Dressed in blue scrubs and carrying a stethoscope around her neck, an oncology nurse in Salem, Ore., looked to the Grinch as inspiration while suggesting that she ignored coronavirus guidelines outside of work.
In a TikTok video posted Friday, she lip-dubbed a scene from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” to get her point across to her unaware colleagues: She does not wear a mask in public when she’s not working at Salem Hospital.
“When my co-workers find out I still travel, don’t wear a mask when I’m out and let my kids have play dates,” the nurse wrote in a caption accompanying the video, which has since been deleted.
Following swift online backlash from critics, her employer, Salem Health, announced Saturday that the nurse had been placed on administrative leave. In a statement, the hospital said the nurse, who has not been publicly identified by her employer, “displayed cavalier disregard for the seriousness of this pandemic and her indifference towards physical distancing and masking out of work.”
“We also want to assure you that this one careless statement does not reflect the position of Salem Health or the hardworking and dedicated caregivers who work here,” said the hospital, adding that an investigation is underway.
Salem Health did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment as of early Monday.
The nurse’s video offers a startling and rare glimpse of a front-line health-care worker blatantly playing down a virus that has killed at least 266,000 Americans. It also has been seen in some coronavirus patients, some on their deathbeds, who still refuse to believe the pandemic is real.
The incident comes at a time when Oregon has continued to see a spike in new coronavirus cases and virus-related hospitalizations. Just last week, the state’s daily reported deaths and hospitalizations rose by 33.3 and 24.2 percent respectively, according to The Post’s coronavirus tracker. At least 74,120 Oregonians have been infected with the virus since late February; 905 of them have died.
The clip posted to TikTok on Friday shows the nurse mocking the health guidelines while using audio from a scene in which the Grinch reveals his true identity to Cindy Lou Who.
Although the original video was removed, TikTok users have shared a “duet” video posted by another user critical of the nurse, which had more than 274,000 reactions as of early Monday.
Soon after she posted the clip, hundreds took to social media and the hospital’s Facebook page to report the nurse’s video and demand an official response from her employer. Some requested that the nurse be removed from her position and that her license be revoked.
Hospital officials told the Salem Statesman Journal that the investigation is aiming to figure out which other staff members and patients have come in contact with the nurse, who works in the oncology department.
But for some, the hospital’s apologies and actions were not enough.
“The video supplied should be evidence enough,” one Facebook user commented. “She needs to be FIRED. Not on PAID leave. As someone fighting cancer, I can only imagine how her patients feel after seeing this news.”
The hospital thanked those who alerted them of the incident, emphasizing that its staff, patients and visitors must adhere to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines.
“These policies are strictly enforced among staff from the moment they leave their cars at work to the moment they start driving home,” hospital officials told the Statesman Journal.
At a rural health system in Wisconsin, officials and medical experts began drawing up protocols for the once unthinkable practice of deciding which patients should get care. The chief quality officer of a major New York hospital network double- and triple-checked his system’s stockpile of emergency equipment, grimly recalling the last time he had to count how many ventilators he had left. In Arizona, a battle-weary doctor watched in horror as people flooded airports and flocked to stores for Black Friday sales, knowing it was only a matter of time before some of them wound up in his emergency room.
Days after millions of Americans ignored health guidance to avoid travel and large Thanksgiving gatherings, it’s still too soon to tell how many people became infected with the coronavirus over the course of the holiday weekend. But as travelers head home to communities already hit hard by the disease, hospitals and health officials across the country are bracing for what scientist Dave O’Connor called “a surge on top of a surge.”
“It is painful to watch,” said O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Like seeing two trains in the distance and knowing they’re about to crash, but you can’t do anything to stop it.”
“Because of the decisions and rationalizations people made to celebrate,” the scientist added, “we’re in for a very dark December.”
The holiday, which is typically one of the busiest travel periods of the year, fell at a particularly dire time in the pandemic. Some 4 million Americans have been diagnosed with the coronavirus in November — twice the previous record, which was set last month. More than 2,000 people are dying every day. Despite that, over a million people passed through U.S. airports the day before Thanksgiving — the highest number of travelers seen since the start of the outbreak.
