. I mean, we all do. He has always existed. I have decades of proof. Even though my parents are long dead and I’m married, presents have continued to appear each year under the tree. And each year when I leave out a plate of cookies and carrots, in the morning only a few bites are taken. Who in their right mind would leave half a cookie except for a very busy Santa? Imagine my sadness when I first saw angry memes claiming that he was fake, that I was a sucker for believing in him. Wait. What? Some people don’t believe in Santa Claus? Santa is as sacred a cow as there ever was. Some mornings mid lockdown would begin with a pit in my stomach.
The mechanics of this strange watering hole began to interfere with the shape of my days. Back in the era when we still had dining establishments, my time at the neighborhood bar was bounded. I might drop in after work, share the counter with friends for 45 minutes and then be home in time for dinner. The FB bar, though, was open for business 24/7. Back in the real world, I might get into a heated conversation over beers with my friend Leo and at 5:50 it was bottoms up. We’d pick it up tomorrow. But at the FB bar I might offer something and individuals up and down the line would provide their commentary. Out of courtesy I tried to respond where response was due. And folks in turn would riff. And all the while I needed to get home to put dinner on the table.
I responded not just out of politeness. As an informed citizen, had I not an obligation to call out falsehoods or dangerous ideas I encountered? And Facebook ensured that encounter them I did. Increasingly I found myself fighting with people at the end of the bar who — Christ — I’m loathe to repeat the horrible things that they said.
When the gal at the end announced that I was being played by the toy industry, I could not in due conscience let it stand. I lidded my rage and put forward scholarly proof of Santa’s existence. She countered with a meme. I felt drained. How in god’s name could I convince this ninny that Santa lives at the North Pole and I was feeling super scared for him because now the North Pole was fucking melting?
Given the location of my bar stool, my ears filled with competing noise. Soon not just my knowledge of Santa was being questioned. The Sanderites insisted that Biden was a serial molester and a shill for the fascist liberal elites. We would be better off, they said, to have the whole shit house go up in flames than elect him President. And the MAGAites said that Biden was a pro-death and senile racist allied with Obama the Islamist.
Staked positions were so rife with contradictions that they stopped making sense.
Some argued that shelter in place orders or even the emergence of the virus itself were orchestrated by Democrats to remove Trump from office (never mind that over a third of the world was sheltering in place.) One person shouted that the Covid-19 disease was not caused by viruses. Another insisted that he was just trying to keep an open mind. Perhaps folks were dying because sheltering had weakened their immune systems or perhaps they were dying of fear. The air was filled with a cacophony of unverified or poorly examined information.
There was the secret alliance between Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci that I had a hard time even comprehending. I pleaded that vaccinations were first administered by variolation practitioners who inoculated folks with powdered small pox pustules in the 1700’s, a sought after procedure such a scourge was small pox on humanity. And what about polio? Because of vaccines this feared disease is now unknown. I angrily asked the drunk beside me if he had ever seen a person with limbs withered by polio?
He hadn’t. See? No polio, no problem.
My counterarguments themselves soon descended into nonsense. Don’t you remember the Man in the Iron Lung?” I shouted. You don’t because the polio vaccine put the friggin iron lung industry out of business! Go visit Youngstown! Listen to fucking Bruce Springsteen!! There’s no more iron, man! The demand completely dried up!!!
And then I heard some Russian accented voice slurring something about the dangers of voting by mail and I suddenly myself defending enfranchisement in a democracy. It was goddamn eight pm, my family was waiting, and I was trying to prove the virtue of Santa Claus.
The more facts I provided, the more unyielding patrons became and the more reactive and foul mouthed my own responses. The shouting occurring at the separate ends of this horrorshow bar met in my own brain as a maze of convex mirrors with no exit but for the shattering of glass.
And the data points? They grew into a veritable flood.
Two blows put me on the ground.
