“If you’re going through hell, keep going!”---Winston Churchill
Tuesday
It’s what everyone is looking for, the precursor, the beginning of the end, the slight tilt eastward which eventually turns south, indicating the end is near if not yet at hand. It came surprisingly soon in China. They thought it would never arrive in Italy, but it did. And in each country where the line started to nudge eastward, it continued. Now, beleaguered New York is beginning to show signs of a curve. The indicator in question is the number of new cases which appear day after day, streaking upward like a bullet train for weeks and scaring to death the administrators of undermanned, underequipped hospitals. In this war, unlike all others, no one is immune. Prime ministers drop. Princes are struck down. Celebrities fall like dominoes. Here today, gone tomorrow, or in two weeks, tops.
There are not enough weapons for defenders to fight the battle in the scattered hotbeds of the Coronavirus invasion. In New York City, they are searching in grandma’s bureau drawers for face masks, doubling up on hospital ventilators, checking the recycled bridal goods shops for extra gowns, but the enemy keeps coming. Bodies of the war’s victims pile up, so many of them the defenders are forced to utilize refrigerated truck trailers to store the lot. The usually united states battle one another for armaments to shore up their own bastions and unity is lost. The Grand Leader stumbles around with his thumb firmly lodged up his adipem nates, mouthing platitudes. There is nothing we can do but keep our patience, hold the fort, wait out the siege. And as a famous homeboy once said, the waiting is the hardest part.
The Good News
1. The spread of the Coronavirus in Colorado has slowed significantly as the state begins to see the effects of its stay-at-home order. Governor Jared Polis claims “A silver lining is just beginning to emerge in Colorado. The data tells us we are starting to make progress. At the beginning of the crisis, the number of positive cases in Colorado was doubling every one-and-one-half days. Today, the number of positive cases is doubling about every six or seven days. That means the virus is beginning to slow.”
2. It’s important to remember that the great majority of people afflicted with the Coronavirus do recover and the percentage of deaths is relatively small. Doctors in India have recently reported success in treating infected patients with a mixture of drugs usually used to battle HIV, swine flu and malaria. In China and Japan, doctors have had promising results using blood plasma from people who have recovered from Covid-19 to treat newly infected patients. 102-year-old Italica Grondona recovered from the virus in Italy and a previously infected 103-year-old woman in China is now reported to be virus free. Vint Cerf, 76, sometimes called the “father of the Internet,” has recovered, as has his wife. Tom Hanks and his wife returned home in late March after recovering from the Coronavirus in Australia.
3. The environment has been an important beneficiary of the world-wide Coronavirus blight. China’s lockdown let to an astounding 25% decrease in CO2 emissions when compared with the same period in 2019. Satellite imaging shows startling reductions in air pollution over countries where traffic has been limited. Researcher Marshall Burke from Stanford University calculated that the reduction in emissions in China in January and February could save as many as 77,000 lives. That’s 20 times the number of people who died from the coronavirus in that time.
Thursday
The (sometimes depressing, surely quite distressing, often convalescing) Coronavirus Blues (by WTK)
I heard on the news there was trouble in China,
The president said it was terribly minor,
I’ll take him at his word but it doesn’t look good to me.
They’re fallin’ in the streets and droppin’ out the windows
The virus showin’ up whichever way the wind blows,
It looks like a problem with a great big capital “P.”
I heard on the news there was trouble in Italy,
The president said it didn’t mean diddly,
I’d like to believe him but it doesn’t look good to me.
They’ve closed all the churches and the Pope is fussin’,
The pastas gettin’ cold and the gondolier’s cussin’
And noone’s showin’ up at the Leanin' Tower of P.
I heard on the news about New York City,
The president admitted that it didn’t look pretty,
But he was a lot less worried about it than me.
The hospitals have more people than beds
And noone’s figured out where to get good meds
And the whole town’s sittin’ on a big catastrophe.
But that’s the way the cookie crumbles,
That’s the way the government bumbles
When the big dinner party is catered by the G.O.P.
The soup arrives cold and the appetizer's old,
The tater’s half-baked and they mortified the steak
And there ain’t a soul even wants to talk about the tea.
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| Leslie Logan, Stuart Bentler, hairy Bill in Lawrence, Mass., circa 1968. |
Nothin’ Could Be Finer? Maybe Just A Smidge.
Each week until the tidal wave crashes on the beach and slowly ebbs back into the sea, The Flying Pie will transport you to some famous metropolis or quaint hamlet to investigate how things are going there. This is quaint hamlet week, so we’re off to little Highlands, North Carolina to see what Leslie Logan and her neighbors are up to. You’ll remember Leslie as the mother of the famous Katherine Bentler Garner, who won last week’s tough Guess The Culprit contest on Bill’s Facebook page. You should also know that Leslie is ready for any silly Coronavirus catastrophe, having been married for many years to the infamously erratic Stuart Bentler of early Pie fame.
The Bentlers were around for the early days of the Subterranean Circus, during which Stuart tried to snatch away Bill’s girlfriend Patty Wheeler with electric yoyo tricks and almost succeeded. Stuart and Leslie had a duplex apartment just off 13th street near the University of Florida, where all potheads were welcome to settle in, break the law and listen to Stuart’s endless musical collection. The Bentlers were not crazed dopers, they just liked to watch everyone make fools of themselves.
