Don't be the turkey

 

This time of year at the Whitaker household, the looming question arises: How many days must we allow the turkey to defrost? Three? Four? How many pounds is that bird again?

But for many American families this pandemic year, another question predominates, or should: Will all of the guests coming for Thanksgiving have properly quarantined for two full weeks beforehand to ensure they don't infect and perhaps sicken and kill some of us? Or: Is anyone even bothering to quarantine? And: Is their idea of quarantining the same as my idea of quarantining?

Medical experts say two weeks are the maximum incubation period for the virus that causes COVID-19, which more Americans are now contracting than at any other time during the past nine months of viral spread. Given statistics suggesting many of us may be pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic, some well-meaning individuals could join in Thanksgiving gatherings and infect kinfolks and friends without knowing it. And with the president of the United States more focused on his losing re-election (or, rather, trying to overturn the election results) than the unprecedented viral spread claiming lives on his watch, and with Texas' Republican governor now less inclined to provoke radicals within his own party as he did earlier through bold public safety orders, this much is evident: We're on our own.

Yet we're on our own only so long as we can be positive everyone around our Thanksgiving dinner table has demonstrated the same unerring caution. The weakest link endangers all. As a 74-year-old friend remarked of his grandchildren — both in their 20s — "I love them, but I'm not too sure how they spend their nighttime hours!" Which is why he and his wife are doing pizza alone this Thanksgiving and holding out a Christmas get-together as a possibility, even though both believe the pandemic will continue to obligate mask-wearing and safety precautions well into 2021. (And, if it's relevant, both voted for a president who has often ridiculed mask-wearing throughout this pandemic year.)

"I'm concerned, I'm deeply worried, that with this degree of prevalence of the virus in our community, some families getting together for a meal could prove fatal to loved ones," Dr. Jackson Griggs, CEO of Waco's Family Health Center, said during a weekly press briefing last week. He recommended enjoying the holiday with only members of the immediate household. If families must welcome others to their table, he stressed keeping the gathering as small as possible; setting up the dinner table outside; keeping chairs six feet apart; remaining masked except when actually dining and drinking; and appointing a "respected voice of authority" in the family to be the enforcer to keep everything and everybody safe.

A medical staffer gauging people's temperatures prior to entry into one of our two hospitals in Waco the other day told me that her mother was absolutely committed to having the whole tribe over on Thanksgiving Day, if only because some family members have died in recent years and she wants to enjoy the company of siblings yet remaining. Yet Mom herself, it seems, is unwilling to entirely give up simple pleasures one might question in a pandemic growing worse by the day. For instance, she continues to gather with friends at the local pancake house once a week. This routine might work out as long as pancake club members otherwise exercise rigorous safety precautions — and as long as anyone in their individual orbits does likewise.

Still, it's an all-American pandemic game of Russian roulette.

Given skyrocketing case counts, hospitalizations and deaths in recent weeks, physicians and hospital administrators have good reason to fear the worst. The president and his most fervent disciples have thoroughly politicized mask-wearing, portraying it as everything from a needless annoyance to a threat to individual liberty. No local instance sums this up better than retired Army Lt. Col. Allen West, a political firebrand who in his campaign to chair the Republican Party of Texas, led a Texas Freedom Rally in Austin on Memorial Day weekend in which, amid crowd-pleasing references to Bunker Hill and San Jacinto, he branded mask-wearing mandates among other health measures tyranny, then got into an accident on Interstate 35 on his motorcycle during his return home. His skin was saved (literally) by physicians and nurses dutifully wearing masks at Waco's Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Medical Center. They did so to prevent infecting their celebrity patient.

Ironically, when West, suffering from a concussion, fractured bones and multiple lacerations, emerged from the medical center into a crowd of well wishers two days later, there was hardly a facial covering in sight. Nor has West changed his tune about mask mandates if his subsequent fire-breathing appearance at Waco's Church of the Open Door just before Election Day is any indication.