I watched powerless as a cultural divide was manufactured over fundamental principles of public health. Right wing political action groups aided in part by foreign bots encouraged citizens to resist requirements to wear a mask, or keep distance, or shelter at home, suggesting any efforts at disease prevention violated civil liberties.
It was as if no small number of people had come to believe that the highest expression of our civic values would be to roar up in our cars and tailgate a Suburu driving mom with a Baby on Board sign dangling in the back.
Or that I had the right to blow cigarette smoke in the face of a bystander because I have the right to smoke.
Or to not wear a seatbelt because it violated my right to free movement in my own car.
Or that when passing a flashing sign warning of black ice, that the person ahead was correct in accelerating, believing that he was a good driver, or had airbags, or that the sign was wrong and the black ice didn’t exist. To this driver it seemed not to matter that hundreds of cars and eighteen wheelers were creeping along behind him, and that if he was wrong in this dark winter weather and he spun out, my EMT friend Paul would be the one to risk his precious life to save him.
Here I am even now, sufficiently agitated that I’ve spent precious time defending public health — or let’s just call it at for what it really is — the health of our public sphere, the higher interest, the social good, the health of the polis itself.
What, I wondered, has become of us? What foul air was fomenting within us such anger?
Many have written about how we got here. But how dearly do we find our way out?
These Facebook fissures make me long for an America that we seem to have lost, or that perhaps was only imagined. I’d like to believe that we as a nation rallied to fight the scourge of fascism in the 1940’s. That’s the story we now tell ourselves 75 years later. Perhaps lost to our sensibilities are the erratic dissent and cross purposes that prevented us from engaging for so long in the first place.
And we so easily forget the people who were excluded or endured their own tribulations (Nisei or Walker Evans poor,African American soldiers or African American anything). Perhaps our current fractiousness and ill will are congenital and not so different from our discourse and tensions of the past.
George Caleb Bingham’s 1846 painting, The Jolly Flatboatman comes to mind, though my remembered version is nothing nearly as serene as the one hanging in the National Gallery: on that raft the dancing figure creates a perfect triangle with the boat deck, not unlike the idealized dimensions of a Grecian pediment. In my minds eye, I remembered the boat as something more careening, jugs a swinging, the dancer teetering on the edge of the raft in a absinthe and mustard gloom as the flat bottomed boat drifted directionless downriver. Bingham’s brazen dancer still suggests something of my American ideal however, the America that perhaps posits strength and conviviality, resilience and ingenuity. America has always been rollicking and unruly, the only true rule being that in the end we are still just a mob. And if you let the mob mash long enough, well, meh, perhaps something may come of it. We are that dancer and we’d like to believe that his exuberance and unbridled joy will carry us.
But in this moment, I feel sadly and with no small amount of fear that we are witnessing the profound darkening of that buck dancer’s shadow.
In recent days I’ve found hope in two touchstones. One comes from a conversation years ago with a dear Hopi friend. He was lamenting some injustice by community leadership. You should exercise your rights, I suggested.
He smiled. Hopi don’t have rights, he said. We only have responsibilities.
In this challenging reframing, the individual matters less and the health of the community more. The wellbeing of one depends on the wellbeing of all.
The second consolation came from the well of friends who chimed in on my Facebook feed. Sociality, even in social media, provides the tender connections by which we remain a society. The message I received was unequivocal and clear: turn away from the darkness if you must. And let’s warm our hands together around the fire. I found myself reflecting on the nature of the hand warming and all the forms it took.
I took solace from my friend Larson, a Hopi man who posted a description of his first shopping excursion after 60 days of isolation. He described how he traveled to Phoenix and wore a mask. How he wiped down every surface he touched sometimes both before and after. How he kept his distance. How he looked about in dismay in those places where few did the same.