One day, Stuart decided to dive in and took some LSD. He was having a wonderful time until he wanted the game to be over, sadly discovering then that Lysergic Acid Diethylamide was not a pushbutton drug. “Take me to the hospital, I’m going crazy!” he wailed. In those days, nobody was taking a friend to the hospital so they could admit to doing drugs. Not that the hospital could do anything about it anyway. We assured Stuart he was not any crazier than he had ever been and this, too, would pass. Sure enough, many hours later it did. He thought it was all pretty funny then.
Leslie, ever the straight arrow, was a schoolteacher in those days, earning hazardous duty pay for working with special ed students in the Hawthorne-Palatka war zone. After a short break to birth a couple of babies, she returned to teaching in 1984 and took Montessori training in 1987. “I taught in Montessori schools and in public school special ed in Atlanta and Tampa until 2006, when I was dragged kicking and screaming into school administration as head of a school,” she says. In 2008, a Montessori school in Portland, Oregon made Leslie an offer she couldn’t refuse to replace their founder who was retiring. She served from 2008 to 2016, when she retired.
“I loved my time in Portland, but really missed my longtime friends back East. I looked around for awhile and finally chose Highlands. It’s a small town, certainly too small for some people, but it’s just right for me. I made the correct choice in coming here and I’m glad I did. I just wish it was a little easier to find a dealer.”
“Welcome to the Highland City Limits! Now Go Home!”///Leslie Logan
Highlands is a small town located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. The landscape is lush in a temperate rain forest sort of way and the views will knock your Birkenstocks off, which is why most of the residents choose to live here. Once situated, new residents will discover a community of exceptionally kind people.
We have restaurants, shops, small hotels, even a little movie theater which shows first-run movies; also a small hospital campus complete with a physical therapy capacity and doctors offices. The facility does not, however, possess the appropriate spaces (ICU rooms) or staff (specialty doctors and surgeons) to treat serious illnesses. Run into a medical crises here and you’d better hope it’s a sunny, windless day so the helicopter can swoop in and airlift you to Asheville or Atlanta. The mere thought keeps most of us health-conscious. Which explains why, when Covid-19 began to spread, we all went straight to the mattresses. I haven’t seen any of my friends or family for a month. We text or talk by phone and arrange happy hour gettogethers via Zoom, which has turned out to be a lot more fun than I expected. Everyone is grateful for the warming weather and a chance to spend more time outside.
The major age group in this community of 3000 is, as you might expect, the elderly (we prefer “baby-boomers). In Summer, the population swells to 30,000 and the hotels fill up, the cottages are rented out and friends come to town to escape the southern heat and humidity. It takes a major bribe to get a restaurant seat. So if a death-dealing virus had to show up here, this is undoubtedly the best time for it to visit. So far, social distancing has been easily managed. Homeowners soon to return from their winter digs in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama have all been sent notifications advising that they must self-quarantine for two weeks upon their arrival and should bring with them enough food and medicine for at least that time period.
All roads leading to Highlands now have road blocks. Only people who live or work here may pass. Nor is there any reason to come---there is nowhere to go because everything is closed. It was easier to get through the lines in Invasion of the Body Snatchers than it is here.
The L.A. Times says “It’s expected to be only a matter of time before the virus strikes rural America.” Alan Morgan, chief executive officer of the National Rural Health Association, says “There is literally NO room for error here. Rural America is a tinderbox of a healthcare crisis for those most in need.” We’re listening to Alan. And getting nervous every time we hear a passing helicopter.
Are We Having Fun Yet? How about EVER?
Though the bodies continue to pile up in NYC at a deplorable rate, the new cases have leveled off, even turning down a bit in recent days. Is the Big Bend imminent? Can the monster rise from its own ashes and strike again? F. Scott Fitzgerald famously claimed there are no second acts in American life but does that cover viruses, too? Maybe, maybe not. Here’s what Dr. Nick Gavin, vice chair of clinical operations for the emergency department at Columbia University Medical Center has to say:
“The curve would need to be a sufficiently negative slope for at least 10-14 days. A reintroduction of the virus, perhaps from outside, could relaunch a second event and change the slope. But with the lengthy incubation period for Covid-19, it’s too soon to tell if the social distancing measures put in place in the last two weeks are working yet.”
Not the cheeriest of prognostications but the results in countries where the disease struck earlier belie the likelihood of a quick Covid rebound. In China, in South Korea, in Italy, once the Big Bend occurred, the virus tapered off and did not roar back. There were occasional scary death spasms as the disease faltered but nothing which could be called a serious rally. The virus has been diminished---or run its course, if you will--- in several countries abroad and even in Washington state. The Chinese government reopened the disease epicenter, Wuhan, yesterday after a 76-day siege. New York is on its way. Needless to say, there will be many more deaths, several scattered hotspots like Washington, Baltimore, Houston and Philly---all with significant and vulnerable black populations---where the virus will make a torrid last stand. Internationally, India is still a big worry. And likely as not, the virus will return for another go at us when flu season returns in the Fall.
In the meantime, extremism in the defense of body and soul is no vice. It does you no good to realize the beast is finally treed if it jumps from the tree and nails you. Continuing to follow the same safety precautions for the foreseeable future is wise. Indeed, social distancing is the chief weapon necessary to bring down the critter and abandoning the practice too soon leaves the door ajar. Stay the course. The Coronavirus is on the run and the precipice is near. Full throttle ahead! Onward, through the fog!
That’s all, folks….
bill.killeen094@gmail.com