Many states did not report new case counts over the holiday, and it typically takes about a week for official records to catch up after reporting delays, said Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.
But in two to three weeks, she said, “I fully expect on a national level we will see those trends continue of new highs in case counts and hospitalizations and deaths.”
The nation has already notched several bleak milestones over the holiday weekend. On Thanksgiving Day, hospitalizations in the United States exceeded 90,000 people for the first time. The following day, the country hit 13 million cases. At least nine states have seen 1 in every 1,000 residents die of the coronavirus.
Mark Jarret, the chief quality officer for New York’s Northwell Health system, said he understood that many people are tiring of constant vigilance after nine months of isolation and Zoom gatherings and waving at people from six feet away.
“But we’re so close to getting some control,” he said, noting that federal officials are on the verge of authorizing one or more vaccines against the virus next month. “This is not the time to let up. This is the time to put on the best defense we can to prevent further spread, further death.”
Officials urged people who traveled or spent time with people outside their household to stay at home for 14 days to avoid further spread of the virus. Some jurisdictions are moving toward lockdown measures not seen since the spring. Los Angeles County on Friday issued a three-week “safer at home” order, limiting business capacity and prohibiting gatherings other than religious services and protests.
Meanwhile, the December holidays are looming.
“Hopefully people will try to minimize their risks around Christmas, especially if there’s data that show Thanksgiving was really harmful,” O’Connor said.
To Cleavon Gilman, a Navy veteran and emergency room doctor in Yuma, Ariz., the wave of holiday travel was “a slap in the face.”
“It’s as if there’s not a pandemic happening,” he said. “We’re in a war right now, and half the country isn’t on board.”
On Friday, members of the University of Arizona coronavirus modeling team issued an urgent warning to state health officials, projecting that the state will exceed ICU capacity by the beginning of December.
“If action is not immediately taken, then it risks a catastrophe on a scale of the worst natural disaster the state has ever experienced,” the team wrote in a letter to Steven Bailey, chief of the Bureau of Public Health Statistics. “It would be akin to facing a major forest fire without evacuation orders.”
Arizona has no statewide mask mandate, and businesses in many parts of the state, including indoor dining at restaurants, remain open.
Gilman said the intensive care unit at his hospital is full and there’s nowhere to transfer new patients. When he’s home, his mind echoes with the sound of people gasping for breath. He and his colleagues are exhausted, and with cases spiking across the country, he worries there is no way they can handle the surge that will probably follow Thanksgiving celebrations.
In La Crosse, Wis., Gundersen Health System chief executive Scott Rathgaber echoed that fear. “We’ve had to tell our hard-working staff, ‘There’s no one out there to come rescue us,’” he said.
Like many in his college town, Rathgaber is anxious about what will happen when students who spent the holiday with their families return to campus. Though the University of Wisconsin and other schools shifted classes online for the remainder of the semester, he anticipates students who have jobs and apartments in La Crosse will return to town.
“We had trouble the first time the students came back,” Rathgaber said, noting that the start of college classes in September preceded outbreaks in nursing homes and a spike in deaths in La Crosse County. “I will continue to implore, to beg people to take this seriously.”
Gundersen has already more than tripled the size of the covid-19 ward at its main hospital, and even before this week it was almost entirely full. Physicians from the system’s rural clinics have been reassigned to La Crosse to help in the ICU. Staff who may have been exposed to the virus are being called back before completing their 14-day quarantine. And Rathgaber now attends regular meetings with ethicists and end-of-life caregivers to figure out Gundersen’s triage protocol if the hospital becomes overwhelmed.
“We’re not at a breaking point, but we are getting there,” Rathgaber said. “I’m concerned about what the next two weeks will bring.”
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan (D) on Sunday said mitigation efforts such as mask mandates have been effective in reducing coronavirus rates in the city, calling such efforts an alternative to mass shutdowns.
“Detroit actually has the lowest infection rate in the state of Michigan,” Duggan said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And it’s because behavior changed. In March and April, Michigan was hammered along with New York, and we had within a few weeks, a thousand people hospitalized and 50 of our neighbors dying every day.”
