By Ken Stern 

Our COVID-19 winter

From the editor —

 

December 16, 2020



As spring dawned, the coronavirus pandemic exploded on the scene. This paper’s first COVID-19 editorial, “Taking flattening the curve seriously,” was dated March 25.

Additional editorials on the pandemic have followed. Early on, some saw the massive change wrought in society and postulated the possibility of “a new normal,” a paradigm shift directing us toward a more just and sustainable future.

Alas, the resulting disruption to the old normal, the everyday routine of work, school and socializing threw our society in general, and many of us and our neighbors in particular, into a ditch.

The wrenching halt to habit and, too often income, combined with mostly far off regional and national news of abstract numbers, the sheer quantity of cases, the ceaseless rise in infections and deaths, resulted most commonly in COVID fatigue.

Now it is the end of a year of the largest crisis in our lives, as individuals, families, communities, statewide, nationally and globally.

After nine months, we are not near a new normal. No, too often it seems we are worn down, worn out and stuck in our ways..

That tiredness has invited a dark winter. Since we are not pulling together in common cause, we seek friends and family. People did not heed public health warnings to not travel or gather at Thanksgiving. The experts were right: being close together spreads the disease. In response, Gov. Jay Inslee has again imposed restrictions and then extended them into January.

Winter is cold and wet and forces people indoors, together. There are reasons it is called the flu season. The flu is a virus, a virus lingering from the 1918 pandemic. That is true.

Christmas is upon us. People travel. Our economic structure demands we shop. If folks, individually, as families, friends and communities have not learned Thanksgiving’s lesson, the holiday cheer many seek will turn into a new year’s hell of hospitalizations, surging case counts and deaths.

Your newspaper’s purpose is to present the news, analyze it and encourage the community to make good decisions to advance individual and collective futures. It does not create or prevent bad news. If there is controversy and conflict that is because readers have differing assessments of life around us.

The definition of public health is the health of the community. Prevention reduces risk and saves lives. On an airplane everyone fastens their seatbelts. On a boat, everyone wears a life vest. A mask saves your neighbor, your sister, your grandmother. Staying apart saves your friends.

This might be the last COVID-19 editorial of the year. It will not be the last of the pandemic. If editorials saved lives, they would be on the front page, both to be read and for making news because they worked. But editorials cannot make you do anything but think and maybe feel empathy. They promote a better future but the readers, citizens of their community, have to decide to journey there together.

That is where I am bound. I hope we travel together.

 

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