Did I miss the end of COVID?
“Sleepless in Seattle” is as unavoidable around Valentine’s Day as naked cherubs flying recklessly with sharp sticks.
The 1993 film is on basic cable, Amazon, iTunes, even on the big screen at Edmund Town Hall in Newtown. For most people, the movie conjures images of the leads finally meeting in a last scene that could have been sponsored by Kleenex.
For me, though, it’s a journalism movie with a feminist subtext.
The Baltimore Sun features writer played by Meg Ryan (who grew up in Fairfield and Bethel) challenges two male colleagues clinging to the fake news that “it’s easier to be killed by a terrorist than it is to get married over 40.”
“There is practically a whole book about how that statistic is not true,” Ryan’s character, Annie Reid, fires back. “Did you even read that book?”
“Did anybody read that book all the way through?” one of the men counters.
The book — Susan Faludi’s “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” — goes uncredited. It doesn’t need to be named because it shows up in early 1990s Zeitgeist more than “Whoomp! (There It Is)” and that newfangled World Wide Web. It has cameos in everything from Demi Moore’s film “Indecent Proposal” to the comic strip “Brenda Starr.”
About the only thing that showed up even more often was that myth about women being unable to marry after a certain age.
I was walking back to the Stamford Advocate’s newsroom with a colleague about 20 years ago when we paused to check out a table of used books for sale. I held up a copy of “Backlash.” My fellow journalist recognized it immediately, but had never read even the first pages.
So I started reading aloud, which he responded to like it was a magic trick. Faludi traces the foundation of her 550-page bible of late-20th century feminism to a single news article.
“Valentine’s Day 1986 was coming up, and at the Stamford
Advocate, it was reporter Lisa Marie Petersen’s turn to produce that year’s story on Cupid’s slings and arrows. Her ‘angle,’ as she recalls later, would be ‘Romance: Is It In or Out?’ She went down to the Stamford Town Center mall and interviewed a few men shopping for flowers and chocolates. Then she put in a call to the Yale sociology department, ‘Just to get some kind of foundation,’ she says. ‘You know, something to put in the third paragraph.’ ”
The subsequent article is a textbook example of daily journalism as the first draft of history. Yale and Harvard were collaborating on a study that suggested unwed college-educated women at 30 had a 20 percent chance of getting married, a figure that dropped to 5 percent by age 35.
The story went viral. In 1986, pre-www speak, that means it was rewritten by the Associated Press and distributed around the globe. Faludi traces its journey to front pages, talk shows, greeting cards, the small screen’s “Designing Women” and the big screen’s “Fatal Attraction.”
It got Faludi’s attention when it landed in a Newsweek cover article. She debunked the data and exposed the media’s insatiable thirst to marginalize women. She quoted Petersen, who lit the fuse, explaining that “We usually just take anything from good schools. If it’s a study from Yale, we just put it in the paper.”
Faludi was writing another revised draft of history. Having worked as an editor on the Harvard student paper, she didn’t hesitate to challenge Ivy League data.
I bought the used copy of
“Backlash” and brought it back to the newsroom. Whenever I need to offer a cautionary tale of accepting “facts” at face value, I take it off the shelf.
Thirty-six years later, the original story is far more measured than its offspring. It’s nestled along the bottom of the front page, below news about Chrysler Chairman Lee Iacocca, cyanidelaced Tylenol in neighboring Westchester County and local urban renewal initiatives.
Petersen notes up front that the report was not yet released, and resists the tortured hyperbole of subsequent publications by merely stating that women had “a slim chance of tying the knot” as they grew older.
The study is just one piece of the article, which bears the bizarre headline “They’re fallin’ in love again, say marriage counselors.”
Clearly, someone at the AP barked “Rewrite!”
In today’s kinetic news cycle, the story probably wouldn’t have lingered long enough for an outlet to wait a full four months to weigh in. Newsweek’s “Too Late for Prince Charming?” feature that June bungled its second draft of history, even creating the wince-worthy “terrorist” crack. It doesn’t even carry the weight of its own reasoning, which suggests a ludicrously high 2.6 percent of the population is killed by terrorists on a regular basis.
In pointing to a “man shortage,” Newsweek ignored both Census data and the reality that not all woman want a male partner.
Newsweek did own up to its 3,000-word error (which carried the names of six contributors) by retracting the story 20 years (not a typo — that’s twenty) years later. I like to think it gave the last laugh to Nora Ephron, who wrote and directed “Sleepless in Seattle.” Ephron offered her talents to the magazine when she was starting out in 1962, only to be told “Women don’t become writers at Newsweek.” She worked there instead as a “mail girl” until becoming a general assignment reporter for the New York Post.
