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SURVIVING THE PANDEMIC: Louise Bernikow: “In September, I will be 80 years old.” It means: In September, I will be here, alive.”
By
Published: May 02, 2020
Category:
Pandemic: Dispatches and Essentials
QUOTE OF THE DAY: MATTHEW 25:31-46
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’”
WHY THE WORST MAY BE AHEAD OF US: PRISONS, MEAT PACKING PLANTS AND NURSING HOMES
Gina Neff is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute and an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She studies innovation, the digital transformation of industries, and how new technologies impact work. Her book, “Self-Tracking,” focuses on the practices and politics of using consumer technologies to track health and other everyday personal metrics. This is her most recent mini-lecture — April 30 — on Twitter and here.
The 10 biggest clusters of infection in the US are not high-flying international gatherings. The 10 biggest clusters are not rich people going to Europe. The 10 biggest clusters are not from airplanes or conferences or fancy birthday parties. They are NOT from outsiders. That Biogen conference in Boston? 88th on the list (and an outlier). Cruises? Diamond Princess is 99th on the list.
One meat packing plant in South Dakota ALONE is responsible for more than 1,000 Coronavirus cases in the US.
The Smithfield “plant also offered a $500 “responsibility bonus” to workers who DIDN’T MISS A SHIFT in the month of April.” The LAST thing you want in a global pandemic is employers paying their workers to come in sick.
Many nursing home workers in the US must work at multiple homes to make ends meet. Again, that’s the LAST thing you want in a global pandemic.
The CDC learned this in early MARCH.
At the first worst cluster in the US, a nursing home outside of Seattle, staff
1) worked while symptomatic
2) worked in more than one facility
3) did not have safety training/ adherence
4) had “inadequate supplies of PPE and other items (e.g., alcohol-based hand sanitizer)”
We ALL pay for these workplace decisions. For everyone to be safe, we must protect everyone.
That’s the story to fight this virus. You might not like it.
For everyone to be safe, we must protect everyone. Not just rich. Or citizens. Or white people. Or voters. Or the able bodied. Or the young. Or people who can wfh.
Protect everyone means adequate (PPE) for our frontline workers. Protect everyone means the whistleblowers who call out unsafe working conditions. Protect everyone means everyone who is sick can stay home. And paying them to.
Protect everyone means criminals, the elderly, immigrants.
We absolutely have to improve conditions in prisons, nursing homes and meat packing plants to before we can return to “normal.”
Otherwise, we are going to have tragic recurrences of clusters of coronavirus cases.
The lesson: you can’t beat this virus without taking care of your most vulnerable workers.
You can’t beat this virus without taking care of the most vulnerable PEOPLE in society. That’s the tragic lesson coming out of the US. And the UK.
You can’t beat this virus without addressing the potential differential impact of coronavirus on racial and ethnic minorities. We need more evidence, but early indications are terrifying.
Public health has always known the truth. The care of the most marginalized members of society is important for fighting infectious diseases.
CAPITOL PHYSICIAN SAYS SENATE LACKS CAPACITY TO TEST ALL SENATORS
from Politico: The Capitol physician told Republican staffers the Senate lacks the capacity to test all 100 senators when it comes back Monday. Instead the Senate will test people who are sick. Test will take 2+ days.
Monahan said test results in the Senate will take two or more days, while the White House has rapid testing.
Roughly half the senators are 65 or older and at increased risk for the coronavirus.
MEANWHILE, AT THE WHITE HOUSE, THERE’S A 5-MINUTE TEST
From the Washington Post: Trump Uses White House Events To Project Return To Normalcy While Relying On Testing That Public Lacks
Trump, Vice President Pence and their aides are tested regularly, and all who enter the White House campus to meet with them are required to undergo on-site rapid tests developed by Abbott Laboratories, which provide results within 15 minutes.
Abbott, which is producing 50,000 tests per day, began shipping supplies to the White House last week, though a spokesman for the company declined to say how many of the kits were sent.
TARA READE VS. JOE BIDEN
from USA Today:
A state and federal prosecutor with 28 years of experience weighs in.
WHO WAS THAT UNMASKED MAN? DAVID LETTERMAN ON MIKE PENCE’S VISIT TO THE MAYO CLINIC
This is particularly a thorn in my side because he used to be the governor of Indiana. I had nothing to do with that.
