The numbers add up

Coronavirus cases in Skagit County topped 800 – 826 – Monday. County deaths are at 21, a 40% increase in four weeks, from a total of 15 on July 7, a figure that had held steady since May 15. These are both high and increasing numbers. This is bad, and bad news, and not just for the infected people and their families, friends and employers.

An early July outbreak at the Mira Vista elder care facility accounts for the deaths. The huge jump in cases – the count was 449 on June 5, the day the County moved into phase 2 of the state’s Safe Start economic reopening plan – does not have a single source. It does have a main cause, though: people disregarding public health professionals’ guidances.

The culprits: your children and their children, with 65% of cases in the 20-60 age range and 78% of cases aged birth to 60 Almost 630 of the people infected in Skagit County are under 60 years old. The biggest cohort is the 20-39 age group, at 34% of the 826 cases. But their parents, people 40-59 years old, who are supposed to know better, total 250 cases.

A good portion of these numbers is family spread. Memorial Day came, the weather turned warm, backyard BBQs and summer get togethers started. July 4h was a great day for partying. Boom. Cases, which numbered 519 July 1, have jumped almost 300, a 60% increase.

Maybe the truest part of the old normal was the air of American invincibility. That hubris – somewhere between “We’re Americans and we don’t care” and “We’re Americans and life’s normal rules don’t apply to us” – has run smack dab into reality. The coronavirus does not bother with anyone’s beliefs, pride or ego. The virus operates as part of the realm of nature, the natural world. Advertising, alcohol, bragging, swagger, what anyone wants to believe is true does not matter in nature. The facts are the facts no matter how confident and cocky and selfish and focused on self a person is.

Still, La Conner seems to be a bubble of combined normalcy and innocence, with First Street crowded on weekends and tourists shopping and eating at the businesses so vital to the Town’s tax revenues. Staff and tourists seem to not be infecting each other. Kids and teachers are safe, given that school is not in session. There are seven new COVID-19 cases on the Swinomish Reservation, with several of the people asymptomatic.

In Washington and nationally, case numbers continue to rise at alarming rates and so has the rhetoric describing those increases. The last two weeks the state Department of Health used the phrase “runaway spread.” Friday’s news release reported “no turnaround yet.”

Over 40 states are in the red zone of rapidly increasing cases. The surge continues to spread, the tide continues to rise and as a nation there is not a unified, integrated, single-focus plan or the necessary support to the states.

No one wants to be locked down. No one wants to be out of work or out of school. No one wants to read another editorial about the implacability of our national and local condition.

Yet the mantra remains the same: 95 percent of us need to be wearing masks when we are within six feet of each other, all the time. All of us need to limit our interactions to a total of five people outside our household the entire week. None of us are to travel anywhere we don’t have to go.

And every single one of us have to pay close attention to what public health professionals everywhere are advising.