I spent the past two days driving around by myself in my car, listening to podcasts, thinking, and trying to find some perspective. I have, for the most part, avoided talking about the pandemic here on the blog. That has been intentional. One reason is that we’re all tired of it. I prefer to focus on the positive things going on in my life, of which there are many. Another is that there are enough people blathering on incessantly about it that I don’t feel the need to add my voice to the din. Mostly, though, it’s because I can’t make enough sense of what is happening in any meaningful scientific, social, or rational way.
I have a scanner in my office. The disembodied voices of the county dispatchers are my constant companions throughout the day. I keep a running mental tally of who is getting called and to what kind of incidents. I don’t do that intentionally—it’s more that after 25 years, the scanner traffic is just part of the information that my brain takes in every day, much as it unconsciously logs a thousand other things. I am aware enough of that running mental tally, though, that I can tell you there has been an uptick in calls for difficulty breathing and other covid-related calls in recent weeks. (I can also tell you there has been an uptick in calls for suicides and domestic violence.) I have talked to EMTs about what they are seeing on these calls, and some of their observations are unexpected. I have heard from medical personnel about what they are experiencing at the hospital. I know people who have lost loved ones to covid recently. I am trying to sift through data—and by data, I don’t mean what the mainstream media tells me the numbers say, because journalists are notoriously lousy statisticians, but what the source papers and scientists themselves are saying. I am trying to put a picture together of what’s going on, a picture that makes sense to my brain, even if I don’t like the way the picture looks. I can’t, and that’s making my brain hurt.
Here is a perfect example of why mainstream media is useless to me: Everything I have heard on the news indicates that the delta variant is the dominant variant in the US at the moment. Curious, I googled the question “How is the delta variant tested for?” I came up with news article after news article like this one that states, “The delta variant accounts for more than 80% of the nation's COVID-19 cases, the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows.” However, that same article notes, a few paragraphs later, that “There is not a specific test for the delta variant.” (Actually, there is a genomic test, but most labs don’t run it as a matter of course.) So the CDC is telling us it’s the dominant variant, but if no one is actually testing for it, how do they know that it is the dominant variant? I’m not saying that covid is a hoax—please go read the first part of this blog post again—but this is the kind of stuff I am having trouble reconciling in my head.
I thought that going to Spokane might give me some perspective. It did and it didn’t. Washington state reinstated its mask mandate for indoor spaces about a week ago, so I washed all my masks and put them into my little zip pouch and put it back on the front seat of my car. If I want to shop at a business and that business requests that I wear a mask to enter their establishment, I will. I expected that when I got to Spokane, the mask mandate would be in full force. I was surprised to discover that it wasn’t. Almost every single store had a sign on the door reminding customers that masks were mandatory in Washington state, but very few stores were policing the mandate. I saw plenty of customers in masks and a good handful not. I even went into a few stores where no one was wearing a mask. My sense was that a lot of people were just tired of the whole situation. Some of the small businesses are hanging on by their fingernails. One of the quilt store owners told me that the Fourth of July fabric that was supposed to arrive in March finally came—last week. I kept thinking of that saying, “Beatings will continue until morale improves.”
I stopped at the BMW dealer because the check engine light went on in The Diva about halfway across Idaho. The husband suggested I see if they could run a diagnostic panel and find out if it was kicking out a code. I walked into the service office, which was completely empty. That was odd. I waited for a few minutes and eventually Kevin came in. We chatted briefly and he said that he couldn’t even run the diagnostic panel for me because four of their service techs were out with covid. I don’t know what BMW’s vaccine policy is, but I would be surprised if their techs were unvaccinated.
[FWIW, the check engine light issue has happened before, and when I explained to Kevin the conditions under which the check engine light was coming on, he nodded and said the husband had done exactly what he was supposed to to try to fix this, and that it was a known—but minor—problem. Eventually, the light went out.]
On the way home, I listened to a couple of podcasts heavy on data analysis in an attempt to get a handle on the actual numbers. One of the podcasters posited the theory—a disconcerting one, certainly—that vaccinated people are driving the current surges. “How can that be?” you ask. If the vaccine lessens the severity of the disease but doesn’t limit transmission, then a vaccinated person with a mild case could be spreading the virus without realizing it. Is that what is happening? I don’t know, but I am entertaining all possibilities. And here’s a thought: If we woke up tomorrow morning and there was scientific evidence that the vaccinated are driving the surge of cases, would the vaccinated people be comfortable being treated the way many of them have been treating the unvaccinated? Would they accept being labelled as “selfish” and made to be social pariahs? That is a good reminder to extend the same grace to others that we ourselves would like to receive if the tables were turned.
Life is complex. Beware of those who say, “If only you do X, then Y will happen.” That is a reductionist approach that fails miserably in the face of reality. I am reminded of Thomas Sowell’s observation that “There are no solutions. There are only tradeoffs.” And the more I think about all of this, the more I realize how vastly complex the whole situation really is.
I had a good trip. I’ll show some of the goodies I got later this week.
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The county is repaving our road. In Montana, “repaving” often means taking the existing road down to the roadbed and rebuilding it, rather than just slapping a layer of asphalt on top of what’s already there. In anticipation of that, the road department has cut down the road every half-mile or so, creating speed bumps. We have one such speed bump right in front of our house:
