Honest Reality

The conversation happened more than thirty years ago. My friend, one of the three most honest men I’ve ever known, declared with Gospel-certainty, “We don’t know anyone” affected or infected by HIV/AIDS.

“Oh, wait,” interrupted his wife. “What about…? And then there’s…”  The list began to grow and, in a minute or two, included six or seven men and women – all within two degrees of separation. 

No man is an island,
Entire of itself.
Each is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thine own
Or of thine friend's were.
Each man's death diminishes me,
For I am involved in mankind.
Therefore, send not to know
For whom the bell tolls,
It tolls for thee.
John Donne (1572 - 1631)

Dr. Lorna M. Breen was the medical director of the emergency department at New York-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, dedicated to the care of her patients dying in shattering numbers as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, and the physicians, nurses, technicians, cleaning staffs and EMTs who also cared for them.

“She tried to do her job, and it killed her,” reported Dr. Philip C. Breen, her father.

Even after she was infected and isolated at home, Dr. Lorna maintained constant contact with her staff – trying desperately to protect her doctors and nurses, despite an onslaught of patients, some of whom were dying before they could be taken out of ambulances. 

After her week-and-a-half battle with COVID, Dr. Lorna returned to work, until the hospital sent her home again and her family intervened to bring her home to Charlottesville. Dr. Lorna died by suicide on Sunday, April 26.

“She was truly in the trenches of the front line… She tried to do her job, and it killed her. Make sure she’s praised as a hero because she was. She’s a casualty just as much as anyone else who has died” insisted her father. 

Before the United States marks the two-hundred and forty-fourth anniversary of the Declaration all men and women “are created equal and endowed by their Creator with  certain inalienable rights,” almost five-thousand more Americans of all ages, races  and social conditions, of all religions and none will die of the novel Corona-19 virus than died in the War of Independence (1775-1783), the War of 1812 (1812-1815) the Mexican American War (1846-1848),  the Korean War (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1964-1975), terrorist attacks (2001), and the wars in Afghanistan (since 2001) and Iraq (2003-2010) combined.

By the closing days of May 2020, almost 300 American health care workers had died – according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention – and more than 60,000 health care workers had been infected. 

During one week in early June, 30% to 50% of meatpacking employees were absent from work – posing a challenge to an industry still struggling to restore normal supplies nationwide. The fact that the world’s biggest meat companies have become epidemic centers – in no small part because of the absence of social distancing on processing lines and the closeness of workers’ living conditions when they leave the plant – has contributed to skyrocketing meat prices. At least 15 counties that are homes to major meatpacking facilities were reporting higher infection rates – on a per capital basis – than New York City at the height of its Coronavirus crisis. 

When one meatpacker reopened with limited operations on June 3 – after having been closed for almost a month, despite the president’s order to reopen as an “essential” industry, the company reported 591 workers – 26% of its workforce – tested positive and the surrounding county had one of the nation’s highest infection rates – 1,257 – a 500 percent increase over the past two weeks.

The spillover of the epidemic disaster swept over America’s grocery stories with ever increasing meat prices and destroying small farms. Mike Patterson, a hog farmer from Kenyon, Minnesota, reported that, because of closed processing plants, the cooperative of 12 family farms to which he belongs raises 150,000 hogs each year but was forced to euthanize 3,4000 pigs – costing more than $500,000 in lost revenue. This after the coronavirus resulted in more than 18,000 positive cases and 73 deaths among meat processing plant workers. 

[There is a narrow window of time (or weight) – between 300 and 350 pounds – during which pigs can be effectively processed in most plants, and they typically gain 15-20 pounds a week. A long-term closure of plants due to the virus also affects farmers.]

As the coronavirus spread through U.S. slaughterhouses, where workers perform some of the most dangerous jobs in the country, the Department of Agriculture was giving permission for chicken processors to boost speeds on production lines by 25%. Poultry processing plants, with workers essentially shoulder to shoulder, and returning to crowded homes after working for hourly wages and afraid to take time off if they are sick, are a breeding ground for the virus – in their factories and their communities.  In April, one Delaware chicken processing company was forced to kill nearly two million chickens because so many of its workers had been sidelined by illness or coronavirus related quarantine.

One week before “the Nation’s Birthday,” The New York Times reported the virus has infected more than 282,000 people in 12,000 nursing homes and other long-term care facilities for older adults. More troubling, at least 54,000 deaths of residents and staff in those same facilities represented 43 percent of all U.S. COVID-19 deaths. 

Infections among Latinos, who are not a single unitary group, have outpaced the rates of other Americans and studies now indicate that communities with higher percentages of Hispanics have disproportionately higher rates of infections – with Latinos accounting for 34 percent of cases nationwide, despite representing only 18 percent of the population. In part, the disproportionate rates may reflect the difficulty of “sheltering in place” for members of large and extended Latino families in which members work - frequently at minimum wages - in industries that never shut down and factories that are especially crowded. 