Many of the rest of us have meanwhile grown weary of the daily discipline and safety precautions, all heaped atop the ugly ramifications of alleged "virtue signaling" and possibly offending someone. More and more dismiss as exaggerated the dangers of SARS-CoV-2. One sees fewer and fewer of the yard signs that proudly proclaimed "Waco: We are in this together." Erected in the spring, some were yanked as political season heated up and campaign signs elbowed their way onto the field of battle. And why not? After a while, the upbeat signs of spring just seemed irrelevant, passé, naive, unnecessarily provocative. And it turns out we're not built of the same sturdy stuff as the Greatest Generation, and by now many of us are even willing to admit it.

And, more and more of us ask, given daunting circumstances of division, disease and delusion: Why should we forsake seeing family and friends one more time? It may well be the last time we see one another, considering the dark uncertainty of our times.

The past week or so I've noticed the number of people not wearing facial coverings increasing in public venues, including around all those grocery checkout clerks and stockers who this spring won plaudits as frontline workers almost on par with dedicated, selfless medical personnel. In the checkout melee at H-E-B the other day, surrounded by patrons stocking up for the big Thanksgiving holiday, some took notice of a woman with a toddler and a person I assumed to be her mother, all with flaming red hair; none of the trio possessed a mask or demonstrated a care in the world. The woman's sweatshirt read: "All aboard the crazy train."

Those involved in weekly COVID-19 press briefings in Waco display longer and longer faces. Dr. Marc Elieson of Baylor Scott & White Hillcrest Medical Center regularly assumes the role of Grim Reaper, gravely reminding any who listen how many weeks it can take for people to suffer and languish and finally die of the virus, even after they’re hooked up to ventilators, and how people of all ages can become debilitated for weeks, months, perhaps permanently, because of severe damage done by COVID-19 to the heart, lungs and kidneys. As our situation worsens statewide, the governor, unwilling to be stung again politically, pivots and blames locals for not actually enforcing the public health measures he has allotted them by gubernatorial proclamation.

And in Waco, new 35-year-old Mayor Dillon Meek, an attorney, tries to walk the tightrope between all these conflicting dynamics, reading nervously from a script during his first press briefing: "For the sake of those community members who have a higher risk of severe illness and death from this virus, whether family members we care for, our coworkers or those we pass in the grocery store, we must exercise caution as we go into the Thanksgiving holiday. We are a country that desires to celebrate Thanksgiving and a time of thankfulness with those we love the most. And we are a country that believes strongly in our rights to make our own decisions. And I believe that. But we must recognize these decisions can affect others."

All this raises broader, justifiable questions involving governance and political theory. One wonders if what passes for federalism in the United States even allows for a concerted national strategy when so many powers not constitutionally allotted to the federal government are reserved to the states. In many ways, the real power in battling all this lies with 50 or more governors and state legislatures, all of varying degrees of intelligence, competence, integrity and political courage, and to a more limited degree the mayors and county judges. This means residents must fear not only their own state and local leadership deciding poorly but the poorly run states surrounding them. The wildly uneven patchwork of public safety measures from state to state, a friend notes, "is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool."

"Rugged individualism is a terrible way to deal with infectious disease," Yale law professor John Fabian Witt, author of "American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19," said during an Oct. 26 interview broadcast on C-SPAN. "Collective authorities through democratic processes to help communities flourish is really the alternative. One way to think about this is that we have a myth in this country that freedom comes from the government staying out [of problems]. In moments of epidemics, freedom comes from figuring out a way collectively through government to give us all the resources — vaccines and the like — that will help us flourish." 

Yet this raises the biggest question of all, one we can contemplate long after the turkey is reduced to scraps and bones and the guests have gone: Is it fair to entirely blame government at all levels for repeated failures and self-interest when so many of us individually are also willing to bet lives — ours and those of others — on simple pleasures and simple joys? In the days and weeks after Thanksgiving, we will have our answer.