Larson wore a mask not because he is a shill of some conspiracy. Or because he is afraid of the virus. He did it because given our current emerging understanding of the disease, he does not know what he carries within him. He may be largely certain that he is not an asymptomatic carrier. But he is not 100% certain. So he felt that his highest obligation was to simply exercise care. He cared about the other people in Phoenix. And he has a great and abiding love for the community of which he’s a part. For Larson to show his love, to express his respect, to protect care givers and grocery clerks and gas station attendants and lots of hard working people, he need only wear a mask. Perhaps sanitize a shopping cart. Perhaps be alone for such time that it makes him feel sad and lonely. For Larson this hardly counts as a price to pay to do his part to ensure the well being of others. He was not asking what he could do for himself. He was asking what he could do for those around him. Larson embodied his civil liberties by wearing a mask.
I found solace in the poems that my friend Dan regularly posts.
Believe This
By Richard Levine
All morning, doing the hard, root-wrestling
work of turning a yard from the wild
to a gardener’s will, I heard a bird singing
from a hidden, though not distant, perch;
a song of swift, syncopated syllables sounding
like, Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
Can you believe this, believe this, believe?
And all morning, I did believe. All morning,
between break-even bouts with the unwanted,
I wanted to see that bird, and looked up so
I might later recognize it in a guide, and know
and call its name, but even more, I wanted
to join its church. For all morning, and many
a time in my life, I have wondered who, beyond
this plot I work, has called the order of being,
that givers of food are deemed lesser
than are the receivers. All morning,
muscling my will against that of the wild,
to claim a place in the bounty of earth,
seed, root, sun and rain, I offered my labor
as a kind of grace, and gave thanks even
for the aching in my body, which reached
beyond this work and this gift of struggle.
How can we invite ourselves toward that content that elevates rather than diminishes our collective humanity? Dan expresses his civil liberties by reminding us in words that are beyond his own words of what it means to be human.
I thought of my Hopi friend Samantha who on one of her recent morning runs in the desert posted a photo. Above she wrote the words, “Morning prayer run for my mother.”
Samantha believes that social distancing and isolation may be the best tools she presently has to keep safe the grandmothers and grandfathers in her fragile community. If you’d like a deeper understanding of what it means to have your world destroyed by a virus, ask anyone in Native America.
For Samantha, social distancing feels not at all like the death of liberty.
It feels instead like a shield protecting her community from death.
Until we know more about this novel disease, the risks for this small, already embattled people are too great. Samantha embodies her civil liberties by praying alone for her extended family members with whom she cannot be.
I am heartened by my friend Gary, not by what he posts, especially not for what he posts, but because in person, in the real world outside the Internet, I have seen his face filled with a glowing love for those human beings around him. I would encourage Gary to give voice to his civil liberties by expressing the part of his nature that is deeply compassionate and kind.
I am heartened by my childhood friend Scott who I’ve watched tread confidently into the middle of bar brawls and not engage, but instead put a consoling arm around a shoulder and offer up memories of a shared past. He exercises his civil liberties through goodwill.
I am heartened by my friend Julie — not necessarily for what she posts, (The algos rarely serve them up in my feed), but more for knowing that her fierce intelligence still exists. She embodies her civil liberties by being ruthlessly practical, by working to ensure that her counterpoints are, to the best of her ability, grounded in fact.
My friend Karin expresses her civil liberties first and foremost by being civil. And no less importantly by being civic. She follows local politics down to the school board. She writes letters to her elected representatives. She lobbies through the civic apparatuses available to us regarding issues that will make her local community a happier, more supportive and caring place to be.
My friend Mary has exercised her civil rights by assiduously studying how the Holocaust unfolded in Amsterdam and how it was resisted, and sharing those learnings through her writing and guided community discussions. She strengthens the meaning of the word citizen, by providing support to refugees in confinement who’s only human crime has been the harboring of hope.
My friend David exercises his civic duties by painstakingly weaving beautiful baskets.
