science – Surely Joy

Pandemic postcard #55: Booster club

November 1, 2021November 1, 2021 Julie Fanselow

A story in this morning’s Seattle Times noted how this city is apparently the most stressed-out major metro in the United States, with more than 54 percent of folks here telling a U.S. Census Bureau survey team that they felt “nervous, anxious, or on edge” for at least several days during the preceding two weeks. Reporting the story, Gene Balk noted that the Census Bureau has only been asking the question since the pandemic began, so it’s hard to know whether this is a new development or a long-standing one, but we’ve ranked either number one or number two in surveys taken since July 2021.

Balk deals in data, yet he noted, “This is purely anecdotal, but I see a tremendous number of Seattleites masked up even when they’re walking outside,” at “extremely low risk of contracting the virus.” I’ve noticed this, too, and it’s very strange. Even with COVID-19 cases dropping, I get why we need to keep masking up in stores and on transit; I’m fine with that, it makes sense, and I’ll be wearing a mask on any bus ride or flight I take for the foreseeable future. But at this point — at least for healthy, vaccinated people — masking up outdoors in uncrowded settings seems like so much virtue-signalling hygiene theater, which is actually a very Seattle thing. Lighten up, folks.

My lax attitude toward masking up does not extend to the excellent news that many of us are now eligible for COVID-19 booster shots. On October 21, the CDC authorized boosters for all people 18 and older who’d received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine at least two months ago. I was getting a flu shot when the news broke, so I decided to give my arm a rest for a bit, but I signed up online for a vaccination slot at a local pharmacy late last week. It was such a cake walk compared to the months of waiting for my first shot last spring.

When I showed up last Friday, I was prepared to get a J&J booster because I thought, as a healthy 60-year-old, that’s all I could get. But the pharmacy tech said no, I could have whatever I wanted, so I got a Moderna booster, and I now feel like I have the best possible chance at continuing to keep the bugs at bay (or to have a mild case if I wind up a “breakthrough” statistic). As the National Institutes of Health found in a study this summer, J&J recipients who got a Moderna booster saw a 76-fold jump in antibodies that neutralize the coronavirus, the best outcome of all the combinations studied.

All gain, no pain: I had a sore arm for about a day after the shot and that was it, but even people who report losing a day or two to side effects from the vaccine say it’s totally worth it to know they’re protected against serious illness. Meanwhile, many Americans are still holding out on getting this protection, but it’s good to know that their numbers continue to dwindle — not because they’re getting sick and dying of COVID, though that is tragically still happening, but because they’ve decided it makes no sense to remain unvaccinated. Whether we continue to mask up indoors or roll up our sleeves for a shot, we’re all looking out for one another.

As I’ve written before, fear seems to be at the heart of so much of what ails our country these days, and fear has certainly driven much of our response to a pandemic that is running on far longer than it needed to. The trick is to identify what we truly need to fear and focus on what we can do most effectively to mitigate those risks so we can fearlessly embrace everything else life has to offer.

A note about this week’s video: I found this one while searching for a good take of Josh Ritter’s song “Long Shadows,” which — along with Dan Hicks’ “I Scare Myself” — was going through my head as I composed this post. It’s a one-take video shot on an iPhone! Very cool. As I mentioned in my last dispatch, I’ve been on a novel-reading tear this fall, and Josh’s new book The Great Glorious Goddamn of It All was a real treat. He is a renaissance man in a band full of them. Enjoy.

Be/wilder

October 20, 2021October 20, 2021 Julie Fanselow

“Which do you think is bigger? Outer space or inner?” — Robbie Byrne to his father, Theo, in Bewilderment

Have you ever finished a book and wanted to immediately read it all again? I’ve just had that experience with Bewilderment, the new novel from Richard Powers. But because I have so many other books waiting, I settled for re-reading its first few pages and its last few pages, savoring those passages for now. I had the same impulse with Powers’ previous book, The Overstory; as soon as I finished it in 2018, I wanted to read it again, preferably over a few days in the woods. But it was a much bigger book that originally took me weeks to read, and it’ll be a while (maybe next summer?) before I get back to it.

Bewilderment is, at its heart, a love story about a father and son and the woman whom they both loved, a woman who loved them both but not quite as much as she loved the world and all the things in it. I read it quickly over a few days mostly spent outdoors, taking in its final 50 pages or so sitting by a lake yesterday afternoon, leaves falling all around me. It was the perfect book to read on the cusp of a summer I was sorry to see come to an end and an autumn that I tentatively welcome, as if I had any choice in the matter.

That’s not to say it is an easy book to digest. Powers finished this book mid-pandemic, shortly before the election last fall. The uncertainty its characters feel is palpable, because it is what we are all living through: environmental devastation, authoritarianism’s creep, and the way our market economy seeks to define and solve every malady with a diagnosis and a pill.

The beauty of Bewilderment is how it resists despair and ameliorates anxiety. It insists that each of us is perfect in our imperfection; that although we can never fully know another person, empathy is possible; that our interior lives are full universes unto themselves; and that a rich inner life can help us survive the pain we’re inflicting on the world. Bewilderment is a book to read in the spirit I think it was written, a mix of hope, resolve, and wild abandon — which seems like a good way to live right now, too.

I finished Bewilderment on the shores of Deep Lake in Nolte State Park, southeast King County, WA. — *Bewilderment* is a book to read outside, if you can.

