It's Off to Work We Go...

    Some of you may or may not have read about the stimulus bills making their way through countries such as Australia, parts of the EU and the U.S.  Here (in the U.S.) it took a bit of wrangling for government officials to realize that work stoppages were happening faster than the spread of the virus.  Quarantines were closing down restaurants and schools, gyms and gathering places, and people were suddenly home and without work.  Checks and payments were grinding to a halt and cash-in-hand was needed since (among other bills) state and federal taxes were coming due (the Internal Revenue Service or IRS recently extended the deadline to July...so far, the states have not budged).  So Congress, in a bit of back and forth (bail out the corporations or the workers?) finally agreed to vote on a stimulus bill to aid those without work and that's where the problems really began.  As it turned out, despite a few Senators and Representatives testing positive for Covid-19, parliamentary rules didn't allow a phone-in "remote" vote (most House representatives had gone ome).  Get 'er done, was the call; let's get the everyday person some relief; let's vote, cried Congress.  Which is when Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie agreed and said to his colleagues to come on back to Washington D.C. in order to vote.  What???  Most were comfortably settled in at their homes throughout the country; we're on this quarantine they said, "working" from home, and anyway, how dare he say we need to come back just to vote?  The comments flew, from Trump's usual rants ("third-rate grandstander") to Democrat John Kerry's Tweet ("Congressman Massie has tested positive for being an asshole.").  But amidst all the vitriol, here's the side that so few heard, that of Congressman Massie's reply: These are people that make $174,000 a year and they expect the person at Kroger’s (a grocery chain) that bags groceries to go to work, they expect the truck drivers bringing produce to their grocery stores to go to work, they expect all these other people to work, but how is it that they’ve decided that people with the best health care in the world, which they all get, that they can’t come to work?...The Constitution requires a quorum to pass a bill, and they were planning to subvert the Constitution...They don't want to be on record...  In the end, enough (but not all) Representatives grudgingly returned to Washington, D.C. to pass the bill (but also voting not to record who was for or against the bill).  So the question at this point becomes, where do you stand?  Was Representative Massie right to take such a position?  Or were the others correct in not wanting to fly back to Washington, D.C. for a vote as the House rules dictated?  Or does any of this matter since the bill passed and the checks will soon arrive both electronically and in the mail?

   As the new month begins and bills need to be paid (to be fair, many businesses have been waiving late fees or allowing additional time on loan payments), our cultural divide is appearing to appear more as an open wound rather than a scar that is healing.  Cancel a large gathering?  From church services to beaches to festivals, some large gatherings are openly displaying an innocent or perhaps a selfish spreading of the virus.  One example came from France where an annual religious event in Mulhouse resulted in over 2500 cases of people testing positive for Covid-19; said Reuters: By March 20, France had more than 10,000 cases of COVID-19.  Around a quarter were in Grand-Est, the region that includes Mulhouse.  “The very great majority” of these could be traced to the church, said Vernay, the local public health official...Coming from further afield was Antoinette, a 70-year-old grandmother who lives on the Mediterranean island of Corsica.  For her, the gathering was part of a 25-year tradition...“People have pointed their finger at me,” said Antoinette on March 16.  “They need a scapegoat.”  She said some people outside her circle were suspicious of evangelical Christians and blamed her for bringing the virus to Corsica.  Jonathan Peterschmitt, the son of the Mulhouse pastor, said others in the congregation had been subject to verbal attacks by strangers for spreading the infection, and were now fearful of revealing their identities.  And the traditional Mardi Gras in New Orleans?  Reported Bloomberg Businessweek: By March 9, two weeks after Mardi Gras and a week before St. Patrick’s Day, Louisiana had its first confirmed infection.  As of Friday, the state had 2,746 cases and 119 deaths.

