Grief and astounding courage in the age of Covid
BEFORE the novel coronavirus, people typically decided whether to fly or drive to a destination based on factors such as price and travel time.
Now, months into the pandemic, the debate over whether to fly or drive has more to do with safety than plane ticket prices. People are still conflicted about travelling. Can you stay healthy on a plane? Are road trips safe? Is one option better than the other?
“There’s really no such thing as safe travel,” said Allison Walker, a senior epidemiologist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) travellers’ health branch.
“Whether you’re driving or flying, there may be health concerns because of a variety of factors. Different modes of transportation have different risks,” she said. “When you have people in close proximity and you’re not doing social distancing, if people aren’t wearing masks or people don’t have access to hand-washing, all of those things are risk factors.”
When asked whether there was a lesser of two evils, Walker said both were equally pressing, “because if you’re spreading it, someone else is getting it”. Should you weigh the risk of travel and decide on a journey nonetheless, Walker said to follow the recommended travel precautions.
“It’s about doing what you can to stay 1.8m apart, to wash your hands, to wear your face coverings,” she said. “And also just to be aware that if you or someone you’ve loved is at higher risk of severe illness, that you really want to protect yourself and others because people can get very sick.”
Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, acknowledged the best practice for avoiding coronavirus was to maintain physical distancing and avoid interacting in groups with new people.
“But it’s also important to be able to maintain your mental health,” she said. “And part of that is trying to take some time off and maybe going somewhere other than your house.” She realised anyone with a semblance of wanderlust was trying to figure out the safest way to indulge it.
Watson said that for those who were travelling, she thought driving was a “much safer” choice than flying.
“You’re only in the car by yourself or with family who you are probably in residence with anyway,” she said. “And you have minimal interactions with people when you stop to get fuel or get food, if you go through the drive-through. Those are pretty minimal risks to take.”
However, Watson said, over the past few months there had been new evidence that showed coronavirus transmission has been very limited on planes. “We think that part of the
COVID-19 hit home hard this week.
There we were, two of the dogs and I, intertwined on the couch having a mid-saturday zizz, when the phone rang.
It was my sister, Janet, so distraught I couldn’t hear what she was saying. It finally penetrated.
Her husband, Sean, and my beloved brother (in-law), was dead.
It wasn’t Covid-19; he had a massive heart attack out of the blue, while driving home from the vet with his daughter, Tyane.
Jan and Sean had been married more than 30 years, and I had known him from school days in the mid ’80s.
Ironically, last week’s column involved mortality and a lament that people with scientific superpowers often did not live to see the results of their explorations.
Sean’s superpower was as a people magnet. His friends were from everywhere, and he made them all feel they were his best friend. He was happy, (but, say his girls, Tyane and Max, sometimes reason for that is the high level of air recirculation and filtration on planes. But still, you would be in close contact with many other people who you don’t know for prolonged periods of time, so I think it is still safer to drive.”
Should you still decide to fly, Watson said, the risk could be minimised by wearing face coverings throughout your trip and keeping a safe distance as much as possible. Ideally, travellers would be able to avoid being within 1.8m of someone for more than 15 minutes (that 15-minute time frame is based on the CDC’S practices around contact tracing), especially without a face covering. While airlines are taking measures such as requiring passengers to wear masks or not filling middle seats, keeping 1.8m away from anyone else for extended periods was likely to present a challenge.
“There are fewer flights, we’ve all seen those pictures of people kind of crammed in on a flight. That could happen, and you could be stuck sitting on a plane that is full capacity for an extended period of time.”
Robert Quigley, senior vice president and global medical director at the risk mitigation company International SOS, said he understood people were eager to travel again, but he still recommended people only travel when necessary at this time.
“By physically moving regions, you are not only exposing yourself to a larger population who may be
LINDSAY SLOGROVE grumpy), enormously kind, thoughtful and giving.
His wit was second to none, and any sad face was a personal affront to him. You had to at least groan at some of his quips. His potato salads were legendary.
His kindness was mirrored by a man, who only identified himself as Checkers 60, who stopped at the roadside, where the car had been steered, and helped Tyane to administer CPR.
It was not only kind – in the age of Covid-19, he was extraordinarily courageous. infected, but you also run the risk of exposing a larger population should you be an asymptomatic carrier,” Quigley said.
He warned that road trips and air travel carried their own risks. “Both have their challenges, but I think the one you can control a little better is the motor vehicle as opposed to the plane,” he said.
While HEPA (high-efficiency particulate air) filters on commercial aircraft can capture more than 99% of air impurities, which cover respiratory droplets, they were not perfect since they did not cover free viral particles, Quigley said. For people driving, Quigley recommended doing significant research and planning. He warned that even when driving, travellers would encounter all manner of hazards in the form of fuel pumps, doorknobs and other areas that see high traffic.
“I think that there’s no better time than now to really do your homework,” he said. “Where am I going, how many km/l do I get, where do I stop, do I need gloves to go into that place, where can I eat?”
He said it was important for travellers to figure out where they would stop to sleep during a long trip, find the hotels in that area and call around to ask what practices they used to mitigate coronavirus transmission.
