COVID MEANS NO THEATERS FOR ME

COVID is still out there, with cases rising.

I’ve been hearing great things about the new hit movie TOP GUN: MAVERICK, starring Tom Cruise. I’m not a fan of Tom Cruise, but I was a fan of the original TOP GUN (my younger brother was a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot, so I was at least adjacent to that culture) and this is the kind of movie you really need to see on the big screen. Sadly, TOP GUN: MAVERICK is only being shown in theaters.

But therein lies the problem. I haven’t been inside a movie theater in two-and-a-half years—since COVID made it a life-threatening proposition. For me, the idea of sitting for two hours with a crowd of folks who may or may not be infected/masked/vaccinated/boosted (depending on the stage of the pandemic we’re talking about) just hasn’t been worth it, no matter what’s on the screen in front of me. Even at the times I usually attend showings (matinees in the middle of the week), I figure some fool would sit right behind me in a nearly empty theater and cough on my bucket of popcorn. People did, even before that was something that could kill me. I keep waiting for the pandemic to be “over,” or at least to ease, so I can resume what had been one of the greatest pleasures of my pre-COVID life—watching a new movie in a big, dark theater, with popcorn and everything.

Hollywood has unilaterally decided that the pandemic is over, though clearly it isn’t. The powers-that-be (filmmakers, studio owners, theater owners) are tired of losing money and audiences to the streaming services. They’ve decided to stop releasing new films to theaters and streaming services like HBO Max at the same time, insisting that blockbusters like TOP GUN: MAVERICK, Michelle Yeoh’s EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE and others serve time in theaters only (and then, presumably, for rent on demand rather than by subscription to streaming). Hallelujah! Just like the old days!

Except, excuse me, this pandemic ain’t over by a long shot. You may be tired of it. We may all be tired of it. But cases are rising—six times the number of daily cases this Memorial Day than last. And that is likely a dramatic undercount. Many public health departments have stopped counting. Folks are testing at home—which, I suppose, is a good thing—but they aren’t reporting the results to anyone if they turn up positive. They’re just staying home. Maybe.

Hospitalizations are up, too, especially in the South and West, where vaccination and booster rates are lower. Sure, death rates are down, thanks to the availability of antivirals like Paxlovid (and the fact that many older Americans are vaccinated and boosted, and younger Americans have a better survival rate), but the effects of long COVID still drag down some 10-30 percent of those who catch the disease, impairing heart, brain, gut or lung function.

Here's the thing: COVID is a nasty disease. It’s a survivor. It mutates to survive in a population and insinuates itself into every cell to survive in the body. You can catch it even if you’ve been vaccinated and boosted. You can catch it more than once—like a cold, or the flu. Any one of those infections can result in a devastating case, not a mild case, though your chances are better if you’ve been vaccinated and boosted. Any one of those infections could result in long COVID, meaning you are left with debilitating brain fog or asthma or a heart problem.

So, no, I won’t be going to the theater to see the new TOP GUN: MAVERICK movie. That’s a risk I won’t take. (I can only pray this thing has subsided enough that I can go to see the new AVATAR when it comes out.) I don’t want to catch COVID, even a mild case. In fact, I don’t even want to catch a stupid cold anymore. I still wear a mask in the grocery store, even though everyone else has stopped because they’re “tired of COVID.” Well, you don’t stop running when a wolf is chasing you just because you’re tired. Or because you suddenly don’t see that wolf behind you.

Cautiously, Donna

 *Information for this post provided by: "Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Maps and Case Count," The New York Times, June 2, 2022. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html 

 

 

SCHOOL'S OUT--FOREVER?

The coronavirus pandemic has thrust us into the future in some ways whether we like it or not. Forced to stay at home, even those of us who might have been ambivalent about our phones or satellite/cable connections or social media now depend on our technology much more than we had before. We Zoom and Facetime with our families and friends, work at home, meet with our doctors online, devour whatever is on Netflix or Prime Video, order food from whatever app we can on our phones, buy anything and everything from Amazon to deliver to our doors. Resistance is futile.

But the trend that the virus has accelerated at warp speed is education, with classes from kindergarten to college being held online. The problem is, as I’ve heard anecdotally from my just-graduated-from-high-school grandson, his first-grade sister and their mother, and according to the evidence stacking up from school districts around the country, online learning can be challenging in a multitude of ways. Even for kids who are bright and self-motivated, it can be boring. For kids who are struggling, it can be confusing and frustrating. For those without Internet access, computers or workspace at home, it can be impossible. And for teachers who have never learned to teach using the technology, it can be the last straw.

