Resurgence

“Fauci’s resigning,” I said, mistakenly; not even noon it was, and already it had been a long day. “Not resigning, retiring.” And then corrected myself a second time: “Not right away, but when Biden’s term is up.” And then another tweak: “Well, this term, the one that’s up in two years.” The ultimate length of the incumbent president’s tenure is unknowable.

To that news: “Oh,” replied she, the medical pro who is one of my two best frontline sources on Covid-19 in Arkansas, the other being my daughter-in-law. Covid-19, yes, and its variants and, now, its subvariants. Letters and numbers, punctuated with hyphens or decimal points.

The news broke a few minutes before the nurse and I spoke. Anthony Fauci, universally known as “the nation’s leading infectious disease expert,” told a Washington-based news site that he would “almost certainly” step down in 2025 from his post as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He’s been with the agency since 1968 and has been its leader since ’84. Since the winter of 2020, the first season of Covid, he’s been under fire from both ends of the political spectrum. On occasion the left accused Fauci of essentially kowtowing to President Trump and thus failing to champion a more vigorous response to the pandemic. But far more often the rounds were fired from the right, and so vitriolic and so threatening did they become, and as they sometimes still are, that Fauci may be the first government doctor to be assigned a security detail.

Fringe conservative figures on the national scene demanded Fauci’s head on a pike, and not a few Arkansas politicians zestfully joined in. While the latter pols were at it, they made clear they had no use for the Arkansas medical establishment, especially

Dr. Jose Romero, then Governor Hutchinson’s secretary of health.

I offered to e-mail the nurse, a veteran RN, some of the clips regarding Fauci that were starting to flood the Internet. She laughed. “Who’s got time to read them?”

Was her hospital among those in Arkansas dealing with the resurgence of coronavirus cases?

“Of course,” she said immediately, almost snappishly. She and her colleagues “on the floor” had just begun to get a handle on their clinical situation, the staff shortages, which bled over into their personal lives, when up jumped the devil. She, they, had been expecting it. There was no way to avoid a significant uptick in the case count given Arkansas’s comparatively low Covid vaccination rate. All it took was another shape-shift of the virus, which every clinician knew was not only inevitable but imminent. So once there was Covid-19, and then the Delta variant followed by the Omicron variant, with BA.2 and BA.4 close behind, and now the BA.5. The pros say there quite certainly will be subsequent variants, new mutations; and no one who knows his or her stuff is proclaiming victory in sight, light at the end of the tunnel. Each turn of the virus seems more easily transmissible, hence the abrupt rise in the overall case numbers, and the accompanying increase in hospitalizations, and the consequent impact on Arkansas’s public and private treasuries.

I read aloud to my nurse source a quote from a Pennsylvania physician, a ranking virologist and pediatrician named Paul Offit of the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital. Covid-19 and its seemingly endless chain of variants, Offit told the Washington Post, “will be here for my lifetime, my children’s lifetimes, and their children’s lifetimes.”

I waited for my nurse friend to react but she said nothing for a time, as if I was about to give her some additional happy news. “Well, okay, fine,” she finally replied. Not so much sarcasm as weariness. In the background I could hear some of those noises that are common at a nurses’ station. “Hold on,” she said, and spoke with someone “on the floor,” presumably a co-worker. After a few moments she returned to our conversation, but only to end it: “I gotta run, okay?” Okay.

I reached out to my daughter-in-law to see if she had to run, too. Yes, she did, although on this day she was dealing with patients with problems other than Covid. But she’s due for another rotation in the emergency room, so she expects to see a few more Arkansans stumble in, or be rolled in, blue from lack of oxygen, gasping for breath, confessing -assuming they are able to speak -- that they had postponed vaccination, or didn’t believe in it; or were certain their ailment was something else, anything else, than that Covid stuff, which we all know is overblown. In other words, she would be saying “well, okay, fine” before the week ends, before Fauci’s stewardship ends, before the plague ends.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Steve Barnes is a columnist with Editorial Associates in Little Rock.)