And my friend Poppy recently cast her civil liberties wide by sharing some Jerry licks on some version of Shakedown Street, guitar peals so softly articulated yet so exuberant, so full of joy that they squashed my inner curmudgeon and made me smile.
And I guess I’ll probably always remain Leo’s friend. Partly because we’ve been friends since childhood. When I was young there was no food in our house, and so every afternoon for a good stretch of time I would go to his place and raid his refrigerator. He fed me when I needed to be fed. I don’t know why he did it. But I would count it as a civic virtue. I’ll remain his friend simply because he’s Leo.
Lastly, I am heartened by images sent by my friend Mary, a fellow American and epidemiologist who has devoted her entire professional life working to save millions from the scourge of malaria. She presently lives in Geneva.
The signs were everywhere, she said, in the town and in the countryside. One read, “We are all in this together,” Another, “You are surrounded by love.” In another, a hay bale statue depicted a nurse wearing a mask.
In Switzerland, Mary said, folks are largely of one mind and they feel as if they are working toward a common purpose. Certainly that is not alien to us as a people? What has made it so foreign to our own selves and to each other in this moment? These signs remind me of what we can be.
How interesting I thought, that the word to give thanks in French is remercier, the granting of mercy, literally that price which is to be paid.
May I grant mercy unto you.
And may you grant mercy unto me.
These thoughts are partly about the infection of our politics. In Facebook and in our national conversation I feel both scared and sad that we have become so merciless, so quick to anger and cruel in word. From what vicious and damaged soul has this division on a daily and hourly basis been nurtured and spawned? And why have we allowed ourselves to adopt it?
These thoughts are also about bodily infection. So here are some provisional truths based on our current knowledge. SARS-Co-2 is a pathogen that our bodies, the human body, in it’s 90,000 years of evolution has never encountered. Our bodies do not know what the hell to do with this thing. Our bodies are learning as quickly as they can. Our bodies are paying the cost of that learning. And based on our knowledge of virology, without intervention, our education and the cost of that education could be borne for a very long time.
Secondly, no one alive today on the planet Earth has living memory of what it’s like to live through a global pandemic. So too our body politic is learning. And the cost of that too been great. And early indicators suggest that it may be greater still.
We don’t know what this disease is going to do. It could burn out. Or it could not. It’s mechanisms may allow us to gain immunity. Or it may not. It may have seasonality or it could mutate. Or it may not.
But it matters not what you or I believe. The virus itself in the end will be the exclusive arbiter of truth.
So if we believe life itself to be precious, does it not serve us to move thoughtfully and with care, and to do so together in a way that serves not just our own personal needs, but also the needs of the most vulnerable among us? I am young. I am invincible. I have a strong immune system. But others may not. And so perhaps I should adopt a standard that will help them feel safe.
And as for the social media stuff? I won’t leave the Zuckerchamber just yet. I’ll do the best that I can. For the moment we’re in this together. I’ll don my armor. Erect my privacy filters. I’ll do my best to turn my own voice away from dark words and toward all of you and the doggies and the fluffy bunnies and the pictures of sunrises and evening light. And I’m never gonna stop defending Santa Claus. There’s a healing yet to be waged. And it’s not about Covid.
It’s partly about me.
And it’s also partly about you.
But it’s mostly about us.
Sincerely,
Andy
May 25, 2020
####
—
For those who want a deeper or more nuanced dive into some of the stuff I’ve touched upon, you might look toward the following:
To learn more about the darker corners of the internet, the growing information divide, and the manner in which our information feeds are shaped by algorithms in ways we may not be aware of, take a listen to Rabbit Hole, a new series that is part of the New York Times Daily.
This Podcast Will Kill You has wonderfully funny, delicious (each week they have a Quarantini recipe!) and fact-based and footnoted in-depth primers on measles, pandemic response, Covid virology, and the history of and science behind vaccinations. These gals do great work. Any episode is worth it’s salt.
