The traditional bird/Wikimedia Commons
In the season of Thanksgiving in what is destined to go down in history as the era of the COVID, maybe it is time to give thanks for the time and place in which we live.
The pandemic wrought by the SARS-CoV-2 virus is today scaring so many in this country mainly because it has disrupted the safety and security to which we have become accustomed.
Think of how blessed that makes us.
As we sit down to socially distanced dinners around tables missing family and friends who might otherwise grace the day, maybe it’s time to recognize this isn’t Afghanistan or Syria or parts of Africa where death could come tomorrow because someone decides you’re a member of the wrong tribe.
Or the American frontier of the 19th Century or even the American South of the early 20th Century where black men were regularly lynched because of the color of their skin.
Or Nazi Germany where being Jewish became a death sentence in the 1930s and ’40s, or Bosnia in the 1990s, which is not long ago, where tens of thousands of people were randomly killed for the crime of being Muslim.
It would be nice if those places were the exception and the way Americans live today was the norm, but for most of human history, those places were the norm and the way Americans live today the exception.
Random death coming quickly from any angle at any time was the nature of human existence from the beginning. Only in the last 50 years have we as Americans come to live in such a nice, safe world we expect death to creep up on us instead of arriving suddenly and unexpectedly.
Yes, the unexpected still sometimes happens. More than 36,000 Americans died in motor vehicle accidents last year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
But in a country of nearly 335 million people, that is such a small number the deaths went largely unnoticed except to the family and friends of the dead.
Not so COVID-19, the disease spawned by SARS-CoV-2.
Freezer vans
COVID-19 has now killed about seven and a half times as many people over the span of about nine months. In some cities, freezer vans have been rolled into position to store the bodies.
All of this has scared the bejesus out of many. Too many among us now know, or know of, someone who went into the hospital one day and a few weeks later came out in a coffin.
And we are simply not used to death in this way.
We are conditioned to expect death to come slowly with the announcement that we have an illness that is generally treatable to degrees great or small, a disease that is destined to kill us for sure because life itself is a death sentence.
But not kill us within days or the matter of a week or two.
The lifetime odds the average American will die of heart disease are one in six and of cancer one in seven, according to the National Safety Council’s Injury Facts website, but these aren’t deaths waiting around the corner.
Most of these deaths come slowly, usually with age, and with well-established treatments for dragging out the time between life and death. Sometimes even delaying it for so long that people are declared “cured.”
If you go to the doctor and the diagnosis is one of some forms of cancer, you might be among the lucky ones “cured.” Cyclist Lance Armstrong was one of those. His testicular cancer nearly killed him.
Armstrong is now 45 years old, and if his Strava data can be believed, he would appear to be one of the fittest 40-somethings in the country. Still, he will eventually die because that is the fate of all living things.
As Americans, however, we expect the end to come in established ways. We don’t expect it to overpower our plans for the near future. We do not live those sorts of lives anymore.
In Alaska, for most of human history, the quote-unquote “future” was defined as simply surviving another winter because winters were too often grim times with food in short supply.
No place for old men
This is the way life was; it was hard. There are reasons the average lifespan of a man was less than 54 years only a century ago. It wasn’t that some people didn’t live into their 80s and 90s in 1920; it was that so many never made it past childhood or adolescence or young adulthood.
Nature managed to hold us in check for a long time. Gerontologist Caleb E. Finch estimated that for thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution the human lifespan stayed in the range of 30 to 40 years, and then everything changed.
I have family history here. My mother had scarlet fever as a child, which weakened her heart and led to her premature death at age 70. I myself had pneumonia as a child and still remember picking off the walls of my parent’s bedroom the giant spiders my delirious imagination had placed there.
That was in the 1950s. Deaths from pneumonia and influenza – similar infectious lung diseases – averaged around 50 deaths per 100,000 people in that decade and the next, according to the website Statista. Those deaths had been reduced to less than a third the number by the 2010s.
We got pretty comfortable thinking nature had been well penned. The Centers for Disease Control thought the U.S. had a bad flu season when an estimated 51,000 people died in 2014-2015.
That’s about the same number of deaths as are attributed to suicide in this country each year, and a tiny fraction of the more than 655,000 deaths from heart disease and nearly 600,000 from cancer each year, according to the CDC.
We are, however, accustomed to those latter deaths, and to the deaths from flu for that matter.
COVID-19 is something new. COVID-19 is nature strikes back. COVID-19 is a blaring reminder that we’re not in control.
Or at least we don’t feel like control even if, in some ways, we’re more in control than we have been with the diseases that have been killing us for decades.
That Safety Council list on the odds of dying gives you a one in 25 chance of falling victim to a preventable disease. Heart disease is on that list as are other diseases almost all of which require you make sacrifices: you have to exercise, keep your weight in check, eat right, and avoid that tobacco you might find enjoyable.