In contrast, he said, the city currently had about 200 patients hospitalized and one or two deaths per day.
“It’s still too high, but the commitment to the testing, the commitment to the masks, has shown that you can dramatically drop the infection rate,” Duggan added.
The mayor noted that the city’s infection rate is about half of those of its surrounding suburbs.
“If you make a commitment to the masks, we don’t have to shut the economy down,” he said.
Asked how the city’s mask mandate and other measures had affected the spread of the virus, Duggan responded that “assembly lines are in our DNA” and pointed to the city’s drive-through testing apparatus.
Duggan went on to say that frontline workers such as firefighters, hospital workers and emergency medical technicians would likely be the first people in the city to receive a coronavirus vaccine, followed by the elderly.
“Occupation is going to go first…then people over the age over 65,” he said. “That’s the way they’re talking about it, I will be really glad when [President-elect] Joe Biden takes control of this and we get clear direction, but we will follow whatever protocols are there.”
The United States recorded 90,481 people currently hospitalized with COVID-19 Nov. 26, marking the 17th consecutive day of record hospitalizations and the first time the daily count topped 90,000, according to The COVID Tracking Project.
The Project has noted that several data points will likely “wobble” over the next several days due to the Thanksgiving holiday, which may cause data points for COVID-19 testing, new cases and deaths to flatten or drop for several days before spiking. It is unlikely that Thanksgiving infections will be clearly visible in official case data until at least the second week of December.
However, the Project’s staff has noted that the new admissions metric in the public hospitalization dataset from HHS shows only moderate volatility and will likely be an additional source of useful data through the expected holiday dip and subsequent spike in test, case and death data.
“If you’re a reporter covering COVID-19, we recommend focusing on current hospitalizations and new admissions as the most reliable indicator of what is actually happening in your area and in the country as a whole,” reads the Nov. 24 blog from The COVID Tracking Project.
On her day off not long ago, emergency room nurse Jane Sandoval sat with her husband and watched her favorite NFL team, the San Francisco 49ers. She’s off every other Sunday, and even during the coronavirus pandemic, this is something of a ritual. Jane and Carlos watch, cheer, yell — just one couple’s method of escape.
“It makes people feel normal,” she says.
For Sandoval, though, it has become more and more difficult to enjoy as the season — and the pandemic — wears on. Early in the season, the 49ers’ Kyle Shanahan was one of five coaches fined for violating the league’s requirement that all sideline personnel wear face coverings. Jane noticed, even as coronavirus cases surged again in California and across the United States, that Levi’s Stadium was considering admitting fans to watch games.
But the hardest thing to ignore, Sandoval says, is that when it comes to coronavirus testing, this is a nation of haves and have-nots.
Among the haves are professional and college athletes, in particular those who play football. From Nov. 8 to 14, the NFL administered 43,148 tests to 7,856 players, coaches and employees. Major college football programs supply dozens of tests each day, an attempt — futile as it has been — to maintain health and prevent schedule interruptions. Major League Soccer administered nearly 5,000 tests last week, and Major League Baseball conducted some 170,000 tests during its truncated season.
Sandoval, meanwhile, is a 58-year-old front-line worker who regularly treats patients either suspected or confirmed to have been infected by the coronavirus. In eight months, she has never been tested. She says her employer, California Pacific Medical Center, refuses to provide testing for its medical staff even after possible exposure.
Watching sports, then, no longer represents an escape from reality for Sandoval. Instead, she says, it’s a signal of what the nation prioritizes.
“There’s an endless supply in the sports world,” she says of coronavirus tests. “You’re throwing your arms up. I like sports as much as the next person. But the disparity between who gets tested and who doesn’t, it doesn’t make any sense.”
This month, registered nurses gathered in Los Angeles to protest the fact that UCLA’s athletic department conducted 1,248 tests in a single week while health-care workers at UCLA hospitals were denied testing. Last week National Nurses United, the country’s largest nursing union, released the results of a survey of more than 15,000 members. About two-thirds reported they had never been tested.