If you feel suspicious of the public health enterprise and the workings of the World Health Organization and the CDC, you might want to read some in depth profiles of the deeply committed professionals within these organizations. You could start with two from the New Yorker, one a fascinating window into the Epidemic Intelligence Service, and the other a profile of one of the early researchers into Corona viruses. Hopefully they can provide a more dimensional understanding of these hard working public servants, complex organizations and fields of study.
Folks who are feeling suspicious of vaccines might want to look at some of the critical reportage drawing connection between the current pandemic response backlash and the far right. I’ve seen an increasing number of vaccine hesitant reposting from Breitbart and even troll sites. :-/. It’s chilling to see how this stuff spreads.
If you’re interested in super duper solid in depth reporting on pandemic conspiracy theories, the predations of this administration, and the ways in which the pandemic is being used as a fulcrum by outside actors and the ill-willed to foment division in this country, the June issue of The Atlantic is outstanding. I strongly encourage people to read online, or better yet subscribe if you can afford it.
If you want a brief advisory on surviving and exercising our civic virtues in this challenging moment for our democracy, consider Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. This review in the Guardian is a super good start.
If you prefer a more dense read regarding Kremlin disinformation campaigns and the spawning of the authoritarian movements in Europe and the US, take a look at The Road to Unfreedom.
Or else if you have drive time and want a more concise and human voiced distillation of these ideas, you can turn to his talk at the Ideas Festival. Timothy Snyder, fluent in nine or so European languages is darn smart and kind and funny — he is a sobering and soothing tonic for those souls who perhaps wonder if they are going crazy in this moment.
If you’re looking for ways to bridge the many divides we are now experiencing, you can look toward Better Angels and Braver Angels — the latter of which sponsors facilitated meetings between people of different political persuasions to help us learn to talk again.
And for those who want to know a little bit more about Santa, there’s no better place to start than a rereading of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
https://www.kqed.org/perspectives/201601139710/public-good
Public Good
I recently spoke with an acquaintance who works on a local farm supporting their CSA. Each day she has had to decide if she will go to work and help pack the boxes of vegetables for the waiting families. As she considered the family that ran the farm and the various workers, she decided at last to not go in and sequester herself for a period of time as a precaution.
It gives pause for thought. Just like our health care workers and grocery store employees, in this new environment our farm workers are in fact first responders.
Between 47 and 70% of our farmworkers in this country are undocumented workers. 73% are immigrants. Upwards of 60% of those working in the meatpacking industry are migrant workers from Mexico.
That means that much of the fruits and vegetables and nuts and seeds and frozen meat that we have emptied from our grocery store shelves in recent days, came from the labor of hardworking people who came from elsewhere. And in this crisis, this vital population is as vulnerable as the rest of us.
This is why Public Health for the entire public is a Public Good.
If our undocumented farm workers and meat packers become sick, the linkages in our food system begin to break. And if they can’t get help or are afraid to seek help because of their citizenship status, the problems for all of us become much, much worse.
Even though we all may be in isolation, let us perhaps consider the ways in which we can support and help these vital members of our community.
With a perspective, this is Andrew Lewis
Last night we got our daughter home safely.
I’ve had a chance to sleep and to breathe and now it’s time for a cautionary word.
Consider this a letter from the future. Depending on where you are, California may be living in a time five to eight days ahead of you. As of this morning, in our state we have over 1,500 Covid-19 cases and 48 deaths. The number of cases in our county have nearly tripled from 8 to 22 in the last day. These numbers will feel far away and quaint three days from now.
Our governor is presently requisitioning school gymnasiums, sports facilities, and thousands of hotel rooms to hold patients. And Department of Defense resources are being deployed to set up triage tents. School has been cancelled until at least September. This is what we are preparing for here and in this moment – eight days ahead of where you may now be, going about your daily business, perhaps thinking that this is a short term thing, or that since you work from home or are so remote that it will not affect you.
But this may be the strange and uncomfortable truth.