These are tough things for many to do. Look around you. A third of the country is overweight. It has been killing us slowly for a long time and now, in too many cases, it is killing us quickly with COVID-19 raging.
But the thing is COVID-19 is among the easiest of the deadly diseases to prevent. All you have to do is stay away from other people and places crowded with humanity. It is a virus you mainly catch from breathing air contaminated by others.
Yes, there is a chance you could catch it from a surface someone else contaminated with SARS-CoV-2, but the odds there appear very low, possibly less than the one in 1,121 odds you will drown.
It’s hard to drown if you stay out of the water. It’s equally hard to catch COVID-19 if you stay away from people. We should be thankful that we can personally minimize our risk.
Granted, for the extraverts among us, this might make for a difficult time. But COVID can be avoided, and there are indications that for whatever reasons, the odds of your surviving if you do catch it are continuing to improve.
Two graphs from much-talked-about Sweden probably say as much as anything in that regard. Far more people in Sweden are catching the disease now than in the spring, but far fewer are dying.
Why? Maybe most of the most vulnerable died back in April and May. Maybe the better testing is finding more asymptomatic cases that went unnoticed before. Maybe more of those catching the diseases now are in the 40 and younger age groups that have had far higher survival rate since the beginning of the pandemic. Maybe the virus itself, which has been rapidly mutating ever since it first infected humans, has evolved into a less deadly form in Sweden.
Nobody knows. We’re still early in this battle and much is lost in the fog of war, but humankind is fighting back. And we should all give thanks we are now able to do that in ways our parents – even the parents of some barely old enough to read this – couldn’t have imagined.
And especially we should give thanks that we live in a time when life – at least in this country – is easier than it has ever been in human history, and easier than it still is in many parts of the world today.
Far easier.
Categories: Commentary
Daily death numbers in Sweden and Italy are rising
dramatically and at spring numbers-that chart is already outdated. World wide daily death numbers are at record highs. Just saying as we race to the grave.
So Don Young who is almost 90 & hasn’t exercised in decades survived this nasty cold virus just fine yet we are told not to meet with our families for Thanksgiving & now the largest economy in Alaska is seeing a second “LOCKDOWN” before the largest shopping season of the year?
If you haven’t woke up to the fact that Trump has ushered in an era of fascism not seen in the 250 years this country has been around, then I guess you never deserved freedom in the first place.
Do you think everyone has the access to the standard of health care Don Young received?
Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t sacrifice lives so
we can go to restaurants and to hair stylists, but Rep Young’s or Trump’s
experiences with Covid are not relevant to the discussion.
Jeff,
Anyone who survived the virus is relative to this discussion…especially senior members of the community like Don Young who are considered “high risk”.
Our immune system is still the number one defense against any pathogen that enters our body…not pharmacological agents.
You must be either independently wealthy or on the civil servant nipple to not care about the health of our economy.
We cannot continue to allow the fed to keep printing money out of fresh air to prop up a failing economy, at some point the bubble will burst just like during the last financial crisis in 08.
Economists are predicting 5 % inflation each year for the next five years.
I wonder what guys like you would do if we had a real crisis on our hands like a foreign military invasion…which has happened before in this country.
You would probably lock yourself up in a basement somewhere and wait till big brother said it was safe to come outside.
Where did I say I don’t care about the economy?
There are 62 million cases of covid world wide. Every single case history is relevant to policy decisions is an interesting and very expensive take if that is someones take.
So quick on the personal attack? Happy thnxgiving to you also.
Jeff , toughen up buttercup. Steve wasn’t unduly attacking you though he could be wrong as there are lots of other reasons to not put economy and rational decisions first. Are you going to melt at first feeling of attack ? ( in the 50s they would have called you ?) . He has some valid points and concerns. Besides nearly any one in Alaska has access to unbelievable quality medical care unless you choose not to receive it . Medicare, medicaid , WIC , community clinics based on finances and subsidized by grants , hospitals that law requires they provide care regardless of finances, cheap medical insurance based on finances, cheap care for cash pay , options go on and on . I had a close relative i nursed through corona recovery last spring. She had nearly no money and the hospitals spared no expense and once she was put into providence in anchorage for 3 -4weeks her care was unparalleled exception is Mayo Clinic. Specialist after specialist from all over the world applied themselves to her condition. ( her immune system attacked all her organs and she nearly died of sepsis and was unconscious during helicopter ride. cyclotene storm .) the doctors called me to say they expected her to be dead in minutes and by the grace of god and their attentive efforts they saved her life . the hospital got her enrolled in insurance and the whole crazy bill got paid with very little out of pocket expenses. Its damn nice here in America! . Happy thanksgiving is Right!
I think its past time we recognized the damage to social and cultural fabric lockdowns incur . The pros and cons are not being weighed rationally.