Faludi paid her dues as a reporter as well. Eight months after the Valentine’s Day misfire in 1986, her byline makes its only appearance in the Advocate on the fluffiest of wire stories, a Q-and-A with Miss Manners showing “she was hip to the times by releasing her first video on how to arrange the perfect wedding.”
She kept taking notes until “Backlash” hit the shelves in 1991, a primal scream of a book that still needs to be heard.
I think of it a lot this time of year. Over the past several days, my inbox has been pinging with pitches to do stories about Connecticut’s most romantic getaways, top Valentine’s gifts and fave rom-coms. They just become pink noise.
Here’s one: “In Connecticut, fewer people are getting married. Our team of analysts found that the marriage rate in Connecticut has dropped by 33% since 2009.”
How fitting — it’s from Seattle.
They all find audiences somewhere. But not here. I just want to deflate them all with cupid’s arrows.
I admit I have been watching a lot of football lately, so did I somehow miss the end of the COVID pandemic? I ventured out to a large, spacious restaurant in Danbury the other day, put on my mask, got ready to show my triple vaccinated booster card and guess what? Nothing. No request for a card, nobody masked except the waitstaff, and my request to sit far away from others was greeted with an eye roll. Same situation at big box stores: little masking, lots of crowding together, coughing, yelling, sniffling and sneezing.
Well, after a nice meal in Danbury, I drove home and flipped on the TV. At least two of the cable news outlets had on guests who were proclaiming COVID over. A quick Google search produced no shortage of articles declaring the same thing.
So, I rechecked death rates from COVID: There were 86 dead just on Jan. 21 in Connecticut, and 3,866 for the whole country on the same day. If the average number of seats on a plane is 138, that’s 28 crashes a day. Would you be heading to the airport if that were true?
Connecticut surpassed 10,000 deaths by COVID recently. Hospital systems in nearly half of the states have postponed elective surgeries due to overcrowding from COVID, Reuters found. (Connecticut did for a while, too.)
One prominent Connecticut doctor, Gregory Shangold, former president of the Connecticut State Medical Society, noted: “If you define capacity as the physical space as well as the staff, we’re definitely above capacity. Rooms are filled, patients are staying in emergency rooms ... Do you do surgeries and things like that, or are we so overwhelmed that we can’t pay as much attention to the details that we normally do?”
The picture for kids is equally grim. Pediatric coronavirus hospitalizations in Connecticut rose dramatically last month. In one week, 21 children per day were hospitalized across the state, doubling the average number of pediatric coronavirus patients from last year.
Worldwide, many people still have not been vaccinated. That means the prospect for the next Omicron-type variant getting here is far from zero.
Despite these terrifying numbers, it is clear from my few ventures outside that many people have given up. Not all, but many. A lot of people in relatively compliant Connecticut are completely exhausted, tired of COVID, tired of conversations about COVID, tired of fights about masking, of restrictions on sports and of constant reminders to get fully vaccinated.
Why? Partly lousy messaging from politicians and public health authorities. People don’t believe that the virus can be contained. So some say, Why bother?
So, I rechecked death rates from COVID: There were 86 dead just on Jan. 21 in Connecticut, and 3,866 for the whole country on the same day. If the average number of seats on a plane is 138, that’s 28 crashes a day. Would you be heading to the airport if that were true?
Moreover, they keep hearing omicron is mild. Again, why bother?
There are good reasons for hope. There is some evidence, scientific and anecdotal, that the omicron variant is starting to wane. New antiviral pills are showing promise in treating people infected with COVID. And we are doing a bit better in monitoring wastewater to get accurate readings on where the virus is and whether anything new has suddenly appeared.
Still, it is too soon to simply give up. The No. 1 thing to do is get vaccinated — three doses, and four if you are in a high-risk category. Vaccination with three shots has been shown to reduce your risk of death by more than 94 percent! Whatever rubbish you see on the internet questioning vaccine safety, that 94 percent number ought to be the final word on what to do.
What else? Keep testing. If you are able to get COVID tests, use them. If you are positive, stay home. Also, if you are positive, you need to call a doctor to see if you need antibodies or antivirals.
If you work in high-risk settings, keep masking and try to avoid poorly ventilated, crowded spaces. I myself pushed a vacation trip to later in the year, figuring COVID rates will fall. And although I will go out a bit, I still mask and try not to wind up in places that are jammed nose-to-nose.
So, it isn’t yet time to surrender to COVID just because we are tired of avoiding it. Not when it is easy to do simple things that lower your risk of death. How long will this go on? Who knows? But just because we see many deaths from viral infections doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying to reduce them.