Since August, when NFL training camps opened, the nation’s most popular and powerful sports league — one that generates more than $15 billion in annual revenue — has conducted roughly 645,000 coronavirus tests.
“These athletes and teams have a stockpile of covid testing, enough to test them at will,” says Michelle Gutierrez Vo, another registered nurse and sports fan in California. “And it’s painful to watch. It seemed like nobody else mattered or their lives are more important than ours.”
Months into the pandemic, and with vaccines nearing distribution, testing in the United States remains something of a luxury. Testing sites are crowded, and some patients still report waiting days for results. Sandoval said nurses who suspect they’ve been exposed are expected to seek out a testing site on their own, at their expense, and take unpaid time while they wait for results — in effect choosing between their paycheck and their health and potentially that of others.
“The current [presidential] administration did not focus on tests and instead focused on the vaccine,” says Mara Aspinall, a professor of biomedical diagnostics at Arizona State University. “We should have focused with the same kind of ‘warp speed’ on testing. Would we still have needed a vaccine? Yes, but we would’ve saved more lives in that process and given more confidence to people to go to work.”
After a four-month shutdown amid the pandemic’s opening wave, professional sports returned in July. More than just a contest on television, it was, in a most unusual year, a symbol of comfort and routine. But as the sports calendar has advanced and dramatic adjustments have been made, it has become nearly impossible to ignore how different everything looks, sounds and feels.
Stadiums are empty, or mostly empty, while some sports have bubbles and others just pretend their spheres are impermeable. Coaches stand on the sideline with fogged-up face shields; rosters and schedules are constantly reshuffled. On Saturday, the college football game between Clemson and Florida State was called off three hours before kickoff. Dodger Stadium, home of the World Series champions, is a massive testing site, with lines of cars snaking across the parking lot.
Sports, in other words, aren’t a distraction from a polarized nation and its response to a global pandemic. They have become a constant reminder of them.And when some nurses turn to sports for an attempt at escape, instead it’s just one more image of who gets priority for tests and, often, who does not.
“There is a disconnect when you watch sports now. It’s not the same. Covid changed everything,” says Gutierrez Vo, who works for Kaiser Permanente in Fremont, Calif. “I try not to think about it.”
Sandoval tries the same, telling herself that watching a game is among the few things that make it feel like February again. Back then, the coronavirus was a distant threat and the 49ers were in the Super Bowl.
That night, Sandoval had a shift in the ER, and between patients, she would duck into the break room or huddle next to a colleague checking the score on the phone. The 49ers were playing the Kansas City Chiefs, and Sandoval would recall that her favorite team blowing a double-digit lead represented the mightiest stress that day.
Now during shifts, Sandoval sometimes argues with patients who insist the virus that has infected them is a media-driven hoax. She masks up and wears a face shield even if a patient hasn’t been confirmed with the coronavirus, though she can’t help second-guessing herself.
“Did I wash my hands? Did I touch my glasses? Was I extra careful?” she says.
If Sandoval suspects she has been exposed, she says, she doesn’t bother requesting a test. She says the hospital will say there aren’t enough. So instead she self-monitors and loads up on vitamin C and zinc, hoping the tickle in her throat disappears. If symptoms persist, which she says hasn’t happened yet, she plans to locate a testing site on her own. But that would mean taking unpaid time, paying for costs out of pocket and staying home — and forfeiting a paycheck — until results arrive.
National Nurses United says some of its members are being told to report to work anyway as they wait for results that can take three to five days. Sutter Health, the hospital system that oversees California Pacific Medical Center, said in a statement to The Washington Post that it offers tests to employees whose exposure is deemed high-risk and to any employee experiencing symptoms. Symptomatic employees are placed on paid leave while awaiting test results, according to the statement.
“As long as an essential healthcare worker is asymptomatic,” Sutter’s statement read, “they can continue to work and self-monitor while awaiting the test result.”
Sandoval said employees have been told the hospital’s employee health division will contact anyone who has been exposed. Though she believes she’s exposed during every shift, Sandoval says employee health has never contacted her to offer a test or conduct contact tracing.