The Covid-19 virus most likely is already in your neighborhood or community.
This is no longer about you as an individual getting infected.
It may now be about keeping you from infecting everyone else.
In essence, you need to function as if you yourself already have the virus and that you are at risk of infecting your family, your children and every one of your loved ones.
Why? Because several preliminary studies suggest that Covid-19 can spread before you show symptoms and that may explain in part why it is spreading so rapidly.
This is why you must act before anyone shows symptoms, not after. Once you show symptoms, once sick people start appearing in your family or in your community, the window of opportunity has already begun to close. You may already be too late.
This is why Louisiana is in trouble. Eight days ago New Orleans celebrated Mardi Gras, and hundreds of thousands of visitors from all over the country and the world gathered and drank and danced and kissed and vomited in proximity to one another. Now, today, Louisiana is facing a public health emergency. The rate of increase in Covid-19 cases that are presenting in that state is one of the highest in the nation.
This is why, in our household, we have already begun to live as if it were eight days past our current situation.
Controlled laboratory studies suggest that under certain conditions the Covid-19 virus can survive for up to three days on metal and plastic surfaces, and up to 24 hours on cardboard or paper surfaces. When you touch something, you are not just touching that surface. You are in a sense touching all the people who themselves have touched that surface.
When I say surfaces, I mean everything. The doorknob. The toilet lever. The shower handle. The dresser drawers. The top of your dresser. Your car door handle. Your steering wheel. Your mop handle. The shopping cart. The handle to the freezer door in the grocery store. We touch hundreds if not thousands of surfaces every day and we are not even conscious of it.
As well, and more importantly, instinctively and habitually throughout the day we all constantly touch our faces. We scratch our noses. We pull our lips. We wipe our mouths. We kiss.
If someone is sick and coughs and touches a surface, and then you touch that surface and touch your face, you are in danger of contracting the virus.
To make this real, I’ll describe what it looks like in our family.
My wife is a physician. The current modeling suggests that she may very well soon be on the leading edge and taking care of a great number of people. She is also very much the linchpin of our entire family. She keeps us all together. As a family, and as a larger community, we very much cannot afford for her to get sick.
Two days ago I started to experience a sore throat and a mild cough. Nothing at all bad. Our lilacs are blooming as well as the crab apple. It is almost certainly allergies. At the same time, in recent days I’ve been in a lot of public places in a county that has already presented with the virus. I was in Safeway multiple times, touching multiple surfaces. I was in the hardware store, in the Mexican market to buy tortillas and cornhusks, at Best Buy and in the checkout line at Whole Foods. I gassed up at the gas station, touching the plastic gas handle. In nearly all instances I passed people who were congregating. I walked alongside people who had coughs.
I touched multiple surfaces.
Because of the possible consequences to my wife, and my family, and my community, I have to assume that I have come in contact with the Covid-19 virus. And now, when I cough, even if at the moment it is only because of allergies, I’m spreading droplets.
I may be a vector.
And now we’ll take it up a notch. Two weeks ago, our daughter was living as an au pair in Paris. France presently has the seventh highest number of cases in the world. Last week she flew from Charles DeGaulle Airport to Geneva to visit friends. As a function of population, Switzerland presently has the second highest infection rate in the world. That weekend, both France and Switzerland issued shelter in place orders. The borders in Europe began to close. Our daughter remained in Switzerland for another week. The United States further tightened travel restrictions and our family collectively decided that our daughter needed to come home. Over the next 72 hours she passed through four airports and four global capitals. She passed by hundreds of people from dozens of countries. She sat in a bar with a person evacuated from South Africa where a national emergency has been declared. Two others in Border Control had come from Iran. Another from Delhi. She passed through border control with hardly a question.
She touched hundreds of surfaces.
We have to assume that our daughter is now a vector.
