Have you heard? Lunar new year starts next week! But all is not as festive as this display in the northeastern city of Shenyang suggests.
In a rare acknowledgment that the Chinese government's abandonment of its people to covid is taking a big toll, citizens have been encouraged not to visit elderly relatives who have not already been infected. “You have all kinds of ways to show you care for them," Guo Jianwen, a member of the state council’s pandemic prevention team, reportedly said, "you don’t necessarily have to bring the virus to their home.”
The true extent of the calamity is impossible to know. Estimates of five to nine to fifteen thousand dead a day can't be tested, but the official death toll of a mere forty in the last month is breathtaking in its mendacity. Everyone must know it's untrue, but the system is banking on nobody's being able to say with any certainty how untrue. Cynical but brutally effective. I can't but think of the words for which Chloe Zhao's Oscar 2021 triumph was censored in her homeland, that the PRC is "a place where there are lies everywhere."
The authorized story seems to be that, after waiting resolutely until it was scientifically safe, China has quickly and decisively achieved herd immunity from a now largely harmless covid variant. For most people, it's a matter of three days of fever and then they're good to go! The other people, the vulnerable, the unprotected? Nothing to see here, move right along!
No doubt a coup if it were really true. But how could anyone come to think it was true? Maybe leaving the dead uncounted will be counted "scientific" in a different sense, in terms of a "scientific Marxism" which accepts the deaths of untold victims as part of the historical dialectic. It's happened before. Will they get away with it again?
Deaths from COVID have been unexpected, untimely, particularly painful, and, in many cases, preventable. The pandemic has replaced community with isolation, empathy with judgment, and opportunities for healing with relentless triggers. Some of these features accompany other causes of death, but COVID has woven them together and inflicted them at scale. In 1 million instants, the disease has torn wounds in 9 million worlds, while creating the perfect conditions for those wounds to fester. It has opened up private grief to public scrutiny, all while depriving grievers of the collective support they need to recover.
Fuzzy nose-tickling filaments on the masks provided by our school reminded me of the cli-fi story a student in last semester's "Anthropo-cene Humanities" class wrote about future beachgoers terrorized by monstrous blue sea creatures composed entirely of the billions - trillions?! - of discarded masks generated by the covid pandemic.
We've reached nine-hundred thousand souls, lost to covid-19 in the United States. More every minute. The most recent number on the Johns Hopkins dashboard is nine hundred and two thousand, four hundred seventy-eight souls, nearly one-sixth of the global toll of five million, seven hundred and thirty-seven thousand, six hundred and fifty-three souls. Woe.
In a statement yesterday, President Biden mourned, too.
Today, our nation marks another tragic milestone — 900,000 American lives have been lost to COVID-19. They were beloved mothers and fathers, grandparents, children, brothers and sisters, neighbors, and friends. Each soul is irreplaceable. We pray for the loved ones they have left behind, and together we keep every family enduring this pain in our hearts.
This is welcome - so much better than his life and death-denying predecessor would have done - but still seemed to me somehow insufficient. (Not that anything could be sufficient!) I realized what was getting to me: the near-exclusive focus on biological family as the locus of "American lives." "Friends" comes after "neighbors," like the outer fringe of moral concern rather than a centerpiece of full lives. Even stranger, "partners" (or at least "wives" and "husbands") don't appear at all. Nor do "fellow citizens." Is it a good or a bad thing that, even in a moment of public mourning, identity is imagined as private?
Omicron's not so dangerous if you're vaccinated and boostered and mask, but that's evidently a bridge too far for the US, despite resources. What's the matter with us? Why are we registering more deaths (two thousand six hundred every day!) than last winter, when we faced a far deadlier variant without the benefit of vaccinations? 
I phoned it in today - literally! I arrived at school bright and early (7:30!) only to find my "medical clearance" status prevented me from entering the buillding. I've had a few students each week report hitting the same roadblock because covid tests they'd submitted were misplaced or results delayed; today was my turn. But students were showing up in class! What to do? I found an outside table at the cafe around the corner (they allow no laptops inside), switched on the hotspot on my cellphone and used the signal to zoom into the class from my laptop. I gave students some projects to work on in twos and threes, including a google.doc I was able to monitor, and invited them to swing by and say hello once they were finished. Got to introduce them to a neighborhood coffee shop, too! This picture shows me, bemused, and in zoom's mirror image.
Meanwhile, in unvaccinated America the virus rages on. And the global death toll has reached five million souls, these mostly also unvaccinated - though most of these never had the chance to protect themselves which too many Americans continue to reject.
I got a covid test again today. This wasn't the fortnightly test required for access to campus, but in addition: a student in yesterday's class got a positive result this morning for a test he took after our class. The student let me know right away, and I later got an official notification confirming that, since I'm fully vaccinated and without symptoms, I need not isolate. However I should monitor possible symptoms for a fortnight and, 3-5 days after the potential exposure, get tested. That means it's too soon for me to test positive for anything that happened yesterday but I decided it wouldn't hurt to make sure I haven't been infected in some other way. I'll do another test Friday for yesterday's contact.
That's not the first positive test among my students, by the way, though the first one (submitted during orientation week) turned out to be a false positive. And once you think of everyone's movements within and beyond class and figure in the inescapable delays in testing results, it's hard not to get a little spooked. Results take time to be processed (usually less than 48 hours though not always), by which time the tested person could have been exposed anew or again! But really maddening is the sneakiness of contagiousness. We're told that infected people seem to be at their most contagious a few days before they develop symptoms! Since infection and transmission are possible even for the fully vaccinated (not that often but often enough to be concerned), regular testing of everyone is needed.
Yet in the absence of immediate real-time results, you never know you're fully in the clear. Even with our school's multiprong approach of near-universal vaccination, frequent testing, contant masking and extra hygiene it takes a dogged faith to feel safe. Someone's likened the situation to Swiss cheese: each slice has holes, but stack enough slices and you're covered. I get it, but when I learn of someone I've been in contact with having tested positive a day or two after the contact and days before I can know if I was affected, all I can see is the holes.
Update, Saturday: both Wednesday's and Friday's tests had negative results.
As seen on the New York City subway, a message which more parts of the country need to hear. Other slogans in the same series: Masks are like opinions: everyone should have one and I care for you; you care for me and my favorite Save the life of someone you don't even know.
My first appointment back on campus is four weeks from tomorrow, the Thursday of Orientation Week. By that time I'll have officially confirmed my vaccination status (everyone on campus - students, faculty and staff - must be vaccinated unless eligible for an exemption), and will also somehow have tested myself for covid and, presumably, tested negative (required within 7 days of first arrival back on campus). The reality of what being back in person will
demand is just dawning on us. At present, all classes are to be held in person, even though a Faculty Senate survey conducted in early June - when the outlook was rather brighter than it is today - recorded considerable apprehensiveness. I was among 28% who would be happy with a 50/50 split of in-person and remote teaching, part of the majority resistant to the idea of going fully in person. I don't know how students feel but at least some surely share our caution.