Carlos del Rio, executive dean at Emory University School of Medicine, feelt comfortable about flying during
When I got Jan’s call, my very first instinct was to grab the car keys and rush to be with my family, who I haven’t seen since lockdown in March.
But our Covid-19 reality reared up. Jan and I are over 50 and have underlying conditions that make us vulnerable.
For so many millions of people around the world, death has carried more pain than it normally does. Covid-19 alone has claimed more than 1 million lives. That’s a million “groups” of family and friends who could not be near the person they loved to offer comfort as they died, nor with others who were feeling the same pain and loss.
People mourning deaths from other causes are also locked away from any succour they may have gleaned in the company of fellow mourners.
We have had to make do with Facetime, Whatsapps, emojis and calls. No hugs or tears on each others’ shoulders.
Grieving in isolation is so, well, the pandemic, and believed airlines had done enough to keep passengers safe. “I think my biggest concern flying is honestly when people start eating their snacks and taking their masks off,” he said.
For those flying, Del Rio recommended wearing an N95 mask if possible, as well as protective eyewear.
Marc Lipsitch, the director of Harvard’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said there was some evidence that coronavirus transmission could happen on an airplane. For road trips, he noted there were different safety considerations to keep in mind depending on how you were taking them.
“Regarding road trips, there is nothing inherently dangerous about travel with a household group in a car,” he said. “Travel by bus in particular may be a more concentrated exposure to a poorly ventilated and dense environment.”
One’s destination for a road trip was another cause of concern to Lipsitch.
“Given the heterogeneity in the epidemic across the country, there is of course the risk of going from a low-transmission to a high-transmission community and thus increasing one’s exposure,” he said.
Lipsitch no longer considered hotels or motels a significant risk, as the evidence for transmission from objects remained close to non-existent. weird. When you don’t live in the same place, and lockdown has kept you apart for months, there is no immediate “gap” in your life.
These come at startling moments when anything reminds you of the person who is gone: then it hits you all over again – they’re really gone forever.
Nothing prepares people for the pain of loss. All of us must make sure preventable deaths, like Covid19, are minimised.
Just because we are frustrated, angry and “over” the virus, it’s not going away.
We have to learn to live with it, and care enough about each other that we will do whatever it takes, no matter how irritating or painful it may be, to protect ourselves, people we love, and absolute strangers.
And be grateful the world has people like Checkers 60 in it.
Thank you for trying, sir.
Slogrove is the Independent on Saturday news editor
IT STARTED with a scripture reading and a prayer – and ended with a police van being upended and torched. More than 1 000 people turned up to protest at Senekal, in eastern Free State, earlier this week, ostensibly to show support for the family of Brendin Horner, the young farm foreman who was beaten to death and then strung up on a pole last Friday.
The murder of people on farms is scandalous. Almost always unimaginably cruel – although Horner’s murder plumbed deeper depths than before – they have become a rallying cry for the white right wing and an increasing problem for the Ramaphosa administration, whose response is an ostrich-like denial.
Keeping quiet just plays into the hands of the unrehabilitated racists.
We saw that in the spin that was put on the Senekal protest afterwards, the lynch mob that tried to break into the cells and get to the two suspects. The same “minority” that posed for pictures atop and alongside the overturned police van – before it was torched.
We saw in the fevered conspiracy theories that the white anger in Senekal was justified because of police complicity in local stock theft syndicates – conveniently ignoring that many in the crowd weren’t farmers or from the local community. Some of the protesters weren’t even white.
Forgetting too, the alacrity with which the police had arrested two suspects.
We saw that in the Trumpian demonisation of “Mainstream Media (MSM) on social media, blithely ignoring the real journalists covering the actual protest on the ground, not somewhere else retweeting social media.
We saw that in the “whataboutism” that followed; that the mob should be forgiven because they had been failed by a systemically racist system because white lives don’t matter – yet conveniently whitewashing (sic) the gender-based violence against MSM journalists in Senekal.
If the protesters did get one thing right, it’s that Bheki Cele must fall.
Not because of his appalling attitude at a recent meeting with Kwazulu-natal farmers, but because he is heroically inept at his job – unless you are one of the several hundred thousand people arrested for breaking lockdown earlier his year.
His officers still have not arrested Senzo Meyiwa’s killers – or Markus Jooste.
In fairness, at least one person has been arrested for Tuesday’s mayhem. The people who torched the police van though, should be put away, like Kanya Cekeshe, for at least the next two years.
We are one people with one law, irrespective of what some political leaders would have us believe.
Indeed, the “Opportunist-inchief”, fresh from his victory at Clicks, has called up his “fighters” for the next court appearance, fittingly pitting one set of racists against another.
The only solution to all of this is to apply the rule of law, consistently and continuously.
Murdered white farmers are a statistically minute part of our murder rate, but that doesn’t make them less dead. It might be politically expedient, but it is deeply unethical and beyond callous for politicians to ignore their deaths.
The sad truth is that the system hasn’t failed whites, it’s failing South Africans – every single one of us.
Ritchie is a media consultant, journalist and a former newspaper editor