According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, the experiment to educate more than 50 million K-12 students online during lockdown this school year “just didn’t work.” Teachers found the transition away from the classroom difficult, and students found the transition from what they do every day on their phones, tablets and computers for gaming and communication to what they have to do for school to be a lot harder than anyone anticipated.

 

Ugh! So bo-o-o-ring!

Part of it may be the way online classes are structured, though that may vary widely from teacher to teacher, subject to subject, and school system to school system. For example, my six-year-old granddaughter struggled with most subjects online but loved the online math games. She had never succeeded in math in a classroom setting. My grandson was a dedicated classroom student in English and history and was also good at math and science. He started online classes before lockdown as part of a special work/study program to finish his high school degree. He found the classes tedious, the equivalent, he said, of completing electronic worksheets. (I admit most work training courses I’ve had to take online have been similar—and deadly boring.) Few teachers have yet learned to really use the technology to advantage in getting lessons across. Too often they’re just translating their lectures to video, which lack even a human connection.

Many students nationwide complain that teachers give too much work with their online classes. This, apparently, is a function of not understanding fully how long it takes to complete a task on the computer, or maybe just being too enthusiastic about the new technology. It’s clear many assignments don’t take into account the circumstances many students find themselves in—a distracting environment, sharing space and computers, parents that may be working at home (or not home at all, due to work requirements), and the need for individual attention from the teacher, which may or may not be possible.

Some students do well with classes that are recorded for playback at a later time, with teachers available at set times for questions. Other students might never watch the recordings at all. Classes held on platforms like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, with all the students present in a virtual classroom setting have their own problems, according to one eighth-grader from New York City in an opinion piece in the New York Times. Not surprisingly, Veronique Mintz observes, the same teachers that “struggle to manage students in the classroom also struggle online.”

In a suburb of Washington D.C., Fairfax County schools have had problems with two separate online platforms, first the commonly-used college system Blackboard, then, when students flooded that platform with obscene, racist and homophobic messages, the newer Google “suite” of tools, including Chat and Meet. Now students are receiving unwanted personal bullying messages from Chat, presumably authored by their virtual classmates. The school system’s IT staff are outclassed by the bullying students, who, according to Tim Schaad, a Fairfax parent and cybersecurity specialist, “are running circles around administrators.” 

 

A chaotic classroom can happen even online.

That’s a rich people’s problem, of course. Thornier still is the problem of those many students who don’t have access to computers or the Internet at all. A recent story in USAToday relates how one mom saw a teenager sitting on the curb outside a Subway in Starke, Florida with a Chromebook in his lap. She turned her car around to check on him. Turns out he was using the restaurant’s WiFi to do his homework. He had no Internet access at home. The article goes on to detail the lengths to which the Jacksonville, Florida school district has gone to provide computers and mobile hotspots to more than a third of its 110,000 students. Still, over 200 students remain without access.

Here in Madison County, in the mountains of Western North Carolina, funds are not available for such an effort. While we’re still in lockdown, kids can sit outside the library or in the parking lots of schools if they don’t have Internet at home, and some computers have been made available, but not nearly enough. So, like in years far past, the children of Appalachia will be falling further behind the longer we remain in lockdown.

At least they can remain blissfully ignorant of the cruelty their peers can deliver via Google Chat or the Comments section at “school.”

Virtually, Donna

*Information for this post provided from:

"The Results Are In For Remote Learning: It Didn't Work," by Tawnell D. Hobbs and Lee Hawkins, The Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2020. https://www.wsj.com/articles/schools-coronavirus-remote-learning-lockdown-tech-11591375078 

"Why I'm Learning More With Distance Learning Than I Do In School," by Veronique Mintz, The New York Times, May 5, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/opinion/coronavirus-pandemic-distance-learning.html 

"'Mama is tired': After school closures, some families burn out on online classes, others thrive," Emily Bloch, Florida Times-Union/USAToday, May 5, 2020. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/education/2020/05/05/coronavirus-online-classes-school-closures-homeschool-burnout/3055101001/

POSTPONED DUE TO PLAGUE: EVERYTHING

In Monday’s post, Laurie gave us a glimpse of what the coronapocalypse has been like for her in tourism-dependent New Mexico, as someone intimately involved in a sport dependent on spectators (horse racing), with an interdependent infrastructure (not to mention people and animals) that can’t really afford the disruptions the spread of this disease has brought.