“If you feel like you need to get tested, you do that on your own,” she says. Sandoval suspects the imbalance is economic. In September, Forbes reported NFL team revenue was up 7 percent despite the pandemic. Last week Sutter Health reported a $607 million loss through the first nine months of 2020.
Sandoval tries to avoid thinking about that, so she keeps heading back to work and hoping for the best. Though she says her passion for sports is less intense now, she nonetheless likes to talk sports when a patient wears a team logo. She asks about a star player or a recent game. She says she is looking forward to the 49ers’ next contest and the 2021 baseball season.
Sometimes, Sandoval says, patients ask about her job and the ways she avoids contracting the coronavirus. She must be tested most every day, Sandoval says the patients always say.
And she just rolls her eyes and chuckles. That, she says, only happens if you’re an athlete.
On Thanksgiving more than a century ago, many Americans were living under quarantines, and officials warned people to stay home for the holiday.
More than 200,000 dead since March. Cities in lockdown. Vaccine trials underway.
And a holiday message, of sorts: “See that Thanksgiving celebrations are restricted as much as possible so as to prevent another flare-up.”
It isn’t the message of Thanksgiving 2020. It’s the Thanksgiving Day notice that ran in the Omaha World Herald on Nov. 28, 1918, when Americans found themselves in a similar predicament to the millions now grappling with how to celebrate the holiday season amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Every time I hear someone say these are unprecedented times, I say no, no, they’re not,” said Brittany Hutchinson, assistant curator at the Chicago History Museum. “They did this in 1918.”
On Thanksgiving more than a century ago, many Americans, like today, lived under various phases of quarantines and face mask orders. Millions mourned loved ones. And health officials in many cities issued the same holiday warning: Stay home and stay safe.
The first cases were detected in the USA in March of that year, growing exponentially by the fall. In October, the virus burned through the nation. Dozens of cities implemented face mask orders and curfews and locked down for two to three weeks, temporarily closing schools, libraries, theaters, movie houses, dance halls, churches, ice cream parlors and soda shops. The virus killed about 195,000 Americans during October alone.
As Thanksgiving rolled around, some cities celebrated the relaxation of flu-related restrictions– partly due to opposition campaigns by retailers, theater owners, unions, mass transportation companies and other economically stressed stakeholders. Washington, Indianapolis and Oakland, California, had lifted restrictions days before, and San Francisco was on the brink of lifting its mask mandate.
San Francisco had one of the nation’s largest anti-masking campaigns, spearheaded by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco, according to Howard Markel, a professor of the history of medicine at the University of Michigan and co-editor-in chief of The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919. Many people refused to wear masks and were arrested, and when the “line into the courtroom was so long, they laid off arresting people because the system couldn’t enforce it,” Markel said.
On Nov. 13, the San Francisco Examiner reported that “Thanksgiving Day will be celebrated in San Francisco by the discarding of gauze masks, if the present rate of decrease in influenza continues.”
A week later, San Franciscans ceremoniously removed their masks as a whistle sounded across the city at noon. “San Francisco Joyously Discards Masks In Twinkling; Faces Beam As Gauze Covers Come Off At Time Fixed,” the San Francisco Chronicle wrote on its front page Nov. 22.
Resistance to public health measures was not as “vociferous or widespread as today,” but it was there, Markel said. “A lot of these rules and regulations were wrapped up in the patriotism of World War I, and most people followed them. But we don’t have that unifying situation right now. You would think the pandemic would be unifying.”
In some cities, Thanksgiving rituals brought a welcome sense of normalcy. Many Americans returned to religious services, performed charity work and went through with planned football games, parties and performances.
In Portland, a “grand reunion service” was planned for the Sunday after Thanksgiving, “in honor of the reassembling after being debarred from worship on account of the epidemic for the last five weeks.” Members of various congregations were “ready to greet each other after the long absence,” according to the Oregon Daily Journal on Nov. 16.
“The chimes of church bells will once more be heard on Sunday morning throughout the city, beckoning one and all to attend their chosen place of worship, where a double celebration will be held, first over the suppression of autocracy and, second, over the eradication of a frightful plague,” the paper wrote.
Rabbis, priests, pastors and more conveyed a unified message, Hutchinson said – one of “forgiveness and compassion.”
