Exasperation
“I’ve about had it,” an Arkansas executive told me a few days ago, exasperated by the refusal of many of his coworkers to accept the Covid-19 vaccine that could save them days, weeks of agony, even spare their lives. Whatever the basis of their reluctance — suspicion of the vaccine’s efficacy or fear of its supposed side effects, resentment of government “overreach,” denial of the virus itself or disbelief in its seriousness, possibly indolence — they were exposing themselves and their colleagues (and their families) to an invisible invader that has sickened hundreds of thousands of their fellow Arkansans, many of them fatally. Too, they were damaging the enterprise that employed them, that put food on their tables and paid their mortgages, that provided them with group health insurance that some of them needed as never before. Coronavirus infections had stretched an already stressed staff and promised to thin it still further.
“I’m at my limit,” the executive sighed, shaking his head.
The state’s hospitals and their personnel keep hitting their limits — of Covid intensive care beds, of rooms for patients with other clinical issues, of ambulances and EMTs and emergency room bays, of nurses and technicians. Arkansas’s inventory of respirators, the only means of keeping advanced coronavirus cases alive, is not unlimited; and on many days we have come perilously close to being without. In fact the state’s health care system is holding together now only because corridors have been converted to triage centers and trauma is being treated in what were closets.
The pace of immunization among us has improved markedly. Yet much of the good news about Covid in Arkansas is good only because it is less bad than the news of the day previous: five fewer ventilators in use, say, or three fewer deaths, or hospitalizations down by seven. Of course the following day the numbers are as likely as not to show increases in one or more, or all, the categories by which epidemiologists and hospital administrators measure the state’s progress, or lack of it, in combating Covid. The daily accounting of confirmed infections is rarely smaller than four figures. (Friday’s report: an additional 2,360.) And has there been a single day since the siege began that the most chilling index of all, the measurement of morbidity, has failed to increase? (Friday’s report: another 16 dead.)
About Covid-19’s lethality: Consider that it was first diagnosed in Arkansas (at Pine Bluff) in March 2020. It took almost 18 months for the death toll here to reach 7,000. But the emergence of the virus’s Delta variant, much more easily transmitted and often much more difficult to successfully treat, leads the UAMS School of Public Health to suggest the total could reach 8,000 in only another 30 days. More than ever, the virus has the momentum.
The Delta variant has also altered the epidemic’s demographics, and in a manner that should scare the daylights out of every parent and grandparent, assuming they view the coronavirus as a real threat and not a Deep State hoax. Across the nation Covid19’s targets are increasingly the young. In Arkansas today, one of every three active cases is aged 18 or younger, driving that bracket’s share of the cumulative state case total to about 20 percent. The trend line of new cases among Arkansas youth is essentially straight up. The school year and its attendant congregate activities (athletics and assemblies, classrooms and cafeterias) is less than a month old, the debate over masking mandates is a political, legal, social and cultural disgrace and we are, at a minimum, weeks away from federal authorization for the coronavirus immunization of youngsters.
“Frustrated,” Gov. Hutchinson described himself, by the FDA’s pace of vaccine authorization for children.
Frustrated and increasingly concerned for the impact of Covid on its bottom line, corporate America is becoming steadily more aggressive with not only its customers but its workforce. Some major corporations are demanding their employees either “take the jab” or pay significantly higher medical insurance premiums; others insist it’s the vaccine or the job. Tyson Foods, based at Springdale, intends to see all its employees inoculated by November 1; Walmart has instituted a similar mandate.
The stridency with which anti-vaccine, anti-masking forces reject the best thinking of the best scientists and physicians, including those in Arkansas, is a reflection of our toxic times. Emblematic, but not excusable. Not alone in exasperation are managers and educators and clinicians. In some quarters, the once unthinkable is being — thought. More on that to follow.
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Steve Barnes is a columnist with Editorial Associates in Little Rock.)