New threats and old
It had been a glorious Tex-Mex feast: a big basket of chips and a big pewter pond of salsa followed by a big platter of great stuff; and, to raise the octane level, a dish of sliced jalapenos.
Shortly after lunch, the tickle in the throat began. Understandable, given the menu, easy to disregard. An hour later, a slight cough, not from especially deep in the chest, just an inch or two below the laryngeal prominence, which is what people with certain letters after their names call the Adam’s apple. No fever, no chills. Nothing to worry about.
Now it was early evening and I was beginning to worry. I was a mite warm, yeah, and the tickle had moved south, deeper in the chest, and the coughing the tickles triggered was rather more frequent. As in every other minute, not the every five of mid-afternoon.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Just a little cough.” And a slight shiver, not so slight that she didn’t notice. The hand she put to my cheek felt like ice. I recoiled. She left the room and returned in a moment with one of those thermometer guns. Two degrees.
“Go to bed.” Okay. Two degrees, two ibuprofen, two blankets.
A half-hour later: “Here, you need to eat something.” A tray, soup and saltines. Minestrone, a favorite. Except: “I can’t taste this.”
“What did you say?”
“I said, the soup – I can’t taste it. I…” Oh, no.
•••••
We barely think of it now, most of us, and when we do think of it we weigh it in terms of the social and cultural changes it wrought, or the trends it accelerated. Its impact on office life, retail trade, brick-andmortar commerce. The skepticism it fueled about science and medicine, public schools and higher education. Government. Politics.
Conventional forms of influenza, the seasonal varieties that constituted “the flu” in the generations that knew of the Spanish flu only from history books – in a typical year such infections would result in some 150 deaths per year in Arkansas. Onehundred-fifty. By that statistical standard, no more than 450 should have died in any 36-month period.
Today, three years to the month after a Pine Bluff man began to feel terribly ill, the especially virulent strain we quickly came to know as Covid-19 has claimed more than 13,000 Arkansas lives, more than two-thirds of them aged 65 or older. Thousands more lives have been significantly altered, some of them permanently. Approximately onethird of our three-million residents have been infected, and the overwhelming majority have recovered if at enormous cost to them and the health care system.
Early on the experts told us that Covid would take its greatest toll among the elderly, that those of us in good health and who had no underlying chronic conditions – obesity and diabetes, cardiac and respiratory and kidney issues – could expect to survive should we contract the virus; and that if some of us would be miserable for days, or for weeks or even months, others would exhibit absolutely no symptoms whatsoever, and spread the contagion unknowingly.
Suddenly politicians and social commentators whose first, last and only medical training was a First Aid merit badge awarded decades earlier were practicing epidemiology, immunology, gerontology and demagoguery. Populist fervor, and the willingness of charlatans to exploit it, took a fearsome toll. Medical freedom, indeed: With the safety and efficacy of Covid vaccines beyond dispute and despite their continued availability at no charge, only six of ten Arkansans have been fully immunized – even as new cases are reported daily.
•••••
We had a couple of test kits left over. She checked the expiration dates. All good. Fourteen months earlier, when the quickand-fairly easy tests debuted, I had “taken the swab” almost on a lark. I felt fine. And I continued to feel fine for the next 10 days, even as test after test demonstrated that the virus lurked within me. I had been one of those totally asymptomatic Covid carriers, unaware of the threat I posed to others.
Was I now one of those many who had contracted Covid a second time? And, this time, was displaying its multiple symptoms? And despite full immunizations – the jabs, including the boosters?
The test said no. So did our daughter-inlaw, the clinician, who telephoned to say that our grandson, who had spent the weekend with us, was exhibiting the same symptoms. There were at least a half-dozen new viruses “out there,” she said, all of them annoying at a minimum, some of them potentially lethal. “It’s the future,” she said, “and it’s here.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE: Steve Barnes is a columnist with Editorial Associates in Little Rock.)