“People are urging to be considerate of one another, to care for one another,” Hutchinson said. “There are messages of putting the smallness of the individual into perspective with the vastness of humanity.”
Other cities were still trending in the opposite direction.
Lockdowns, quarantines on Thanksgiving
By the end of November, cases were rising in cities such as Atlanta, Denver, Louisville, Kentucky, Milwaukee, Omaha, Nebraska, Portland, Oregon, and Richmond, Virginia. Many health experts attributed the “renewal of the grip epidemic” to festivities Nov. 11 – later designated as Armistice Day – when thousands flooded the streets to celebrate the end of WWI.
“It is not the lifting of the closure ban that is the cause of spreading of the epidemic but the putting aside of all precautions and restrictions by the people of Denver when they celebrated on Victory Day,” City Manager of Health and Charity William H. Sharpley told the Denver Post in a story Nov. 21.
On Nov. 27, the day before Thanksgiving, St. Louis reported its highest new daily case count since the epidemic began, and Buffalo, New York, reported its largest jump in daily cases since the lifting of its pandemic ban weeks earlier. Both cities subsequently cracked down on public gatherings, limited the number of passengers on streetcars and ordered those cars to be ventilated and cleaned.
In Salt Lake City, residents were under “quarantine” on Thanksgiving, shops were prohibited from holding sales and celebrations were postponed until Christmas Day. Placards indicating households infected with influenza were placed on the front and rear entrances of 2,000 homes.
“Owing to the influenza quarantine, the day’s festivities … had to be postponed till Christmas day. But Thanksgiving services of some sort are being held in nearly every home,” an article on the front page of the Desert Evening News said. “Because the influenza quarantine prevents public gatherings, the day in Utah is being observed quietly and without any spectacular features.”
Officials in Los Angeles promoted a “Stay at Home Week” over Thanksgiving. The Los Angeles Times issued a call on its front page to “REMEMBER AFFLICTED THANKSGIVING DAY; Influenza Ban Is Felt,” saying, “Thanksgiving Day held many attractions, although in a modified sense.”
“The salvation Army served fifty pounds of turkeys to fifty old men, but dispensed with its usual big dinner to the outcasts at the headquarters, because of the influenza ban,” the Times wrote.
Denver, which was under a face mask order, had just opened three emergency hospitals and issued an urgent call for nurses. Churches were expected to hold Thanksgiving services, but “extra precautions will be taken to guard against spread of epidemic,” the Rocky Mountain News reported the day before.
“Special pains have been taken to provide all the ventilation necessary and to make attendance at the services safe in spite of the influenza epidemic. In a number of churches electric fans have been placed in the auditoriums so as to change the air every few minutes,” the article said.
In many cities, traditional Thanksgiving Day pageants were held outside. In Cincinnati, which saw a surge in cases among children and firemen, Thanksgiving “exercises” at school were held in auditoriums instead of classrooms to “avoid crowding,” the Cincinnati Enquirer wrote Nov. 28.
A handful of cities began to see a surge in cases on Thanksgiving.
Cities see cases rise on Thanksgiving
Cincinnati health officials “requested parents to forego children’s parties and gatherings during the Thanksgiving vacation,” but the number of hospitalized patients rose on the holiday. Schools added an extra day of vacation to the Thanksgiving holiday break to promote “a beneficial result in the influenza situation.”
“We are not in a happy frame of mind tonight,” Dr. Walter List, superintendent of the city’s General Hospital, told the Cincinnati Enquirer on Thanksgiving. “An institution such as this can stand the strain of an epidemic for five or six weeks, but when it continues for such a long period the situation is complicated.”
Kansas City saw a similar trend. The week of Thanksgiving, the number of flu cases at the city’s General Hospital doubled, and on Thanksgiving Day, city health officials reinstituted home quarantine for influenza victims and their families. Schools on break for Thanksgiving were closed until further notice.
Public dance halls and restaurants were closed on Thanksgiving in Spokane, Washington, and private parties were prohibited. The next day, the city’s emergency hospital received more applications for admission than on any other day during the entire epidemic. On Thanksgiving, “the hospital was filled and death a frequent visitor,” the Spokesman-Review wrote.