Exhausted emergency workers in NY.  Photo: Steve Pfost/Newsday RM/Getty 

   That magazine's report highlighted the many viewpoints of this viral crisis.  This from Dr. Jolion McGreevy, director of the emergency department at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital: People are coming in and look OK.  They start out awake and alert and are able to talk to you, tell you what’s going on and how they’re feeling.  But they get very sick, very quickly.  They start breathing extremely fast and get distant and don’t respond as sharply.  After that, they don’t participate in any kind of conversation.  They don’t know where they are.  This from funeral director Patrick Kearns: There’s a reason why we all gather.  The gathering supports people and gives them an opportunity to express themselves.  It serves a real need and a purpose.  Now, we’ve taken that gathering away.  That is a real struggle for people...we hug and we seek contact with each other, especially in difficult times.  Now that intimacy has been taken away.  It’s just hard.  Here are some comments from Emergency Room docs, as told to STAT: Every time I go to the ICU I basically hug my family and take a picture of my kids...in my mind, if I have an exposure, I don’t know if I’ll come home. --Almost all of our personal protective equipment is meant to be disposable.  Instead, we are wearing procedural masks, surgical masks as long as we can...This does not feel normal.  It feels scary. --When we have a unit full of critically ill patients who are often on ventilators and have medications running, the kind of attention that requires is immense on a moment-to-moment scale.  The reason is our interventions are sometimes as dangerous as the disease. The ventilator isn’t something you can just set and forget.  Once someone’s on a ventilator, there’s no margin for error.  Especially with Covid. --We’re learning on the job.  There’s not one single resource that says: “Are you taking care of Covid patients?  These are the 78 things that you absolutely need to know.”  There’s just so much information and it changes every single day.  I remember looking last week at the number of journal articles that had already come out. It was like 12,200.  Even if I had the abstracts for all of those, I wouldn’t be able to keep up. --I have more than a dozen of my physician friends across the country, not in my own hospital but in Massachusetts, in New York, in Washington, in California, who’ve been diagnosed with Covid-19 at this point.  So I know that I’m high risk.
  
   Multiply those thoughts by a thousand or a million, or by billions.  The doctors and nurses working long shifts and returning home with the nagging thought that they may have caught the virus or may expose their family to it; the person who does test positive and wonders if she'll make it through; the people unable to go to the hospital or even enter the room where their loved one is dying; the researchers and scientists trying to figure this virus out and perhaps find how to slow it: the homeless and jailed and cancer patients and people who just want to see a doctor; the businesses and people both working and not working and touching packages and groceries and knobs and money and not knowing who else has done so and whether they're picking up the virus.  And of course the nagging thought in the background which Bloomberg asked in its op-ed: ...think about all the social problems the U.S. faced three months ago before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19: Half a million homeless.  More than 2 million incarcerated.  Tens of millions with untreated mental health or addiction problems.  Almost 28 million uninsured.  And 40% of households with less than $400 in emergency savings.  These aren’t small nuisances at the edges of the pandemic.  They’re social problems deep at the core of America in 2020.  Each compounds the challenge of responding to the virus, and each one may be aggravated by the pandemic and the economic chaos that’s already underway.  Just as the virus poses the greatest threat to individuals with other health problems, perhaps a society’s existing illnesses magnify the damage it may inflict.  We don’t yet know how great that will be.  But it isn’t too soon to ask: What does healing look like?

    Author, researcher, TED Talk speaker Brené Brown recently appeared on Netflix to talk about a subject she knows well, shame and vulnerability.  Courage takes being vulnerable, she said: Are you 100% sure that person will always love you back, will never leave, will never get sick?  How many of you have every buried someone you love?  How many of you have lost someone you love?  To love is to be vulnerable, to give someone your heart and say, 'I know this could hurt so bad, but I'm willing to do it; I'm willing to be vulnerable and love you.'   Vulnerability is hard, and it's scary, and it feels dangerous, but it's not as hard, scary or dangerous as getting to the end of our lives and having to ask ourselves, 'What if I would've shown up?'  'What if I would've said, I love you?'  Show up, be seen, answer the call to courage...cause you're worth it.  You're worth being brave.  And in her new podcast, she added this: These are anxious times.  I hope you are well, taking care of yourselves, and finding a way to connect with people you love.  If you are a healthcare worker, social worker, counselor, first responder, store employee, food delivery person, or anyone out there on the frontlines: Thank you.  You are our heroes.  We owe you so much.  If you are someone who loves a frontline person: Thank you.  We also owe you so much.  Taking all of that in, was it too much to have those politicians leave their homes to vote?

    This is not a time of division, but a time of unity.  There would appear that this virus doesn't care a hoot about politics or geographic boundaries or weapons or making money; like us this virus just wants to survive, no matter what it takes.  And slowly, ever so slowly, we appear to be getting the message that "business as usual" is no longer.  Snow White's seven dwarfs may have happily sung about going back to work, but during these puzzling and confusing times I fall back to the words of singer Paul Simon's American Tune which seemed to encapsulate the thoughts of many, not only those of us in the U.S. but in the entire world: Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken, and many times confused.  Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken and certainly misused.  I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered;  I don’t have a friend who feels at ease.  I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered, or driven to its knees.  Oh, but it’s all right, it’s all right, for lived so well so long.  Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on I wonder what went wrong.

   On a final note, we're all in this together and vulnerable and yes, courageous.  Again, I'm pointing out the segment from the PBS Newshour which showed not only how things we once couldn't imagine are now occurring, but also how quickly and callously such changes can come...and bring us to our knees.