By mid-June, the Centers for Disease Control was reporting that Covid-19 “disproportionally” affects racial and ethnic minorities, as well as older people and those with underlying health conditions. 

Between March 31 and April 21 – three weeks – thirteen Emergency Medical Service providers from around New Jersey died of COVID-19 and hundreds of others had fallen sick with COVID-19 symptoms – resulting in staff shortages and forcing some local squads to temporarily drop services.

The Cato Institute has listed 73 private grade and high schools that permanently closed  between March 18 and June 20 including: St. Francis Academy Bally, PA (opened 1743), St. Rose in Chelsea, MA (opened 1871), Lebanon Catholic, Lebanon, PA, (opened 1851) and Institute of Notre Dame (opened 1847). The 73 schools represent a total enrollment of almost 10,000 students. The transfer cost to public school systems nationwide will approximate $150 million, according to the Washington-based libertarian organizations.

Boston’s Public Radio WPUR reported, “With the COVID-19 pandemic sapping disposable income for many low- to moderate income families,… private religious education could be on the verge of the biggest collapse in recent memory….”

A traditional rite of passage – Spring Break and family summer tours of the nation’s colleges and universities – evaporated and many members of the Class of 2024 will see their future alma mater for the first time when they move into their single-person-‘cause-of-COVID-19-and-social-distancing dorm rooms. Community colleges nationwide are anticipating that upward of 90% of classes – excluding science labs and small numbers of courses that absolutely demand “in person” contacts – will be offered online – at least in the Fall semester and a majority of colleges and universities are anticipating more compact semesters. 

In the 2017-2018 academic year, there were approximately 4,298 degree-granting postsecondary institutions (colleges and universities). The coronavirus may cause more than a handful of small liberal arts colleges to cancel classes forever. MacMurray College in Jacksonville, Illinois closed in May after 174 years. San Francisco Art Institute and Notre Dame de Namur University, also located in the San Francisco Bay Area, will no longer admit students.

And it is critical to recognize that the COVID-19 is not simply a respiratory disease that is “going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle, it will disappear” sometime during the summer. While, a vaccine may be a year or more away and some therapeutics have been or are being developed, the consequences of the virus may last twenty, thirty or forty years – in the emotional traumas suffered by physicians, nurses, caregivers and others; in the unresolved mourning of families who said their final goodbyes through cellphones held by empathic nurses; and in medical conditions that may last a lifetimes. 

COVID patients can experience blood clotting disorders leading to strokes, and extreme inflammations that attack neurological systems, resulting in headaches, dizziness, seizures, confusion and loss of taste and/or smell.

Intensive care unit and ventilated patients may need extensive periods of rehabilitation and therapy to regain mobility and strength. No one yet knows for how long some patients will experience breathing problems or persistent fatigue.  

Mental health specialists are only beginning to understand the long term – PTSD-like – consequences of prolonged ICU hospitalizations and ventilations – in settings in which the lights are never turned down, the whirls of medical devices are rarely silenced, and death – perhaps in beds on either side of the surviving patent – is omnipresent. Some of these traumas – perhaps many of these traumas – will never “disappear… like a miracle” or “fade away.”

And one example of the invisible unmedical consequences of the epidemic is the hundreds of thousands – millions - of Americans who have lost their jobs and are facing bankruptcies and homelessness when they can no longer afford rents and mortgages.  

REMEMBER: If you are diagnosed with COVID-19 – perhaps even if you remain forever asymptomatic but simply test positive for the antibodies, without protections for folks with “preexisting conditions” insurance companies may determine that you have a “preexisting condition” that will disqualify you for insurance or place you in an unaffordably high rate class.

“We are now having 40-plus thousand new cases a day.
I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day
if this does not turn around. And so I am very concerned.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci
June 30, 2020

From Isaiah to Malachi, including Hosea and Micah, the role of the prophet was never to foretell the distant future. The prophet examined the “signs of the time” – the social and moral conditions of the world and community in which he lived. He then retired – not from the world but to pray and reflect, attempting to understand the Will of God regarding those signs of the time. Finally, the prophet emerged to declare the Will of God to a self-centered, recalcitrant world.

The Prophet Micah succinctly summarizes the prophetic message:

This alone, my child, does the Lord ask of you. This alone:
To act justly, to love tenderly, and to walk humbly with your God.
Micah 6:8

Almost 2,700 years later, we can hear the Prophet.

Thus says the Lord:
There is no vaccine. There will be no vaccine any time soon.
Even without symptoms you can spread the virus and kill the vulnerable - 
your friends, classmates, parents and grandparents.
You don’t have a right to endanger others for your convenience,
for your vanity, or as a political statement.
Wear a mask and be prepared to wear masks for the next year or more.
Social distance and be prepared to social distance for a year or more.
To do less is a sin against the Lord, your God, and His People.