Jefferson, Iowa, physician C.W. Blake spent much of his Thanksgiving evening making house calls on people ill from influenza, author Thomas Morain wrote in his 1998 book, “Prairie Grass Roots.” Blake was attending a Thanksgiving dinner at a farm outside town and let the local phone operator know he would be available later in the day. When he received the call about patients in the early evening, the operator had a list of 54 patients who had come down with the flu that day.
“At one farm north of Jefferson a family of four was too sick even to make themselves the most simple meal,” Morain wrote. “While Blake checked each one, (his assistant) made a soup from ingredients on hand and left it for the family.”
Hopes of a vaccine on Thanksgiving
By the fall of 1918, scientists were working on an influenza vaccine, and many were developed and used over the course of the pandemic. Researchers in New York, Boston, Pittsburgh, New Orleans and Seattle developed vaccines, and thousands of people in those cities and many others were inoculated.
Days before Thanksgiving, health officers in Rochester, New York, encouraged people to obtain the vaccine available at a health bureau. In Salt Lake City, the emergency hospital gave more than 100 vaccinations Nov. 30. By early December, free inoculation clinics were established across the city, and thousands of residents lined up for their vaccinations.
The problem? Researchers didn’t know influenza was a virus.
“The vaccine that was made was a vaccine against (a bacteria), which they thought was the cause of influenza,” Markel said. “So not only were vaccines of this era crude and not all that effective, the vaccine that they did produce was for the wrong organism.”
Vaccine science was nowhere near the scientifically advanced level of 2020, said Markel, whose mother died from COVID-19 this year. The study of virology was in its infancy, and researchers didn’t have the tools to see viruses. Though bacteria are much larger and can be viewed under a light microscope, viruses require an electron microscope, which had not been invented in 1918, Markel said.
The vaccines that researchers developed did not stop an impending third wave of the flu.
On Dec. 6, the St. Paul Daily Newsannounced that more than 40 Minneapolis schools were closed because of the flu, below the headline “SANTA CLAUS IS DOWN WITH THE FLU.” Health officials asked “moving picture show” managers to exclude children, closed Sunday schools and ordered department stores to dispense with “Santa Claus programs.”
On Christmas Eve, health officials in Nebraska made influenza a mandatory quarantine disease, and fines ranged from $15 to $100 for violations. Approximately 1,000 homes in Omaha were placarded, meaning their occupants were unable to leave for at least four days after the fever had subsided.
“What did they do wrong? That’s hard to say, but all of these measures are like Swiss cheese. They have holes, so you try to use as many layers as possible,” Markel said. “To me, those surges just represented whether there was social distancing or not. Flu didn’t stop circulating, the question was when did people go out and get exposed to it? And that’s what’s going on now.”
A warning for 2020: ‘Stay home and stay safe’
A century later, the nation has recorded more than 12 million cases of COVID-19, and more than 255,000 people in the USA have died. Dozens of states reimplemented coronavirus-related restrictions, and health officials echo the stay-at-home guidance issued decades ago.
“The risk of not traveling is less than the risk of traveling,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, told USA TODAY Wednesday. “During this interesting period of a lot of infection going on, colder weather, indoors: Do you want to travel and go to a Thanksgiving meal where there may be 12, 15, 20 people?”
Fauci said his three adult daughters won’t come home for Thanksgiving this year. Hutchinson, the Chicago-based curator who had COVID-19 in April, said she plans to celebrate Thanksgiving at home with her dog and Facetime family members. Markel, in Ann Arbor, said he plans to eat Thanksgiving dinner alone, downsize from a full turkey to a sliced turkey breast and Zoom with family.
If history tells us anything, Markel said, it’s that “the risk of contracting the virus or spreading the virus by congregating in groups or even traditional holiday parties is right now too great.”
“It is disappointing, but let’s get through this, so we can celebrate many, many more Thanksgivings,” he said. “The better part of valor is to stay home and stay safe.”
