Hunkered down, somewhere in Wyoming, part 3

I've used three video-conferencing apps in the past week. Before that, I had used exactly no video-conferencing apps. Didn't need to. I was never quarantined by a pandemic before. I  attended public events with other humans. I dined out with the family. I volunteered in a public place where germs circulated freely.

None of that is possible now. It is possible, as Wyoming has no mandatory shelter-in-place order as of yet. We've been advised to stay at home. As I reported in my previous post, I have ventured outside to tend to business at drive-through facilities: library, post office, credit union. Last weekend the family went hunting for ice cream and we joined the queue at Dairy Queen's window. Yesterday Annie went to a physician's appointment. When she arrived, a nurse told her to leave because an earlier nervous patient had admitted that she was afraid she had coronavirus because one of her relatives had a cold and they had been together the day before so maybe she was contagious.

Paranoia is the new normal. But, as the old saying goes, you ain't paranoid if someone really is following you. Millions of us are now being followed by COVID-19. It's OK to be a bit paranoid and a lot careful.

I've read first-person accounts of the 1918-19 flu pandemic. It killed millions of young people. It killed older people too. But researchers believe that the virus hitched a ride on the revved-up metabolisms of youth. Doctors and nurses told stories of people in their prime hemorrhaging from the mouth, nose and eyes. They turned blue as lungs ceased to work when they filled with pus. Toddlers starved to death as parents wasted away in their beds.

Most of these gory details went unreported because of wartime restrictions on publishing bad news that might frighten the populace and disrupt the war effort. The fact that the flu might have originated among soldiers at Ft. Riley, Kansas, was hidden. Soldiers continued to come and go, infecting the population along the way. A little more governmental openness would have saved thousands, maybe millions. The final worldwide tally of pandemic deaths is estimated between 50 and 100 million. 

As author John M. Barry concludes in "The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History: "The final lesson of 1918, a simple one yet one most difficult to execute, is that...those in authority must retain the public's trust. The way to do that is to distort nothing, to put the best face on nothing, to try to manipulate no one. Lincoln said that first, and best. A leader must make whatever horror exists concrete. Only then will people be able to break it apart." 

Barry wrote in the March 17 New York Times that he served on pandemic working groups after the bird flu plague of 2005. The groups recommended the usual non-pharmaceutical interventions, Barry wrote: social distancing, washing hands, coughing into elbows, staying home when sick. Sound familiar? If followed closely, those techniques could go a long way in curtailing a pandemic. But people are people, politicians are politicians. We stray and the bug spreads.

I keep thinking that our first-person accounts of COVID-19 might be read 100 years from now. People may be shocked by the quick spread of contagion, the many senseless deaths, the lackadaisical, even criminally negligent, attitude of POTUS and his minions. Those poor people, our descendants might say. Such a tragedy. It's a good thing it can't happen now, here in 2120, with our sophisticated knowledge and our advanced medical techniques.

COVID-19 might be the pandemic to end all pandemics, just as World War I was "the war to end all wars."

Latest update: Wyoming Department of Health Epidemiology Unit reported this afternoon that 73 people in the state have tested positive for COVID-19. Laramie County had the most at 18. Fremont was next with 17.