If you’re going to the Mayo Clinic because you have [the virus], you really have it. You’re not going up there because you like the turn down service.
And [Pence] goes up there—and he takes time off from his gig as a mannequin—and he’s walking around without a mask taunting these poor people who are bedridden and wearing a mask. To me, that is just taunting people who are ill, to see that guy walking around in his $40 suit walking around in the Mayo Clinic without a mask.
Pence’s next visit was to a GM ventilator plant. He wore a mask. Because… people are a second priority.
GUEST BUTLER LOUISE BERNIKOW: “IN SEPTEMBER, I WILL BE 80 YEARS OLD.” IT MEANS: IN SEPTEMBER, I WILL BE HERE, ALIVE.
Louise Bernikow, friend of decades, is a quadruple threat: feminist historian, journalist, lecturer, dog-lover.
Note the date: June, 1946. Kindergarten. Teachers in the background and rows of Jewish 5-year-olds in the Bronx, many looking, to me, haunted. Refugees, probably, though there was no mention, then or for many years after, of what they sought refuge from — the Holocaust.
“You’re an American girl,” my parents said. Nothing to worry about. That’s in Europe.
This American girl in the picture is well combed, dressed, fed and staring directly into the camera. She has a hanky in her pocket. Can you find her?
Spring 2020. The girl in the picture has managed to build a life she loves, surviving, as Virginia Woolf urged, by her wits. Her first book is a hit; decades later, Stephen Spielberg uses that Soviet spy story in a film. When feminism saturates her world, she swerves to books and essays about women, politics and history. Her work is contrary, against the grain of received wisdom, filling gaps. From time to time, she performs literary ventriloquism, ghostwriting other people’s stories. The life she makes includes friends and comrades all over the world and men she has loved, some flippantly, some fiercely. For the Centennial of women’s right to vote, this very year, she is constructing a piece of street theater.
Then comes the new Holocaust. From Europe, again, but being an American girl, well fed, well dressed, does not exempt me. Everything stops. No libraries open for research. No live conferences or talks or political strategizing. In New York City and alone in lockdown, hug-less, kiss-less, unsexed, I am face to face with myself and my computer screen. To Zoom, I comb my hair. I cannot see ahead. The only words I find are about boosterism for our besieged city, grief for the fallen, gratitude for angels bearing goods and gifts to my door. The world out there is, as my parents believed, a dangerous place. In here, I make scratch marks representing likes and grins and tears on other people’s Facebook postings.
A sentence arrives, one I never imagined writing: “In September, I will be eighty years old.” It means: In September, I will be here, alive. I will have survived. I type that sentence above the kindergarten photograph, not knowing why, and enter on the screen the names of some friends, asking them to save the date. It means: In September, you will be here, alive. You and I will have been saved. We will do something. I’m hoping for a parade or even a quiet toast and an exchange of knowing looks. We will look haunted.
The cursor blinks. Clicking “send” is my first big act of hope. Can you find it?
TODAY’S POEM
James Tate, “Man with Wooden Leg Escapes Prison”
Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught.
They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day
he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river
to get to the field where he must work all day on
one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas
Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t
want it. His escape is all planned. It requires
only one leg.
TODAY’S MUSIC, SPANISH GUITAR… AND THEN SOME
THE MOVIE TO STREAM: “SHOPLIFTERS”
Instant classic? Masterpiece? Yes. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film is about a family… sort of. If I told you the plot, it wouldn’t help, because it doesn’t feel as if you’re watching a story about the family of shoplifters taking in a crying little kid and what happens next. It’s more like you’re watching these people live. And, with each scene, you see a little more how they are with one another and what the relationships mean. And then…. there’s something that you might have picked up along the way, but you didn’t, and suddenly there’s a reframing of the story. With one shot — a woman’s face, seeing someone for what she knows will be the last time — I’ll never forget. I saw “Shoplifters” with an audience that was 99% Japanese. Their rapt attention told me we were seeing the same movie: a masterpiece. [To buy the DVD or stream the film from Amazon, click here.]
ESSENTIALS AND DISPATCHES
Everything, all in one place.
UPDATE: EO Hand Soap is available again.
UPDATE: I spoke with a NYC lung specialist. He endorses Vitamin D, but warns you not to double/triple dose. In large doses, Vitamin D becomes toxic.