BLINKING RED: This is a critical week in the coronavirus pandemic. Economists are nervously watching as much of the nation experiences a worsening fall wave, with U.S. case counts near 200,000 a day and record hospitalizations in many parts of the country, my colleagues Paulina Firozi, Lena H. Sun and Hannah Knowles report.
Whether a crest arrives soon could largely be determined by the Thanksgiving holiday, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health experts warn against traveling and many of the once commonplace rituals of family gatherings.
Early data doesn’t look great:More than 1 million people went through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints in the nation’s airports on Friday —that’s the second-highest single-day rush since March 16. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent of epidemiologists surveyed recently by the New York Times said they were having Thanksgiving celebrations with people only in their households or not at all.
One bright spot: A third vaccine, made by AstraZeneca, is 90 percent effective if administered in two doses (a half-dose followed by a full-dose booster) and is easier to store than vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna, my colleagues reported this morning.
“The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is likely to be cheaper than those made by Pfizer and Moderna, and it does not need to be stored at subzero temperatures but can be kept in ordinary refrigerators in pharmacies and doctor’s offices,” they wrote.
The frightening, post-election COVID surge is making everything feel strange, different and unsettled all over again.
Why it matters: With Thanksgiving canceled, doctors quitting their practices and grocers limiting purchase quantities (again), Americans have the ambient sense that our safety net is unraveling. Not only are things not returning to normal, they may not return to normal for a long time.
The people and institutions we look toward for guidance and leadership — like elected officials and medical authorities — seem as flummoxed by the pandemic as we are. They issue new rules day by day (closing schools, restricting shopping, issuing curfews), yet look helpless and flailing as infections rise.
Our comforting touch points, like family get-togethers and holiday rituals, are suddenly off-limits.
There are fewer entertainments and distractions, with movie theaters closed and our appetites for TV bingeing satiated a long time ago.
For those who derive comfort from their faith, remote worship offers less fulfillment.
Strangely, CEOs and corporate America have been serving as a rare anchor in this unmoored reality, attempting to provide some moral suasion and fueling the engine behind the stock market’s rally.
Companies like Pfizer and Moderna are looking like the heroes of the day — though their vaccines can’t come soon enough to allay our worst fears.
Meanwhile, the restaurateurs and merchants who form the pillars of our communities are suffering with growing intensity before our eyes.
Economically, the nation is heading into uncharted territory, with COVID-related uncertainty obliterating all forecast attempts.
While many Americans are doing fine financially, it’s hard not to think that a lot of people’s personal finances may be poised to head off a cliff — and the promise of federal help is looking questionable.
Politically, the standoff between President Trump and the rightfully elected new administration has left a vacuum.
By all accounts, the situation is thwarting efforts to attack the coronavirus.
Socially, we feel isolated and trapped in our pandemic ruts, not even permitted to savor the promise of holidays we’ve been looking forward to.
Doctors say pandemic-induced loneliness will shorten life expectancies.
Culturally and intellectually, the arts, concerts, films and literary output that we rely on to enhance our lives are dampened or depressed by pandemic strictures.
Emotionally, we worry about ourselves, our loved ones and all of our futures. How will the pandemic stunt my child’s education, my career trajectory, my experience of the world? And what if I get sick and there’s no hospital bed available?
“Thousands of medical practices have closed during the pandemic,”per the NYT.
What’s next: “Next Thanksgiving will be different,” Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told CNN’s Chris Cuomo on Thursday.
Americans who persevere through 2021 will, we can all hope, weather this turmoil and see flourishing times ahead.
More than 1 million people flew through U.S. airports on Friday, according to TSA data, the second highest number since the coronavirus pandemic began hit the U.S. in mid-March.
Why it matters: As coronavirus cases and hospitalizations continued to soar this week, the CDC issued new guidance on Thursday advising Americans not to travel for Thanksgiving, warning doing so may increase the chance of getting and spreading COVID-19.
By the numbers: The 1,019,836 people TSA screened at U.S. airports on Friday is still less than half the number (2,550,459) that passed through screenings on the same weekday a year ago.
TSA screened 1,031,505 passengers on Oct. 18, the highest number since March 17.
HENRY KOTULA 