All of us here in tourism-dependent North Carolina certainly echo her concerns. Our governor not only closed the schools and nursing homes in the state for an indefinite length of time, but also closed the bars and restaurants (except for takeout orders). In Asheville, a city twenty-five minutes away from where I live, the hospitality industry is the largest employer, and most of that industry’s employees live slim paycheck to paycheck, bolstered by tips, none of which they will now be receiving for an unknown time. 

The bars and restaurants themselves can scarcely afford to lose the income that would normally have come their way this time of year. They exist on the narrowest of margins anyway, with closures a regular occurrence in the best of times. How many will survive this blow is something no one can predict.

In my small town of Marshall, the shuttering of bars and restaurants creates an even bigger dilemma. The few establishments that eke out a living here maintain a razor-thin reserve and support a disproportionate number of the younger members of our community as employees. Some of them are trying to survive by gearing up for take-out with minimal staff. In order to help them, Marshall citizens are ordering take-out when they can, paying online and buying gift certificates for an optimistic future.

And, of course, all of this pushes a ripple effect throughout the economy. Fewer people going out and spending money means suppliers have no customers for what they provide to restaurants, bars, shops and so on. They begin to reduce hours and close, too. It’s no wonder the stock market is falling. We are, unfortunately, a consumer-based economy. If consumers can’t participate, the house of cards collapses.

Early, swift action at the Federal level might have avoided some of the worst of this, but the time is past for that. And, at any rate, the agencies and mechanisms that should have been in place to deal with this national crisis had been gutted, diminished, and denied long ago. 

Our first mistake was to allow profit to rule our health care system, so hospitals operate on an as-needed basis: staffing with only the bare minimum number of doctors and nurses to cover shifts; ordering only enough medications and supplies to cover basic needs for a short period; operating with the fewest beds possible to ensure those beds are filled to capacity to maximize profit. As a result, according to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. can offer an average of only 2.8 beds per 1000 people, as opposed to 4.3 in China, 8.0 in Germany and 12.3 in South Korea, which by all accounts has been handling this outbreak like a champ.

So, we started out short of medical personnel, short of hospital capacity, short of basic supplies. Then we refused outside help, in the form of testing kits from the World Health Organization. As a result, we’re critically far behind on testing those who may be have been exposed to the virus or may actually be sick with it. And, it appears, the few tests that are available are being given not to the most vulnerable among us, but to celebrities and political A-listers. The official answer to why that is? A shrug. Oh, and a suggestion to governors that they try to get their own crucial supplies.

 

Yep, we were made for this!

Okay, so now we’re here. What’s to do? For those of us who are natural-born introverts, social distancing is no great sacrifice. Everyone who knows me is aware I have a HUGE personal bubble anyway. The only problem is, we may be cooped up with the more extroverted members of our households for the near future. They’ll be sharing our space and our quiet time, destroying our hopes for all the work we’d planned to get done in this time of limited outside engagement!

Some practical suggestions, then:

 --Headphones!—For those times when my husband and I both work from home, I slap on the headphones and check out YouTube for binaural beats, a type of electronic music that research shows can improve your focus, healing, happiness, sleep and a host of other good things. You can use it for meditation practice, too, but I find it drowns out phone conversations from the next office over just great.


--Go outside!—Fortunately for everybody, and most especially for parents of kids of all ages, this outbreak happened at the beginning of spring. Unless it’s pouring rain or blowing snow, get outside for a walk or a few minutes in the yard. You can work in the early garden or play with the dog (who is already ecstatic that you’re home!). Local and state parks remain open, and national parks are waiving fees right now, hoping that most people will find it easy to maintain a decent distance in the great outdoors. Besides, it’s been proven that COVID-19 doesn’t like fresh air and sunshine. 

--Virtual tours!—When the weather won’t allow it, take a virtual tour of a national park or a museum or an aquarium. They’re free and guaranteed to keep you and/or your little ones occupied for hours. After all, there is only so much Sesame Street or Disney you can take. Google Earth offers tours of 31 National Parks; Google Earth and 12 world-famous museums teamed up for virtual tours of their collections; the National Aquariums at Baltimore and Washington D.C. offer virtual tours (after all, the sea creatures don’t have to practice social distancing); another site allows you to travel virtually around the world on your computer or big-screen television; and more than a thousand colleges and universities offer virtual tours of their campuses if your teenager is looking for school in the fall (just check online for the school of your choice). The only problem may be access to enough Internet bandwidth to do everything we all want to do. 

--Reviews!—Remember all those books you read and still need to review for Goodreads? (Or maybe that’s just me.) At least this is a good time to whittle down the TBR pile. And I'm hoping to get to a few reviews while I’m at it.
 

It’s a new day, after all. Might as well make the best of it.

Stay well, 
Donna