While she was in flight, traveling from Los Angeles International Airport, I drove down to SFO from Sonoma County. As I drove down 19th Street in San Francisco on that late Saturday afternoon, I saw small groups of young men and women walking huddled together down the street. People laughed and joked. They ate sandwiches while standing at the bus stop. They wiped their hands on their pants, and their mouths on their sleeves. They spoke and kissed and coughed because of their seasonal allergies. They shouted and spit. At that same moment, hundreds of people were walking and congregating in crowds at Point Reyes National Seashore. They were all being human, living and loving one another.
And the thought of it all made me frightened.
When I met my daughter outside SFO baggage claim, she sat with her luggage, a mask on her face. We did not hug. We did not come close to one another. Instead, I had brought her doggie who was able to run up to her. They hugged and greeted, I wiped off my hands with a sterilized wipe. I gave one to my daughter and she wiped off her hands with a sterilized wipe. We tossed them into the trashcan on the curb. We loaded her luggage into the back.
And then my dear daughter and I and her dog drove home together for one hour and fifteen minutes in close quarters in our car.
—
So.
Today is no longer today. A little over a week ago, it was today.
On that day, I stocked split wood and kindling for the wood stove in our field house. The following day it was tomorrow. On that day I moved some of my clothes and books into the field house. Two days later it was in the middle of this week. I moved in a box of food and stocked the fridge with beverages.
Yesterday morning, as a final preparation, we did a deep cleaning of our house. And then today, which is eight days hence from where you all are, my wife and I and my daughter went into fourteen days of relative self isolation.
My wife and daughter have occupied different areas of the house. We try not to share bathrooms. For the next fourteen days, except for cooking and gardening duties, I’m living out in the field house.
Our daughter’s luggage, her guitar case, her backpack, all touched by multiple baggage handlers, remained outside on her porch until my wife could wipe them down with bleach. We had our daughter change out of her clothes as soon as she got home and we washed them. We all washed our hands repeatedly that night.
We eat meals together, four feet distant. We have cleared all the counters and every surface of objects to make them easier to wipe down. We have disinfectant and rags out at all times. In our family, I make the coffee. I am the only one to touch the machine. After I touch it, I wipe it down.
You touch a surface, you wipe it down. You touch a surface, you wash your hands. You touch a surface, you wipe it down.
We are starting to be conscious of our hands and our faces. Where are they? I recite a mantra. Hands, hands. Face, face. When idle, I try to hold my hands in front of me, fingers touching so that they are aware of each other. This keeps me from idly reaching out and touching surfaces. Hopefully it keeps me from touching my nose and mouth and face.
I rub my hands across my nose and face. Dammit. I wash my hands. We each have different hand towels put in separate places.
These are extreme measures, perhaps far beyond what might be recommended in a normal situation. But you have to remember why: today is no longer today.
In our family, our today is eight days from now.
And what does that world look like on that day? That day is the day that Italy experienced seven days ago. On that day, California hospitals are beginning to feel overwhelmed. Triage rooms are filled. We do not have enough ventilators. We do not have enough physicians. My wife and many other physicians no longer have the luxury of performing telemedicine. On that day, physicians start to work fifteen hour shifts. Patients line the hallways on gurneys. Nurses and doctors and medical assistants start to break from the strain. Personal protective equipment is increasingly no longer readily available. Soon everybody knows someone who is sick or dying. As is presently happening in Italy, bodies start to accumulate in the churches and morgues.
And for that day, my wife needs to be well. We cannot get her sick. When she comes home, she cannot afford to have any additional vectors. All of our lives, not just in our family, but in our larger community, may depend on it. Touch a surface, wipe it down. Keep your distance.
And here is the crazy part of all this dystopian time travel. If we all do this, if we act in the extreme, if we actually succeed – then that tomorrow will never come. We will actually prevent a terrible future from happening. And then we will have the greatest of luxuries. Once again, today will only exist as today.
And that will be a very, very, very, good thing.
Snowflakes Edge 