DPR,
I have been called a lot of things since the 60’s
some actually not deserved, but untough is not one of them. I once crawled out 25 miles with a broken femur over glaciated terrain because I was too “tough and stupid” to request help-just another week in a life full of mishaps with gravity.
My point is time in and time out again forum users use ad hominem attacks instead of
acknowledging and discussing different views. It is not very productive regardless of my so called toughness.
The medical attentions both in type and scope Don Young and Don Trump received are not readily available to the public. This is a fact. From there its conjecture.
Jeff you are right if ad hominem distracts from discussion. Sounds like you are one tough hombre and few could dream of what you did . My hats off to you . Yes different views should be acknowledged politely. Yes you are probably right- don and don probably have access to Premium Heath care . Better than most . Ours is pretty impressive though. So in short you are right.
An interesting aspect of the Don’s health care experiences is access to high level treatments before things turned towards the worst.
For most of us a helicopter is not awaiting if we test
positive.
Alaska just issued some advice on this level because ya
don’t want every citizen with Covid-19 show up at the hospital, but you also don’t want them to show up
and go straight onto a ventilator either.
eh my mom would claim am more stupid than tough-
but she also says Jeff you might be stupid but your not dumb so got me.
Jeff,
Maybe this will show you what “lockdowns” are doing to our country…
“Among the largest US companies that have already declared bankruptcy this year are 24 Hour Fitness, Advantage Rent A Car, Brooks Brothers, Chuck E. Cheese operator CEC Entertainment, GNC, Gold’s Gym, Hertz, JC Penney, J. Crew, Lucky Brand, Modell’s Sporting Goods, Neiman Marcus, Noble Corporation, The Paper Store, Pier 1 Imports, Stein Mart, and Tuesday Morning.
Most analysts expect that, if the pandemic does not abate, retailers and restaurants will continue to be among the hardest hit industries.” –Fidelity.com
Steve,
I never took you for a supporter of unbridled consumerism.
And please tell us more about the threat of “foreign military invasion…which has happened before in this country.” My history books tell me the last time that happened was WWII when the Japanese spent a little time out in the Aleutians (the furthest reaches of a US Territory), before that was the Mexican-American War (for some reason Mexico still thought Texas was theirs), and the War of 1812 (Great Britain was still upset over us declaring independence). Is Canada planning an invasion, Mexico and points beyond have been invading us for years but that isn’t a military invasion so much as an economic and population based invasion. Maybe you think China is going to send thousands and thousands of troop transports across the Pacific Ocean?
Pier one filed for bankruptcy 2-17-2020-it has been struggling for years.
how many others on your list were headed that way pre-covid? me too lazy to research.
that said am sure there are many privately owned restaurants that closed directly because of covid-19, but
restaurants are generally a very high risk venture.
I personally find them high risk places to eat-preferring to secure and cook my own food. The margarita halibut I cooked today was fn amazing. Just made a small marg
and poured it over the halibut filet with a dash of salt and black pepper. Added broccoli to the skittle to which the sauce caramelized on.
S.S,
Behind each of those corporate names are out of work employees,most lurching through a terrible year, to be sure.
But id also say that most of those names are/were overly indebted or weak business models to begin with.
Hertz’s debt problems predated the virus, how many street corner gyms can we support.JCP was going down the tubes anyways, because it couldn’t see societal tech trends changing.Sears finally rolled up here locally,Im sure you’ve seen the parking lot even when times were good(that used to be the old Walmart location a thriving surviving, changing tech juggernaut taking on Amazon,toe to toe.
Thats why I believe there should be more aid for workers, less so for corps.Hard times weed out the marginal business’s,but of course punish the employees.
GNC struggled for years, paid out 4 million in executive bonuses and then claimed bankruptcy the next day.
Japan attacked pear harbor, the Aleutians and tried to fire bomb the nw USA.
Great article and thought inducing perspective.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Another good article. We have so much, so much for which to be thankful. Thank you , Mr. Medred for your thoughtful writing week after week.
Crusty Old Curmudgeon grumbling over his turkey dinner: .. “prices through the roof!” .. mumbling.. “fish and game!” .. growling.. “taxes!” .. shouting .. “damn crazy drivers!” ..
Sassy Grandkid: “But Grandpa, be grateful! You’re lucky you weren’t born…”
Crusty Old Curmudgeon gesturing wildly: “Don’t give me that ‘lucky to be born here’ crap. We paid dearly. We sweated bullets and blood for this country, by God and we built …”
Sassy Grandkid interrupting: “No, Grandpa, I was gonna say, you’re lucky you weren’t born a dog.”
HAPPY THANKSGIVING, EVERYBODY!
Good laugh yc,
Things certainly could be worse for many,I wonder if this year will alter behavior in some way going forward.Or will we just forget the “year that was”.
Happy Tday