Loving our families to death

Ihave the informed impression that the Imperial Valley may soon be in the forefront of both the Trump administration’s new push for herd immunity from COVID-19 and the deadly consequences of that push.

I asked some of my students recently if their families had any plans to do things differently for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve/Day this year, whether there were plans to have no gatherings, tiny gatherings or at least have the gatherings and meals outdoors. Few of my students indicated their families planned to take different approaches to the holidays this year. They mostly shrugged, indicating that things would proceed in their households and families as they had in the past, COVID concerns be damned.

When I pointed out this may mean serious illness or death to their family members, particularly those who are old or have underlying conditions such as obesity, diabetes and asthma, which are huge issues here in the Valley, they shrugged again, as if to say we’re going to do what we’re going to do, because we need to be with their families over the holidays the way we always have.

Yes, we are family-oriented folks to the extreme in the Imperial Valley, and while that is almost always a good thing, getting together for the holidays this year is the exception.

At the start of the pandemic I expressed distress in this publication about how people were reacting to it in the Valley, how people were still freely moving about, mostly unmasked: shopping, playing soccer in parks, going in and out of each other’s homes, even having large parties. I said I believed this meant the Imperial Valley was going to get hit disproportionately hard by COVID-19 in coming weeks and months.

For that I was called -- in emails, on social media and on these pages -- an elitist who was out of touch with locals because I could work from home and order items over the internet, a pessimist who looked at the world through a darkened lens, and someone who was just jealous that I wasn’t being invited to those neighborhood parties during the pandemic.

I received few if any apologies when what I prognosticated turned out to be correct in subsequent months. Valley hospitals were overwhelmed within weeks by COVID-19 patients. Our infection and death rates were among the highest in the country. Because of hospital overcrowding, many Valley patients were shipped to hospitals around California. A field hospital was set up at Imperial Valley College to deal with the overflow of patients. The Imperial Valley finally made the national news regularly, but it was because we were an extreme COVID death zone.

I don’t mean to again be an elitist, a pessimist or a party-pooper, but I think local hospitals need to be ready for an onslaught of patients starting soon after Thanksgiving and well into February. That’s because families in the Valley are going to get together for the holidays no matter the threat. Most are not going to have smaller get-togethers or celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas in their back yards, because that’s just not what they do. Some will say it is too cold to do such affairs outside, as many Valley residents consider anything below 65 degrees absolutely frigid.

And because we have many old, obese, diabetic and asthmatic folks in the Valley, many such people will get terribly sick and many will die in the weeks and months after because they got together for holidays. It’s that simple.

I have heard countless Valley residents say they “love their family members to death.” If Valley residents insist on having large, indoor, generally unsafe gatherings for the holidays, loving their family members to death is exactly what they’ll be doing.