I have a hate-hate relationship with Covid-19. I’ve been lucky enough — and privileged enough — to avoid it, so far (knock wood). I have been vaccinated since mid-May. I still wear masks in most indoor settings.
I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I might not ever get to write in a coffee shop again. I’m still mad about it, but I’m heading toward acceptance at a faster, easier clip than a couple of months ago.
I’ve never been particularly afraid that I would die from Covid — I’m young enough and healthy enough that death rates in my demographics are pretty low.
But I have a couple of reasons to believe that I might not have an easy time of it. I have asthma, and a deep and abiding appreciation for being able to breathe, thanks to appropriate maintenance meds. I don’t want to upset that apple cart with a big respiratory disease.
Add to that I have had an experience with a long-tailed viral infection — a history of not bouncing back from illness. Repeating a cycle of unending fatigue, joint pain and brain fog for multiple months is not my idea of a good time.
All of this is to say that I’m a HARD NO on throwing caution to the wind, because long covid would S-U-C-K.
Unfortunately, this means relying on a not always reliable source for local information about what’s going on in my community. Take yesterday, for instance.
451 cases is a four-fold increase in daily cases from the last week (~100 cases a week is still WAY too high for this region), so at first glance, it looks like Spokane is having one hell of an outbreak.
Except…
The Spokane Regional Health District has a history of adding backlogged results into random days.
It’s frustrating, because when that happens, none of us has any idea what’s actually going on with the pandemic. Is this an outbreak? Is there some kind of odd cluster somewhere? Do I need to change my behavior?
SRHD apparently doesn’t feel like it’s their place to provide any kind of context for these numbers. This region was over the pandemic before it started, and our behavior as a community has never been exemplary. I’m sure the health district has taken no small amount of heat for everything they’ve done over the last 16 months (only some of which they’ve deserved).
But to have our health district be so lackadaisical is even less helpful in that context, because I don’t know what my response to conditions should be as an individual (should I mask when I run into a store? Is eating in a restaurant not a good idea, AGAIN?), never mind getting my neighbors to respond to public health recommendations.
And yesterday, they posted the case numbers with no explanation for the massive increase. I tweeted at them, and I’m sure the local news organizations approached them and were like, “uhhhh, what’s going on here?”
The local news organizations must have gotten involved, because about an hour after posting the giant numbers, this note appeared on the site:
Sigh. This reeks of multiple phone calls to the SRHD that they were tired of answering.
Maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea to try to get ahead of the questions by proactively posting information about what’s going on, along with the testing data from today, so we actually know how many records are part of the backlog?
Carmen Yount 