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Posts published in “Day: July 15, 2022”

“No worse than the flu”

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Not long after the United States recently reported its millionth death - one out of every 330 people - from the Covid-19 pandemic, Idaho is about to pass another milestone too: By the time you read this, likely 5,000 deaths of people in Idaho.

That and 470,457 - coming up on a half-million - cases, in a state with just over 1.8 million people.

And remember those numbers are probably very much on the low side. Many thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of cases never were reported. Some deaths were probably reported as happening from other causes.

The most regular reader comments I received when I wrote columns about the pandemic in the first half of 2020 was that it was no big deal. No worse than the flu, people said. All this masking and social distancing and shutting down of public places was just overwrought.

Wayne Hoffman of the Idaho Freedom Foundation was one of the prominent complainers: “before a single death was logged in Idaho, [Governor Brad] Little bowed to the opinion of fear-mongering newspaper editorialists, the likes of Rachel Maddow, and the health ‘experts’ who want to protect us to death. Little signed a confusing order this week that forces all Idahoans to stay at home. You can leave, but first you need to decipher about 22 pages of state and federal documents to conclude whether your job or activity is deemed essential or non-essential.”

The order was actually simple and straightforward, similar to what people around most of the country were managing, and it didn’t last very long - probably not as long as it should have. Hospitals were filling up (and that would get much worse later), and people were dying.

The numbers of people sickened by the pandemic, many of them hit by more dangerous strains than those active now, is astounding. When I think of Owyhee County (to cite one example) I think of a few small communities surrounded by wide open spaces, but so far 2,357 cases have been reported (in a county with grer than 12,000 people), and 53 people have died. That’s not a small problem.

We’re not done yet, but we’ve passed a good inflection point and this seems a reasonable time to take stock. 5,000 deaths of Idahoans is far more people than died at Pearl Harbor or 9/11 - almost as many as the two of them put together - and that would have seemed like a very big deal indeed if so many people weren’t wrapped up in cultural and political agendas dug in against doing anything useful to combat it.

The Idaho Capital Sun recently ran a good summing up of the impacts, and included this from Dr. Jim Souza of St. Luke’s Health System: “We have lost more than 1,100 life years … Can you imagine? For the people who say, ‘We all die some time,’ yes, we do. But these people didn’t need to die now, and they didn’t need to die like this. … Can you imagine all of the life and experiences contained within those 1,000-plus years? We shouldn’t trivialize that. These people deserve better.”

Was this pandemic a big deal? It sure was.

We can hope that most of this is now in the rear view mirror.

Conditions have changed, a lot, from two years ago. The newer variants of the virus still transmit effectively but generally seem much less dangerous than earlier iterations. We have vaccines now, and most of us have taken them, and in some cases used other useful steps to combat the illness. For some people masking still makes sense, but for many of us that’s probably not ordinarily needed. We can meet in public again much the way we used to without undue risk to ourselves or other people.

Great.

But - much as I hope it won’t happen - conditions can change again. And if they do, are we willing to sacrifice the lives of thousands more Idahoans … simply because no one can tell me I can’t do whatever I want …

And spread whatever diseases I please?