Pandemic postcard #51: Waiting my turn

March 11, 2021April 26, 2021 Julie Fanselow

It’s sometime in April, and I’m in line outside the stadium field house that has recently opened as Seattle’s mass vaccination site. Nurses are standing by with tens of thousands of single-dose Johnson & Johnson shots newly arrived from the feds, and I hold a sliver of hope that my silver hair will confer an advantage in securing one of these coveted vaccines. I easily pass through the entrance, and my excitement builds as I near the station where volunteers are verifying eligibility.

The woman at the sign-in table glances at me, starts the paperwork and asks for my driver’s license. She frowns as she sees that, despite a mane of graying hair, I am a few months shy of my 60th birthday. A few more questions reveal that I live alone and do my non-essential work from the safety of my computer, that I am not a smoker, and that I have no serious health conditions.

Turns out I’m still not eligible for a vaccination, and it remains unclear when I will be. “Maybe by late May?” the volunteer muses. I stifle an urge to cry as I turn for the exit. I have plans to visit my daughter over Mother’s Day for only the second time in more than a year. Will I still be unable to hug her?

I didn’t feel any vaccine envy until last Saturday, but it hit full force for me that day. First, I saw a friend’s Facebook story reveal that he’d secured a vaccine as a teacher. He’s in his 30s and teaches English as a foreign language — online. If anyone questions his eligibility, I guess he can argue that maybe he’ll get an in-person job soon. Later in the day, I learned that two family members had also received their first doses of the Moderna vaccine. Their situations merited legitimately getting the shots despite their tender ages (26 and 55), yet I still felt twinges of jealousy.

Then on Tuesday, the CDC announced that vaccinated people can now safely socialize together indoors without masks. I’ve signed up to write thank-you notes to people who take part in my church’s annual pledge drive, and within hours of the CDC announcement, the organizer sent an email inviting people to her home for an indoor note-writing party next week. As I sent my regrets, I felt another pang of loss and a preview of the limbo that we last-to-be-vaccinated folks will endure this spring as social gatherings ramp up among the protected.

It’s still the early days. As I write this, 19 percent of Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine to fight COVID-19, and one in 10 are now fully vaccinated. I’m genuinely happy for people who are managing to get the shot, and it does look like the pace of vaccinations is quickening. But I also know that, due to my age, self employment, and lack of risk factors, I will likely be waiting a long time. It’s not always easy to make peace with that, but at least it’s a short-term situation, and certainly shorter than the year I’ve already endured.

Our priorities as a society seem clear and indisputable: vaccinate older folks and people of color, because they’ve been hit hardest by the coronavirus’s lethality. Beyond that, it gets a bit fuzzier. People under 65 with underlying health conditions need the vaccine, but that’s a wide category, subject to squishy interpretation and self identification. We need to give people the benefit of the doubt and honor those who feel they can’t wait, especially since a constellation of factors may be in play.

How about a 60-year-old with minor health issues who is caring for an aging parent? How about a 35-year-old who has been housebound for a year with an immune disorder? These seem like no-brainer situations. Get them their shots, stat. Then again, how about younger people who have mild health issues? And who is most essential in the vast category of essential workers? I’d put front-line healthcare personnel and grocery store workers at the front of the line, followed by teachers so we can open in-person learning. But hairstylists and health club employees? Maybe, but it gets murky.

I volunteer twice a week as an online English teacher, and there is no way I’d stretch that fact into a qualifying condition since I can’t catch COVID on Zoom. On the other hand, I also volunteer a few times a month at a food bank, and it was after such a stint that I received word in December that I may have been exposed to the virus. (I quarantined, and I tested negative.) I understand the food bank’s full-time staff may soon be eligible for vaccination, and they should be. But what about those of us who drop in on occasion? Although it doesn’t seem right to push us forward in the queue, I could reasonably argue that I might expect to earn a few bonus points toward eligibility via this moderately risky unpaid work. For now, though, I’d rather my shot go to the older woman volunteering beside me who hasn’t been able to get an appointment.

There are stand-by lists aimed at distributing unclaimed vaccinations so they don’t go to waste. People sign up and get alerted by text if a shot is available and they can immediately go get it. Intrigued, I checked to see if such a program is available in Seattle. It is, but only for people 65 and up. Then there’s the phenomenon of people traveling to places with fewer restrictions in order to get their shots. Alaska is one of the only four states I haven’t yet seen, and everyone 16 and older there is now eligible for the vaccine. Hmmmm … like many of us, I can work from anywhere these days … but I guess you actually need to prove that you live there. Go figure.

It’s human nature to want to give ourselves the best shot at life. Eventually, there will be enough vaccine for everyone who wants it, and it sounds like that time is now mere months away. After a year without hugs and unmasked human contact, my vaccination can’t come soon enough. But I’ll wait my turn, hoping that the people who truly need this protection are getting it the soonest. I’ll also try to remember that my place near the end of the line is the result of my relative youth, reasonably good health and no small measure of privilege and good luck — and for all these things, I am grateful.

Thank you for reading Surely Joy. You can find the first Pandemic Postcards and my earlier writings here. If you’d like to get future posts via email, look for the link on the right side of this page (or maybe below this post, if you’re on a mobile device). I write for a living, so if you’d like to support my work, please hit the tip jar. Thank you.

Pandemic postcard #46: Don’t move this goalpost

February 4, 2021February 5, 2021 Julie Fanselow

When it comes to doing right by our planet, I am a perennial optimist. In 1971, inspired by the first Earth Day a year earlier, I started the John J. Audubon Nature Society at my elementary school. As a young reporter in the 1980s, I organized my newsroom to start recycling. In 2007, I took my 12-year-old daughter to hear Al Gore. And in 2012, I signed on to work for a nonprofit that organizes religious people to address climate change. Turns out they really needed a fundraiser and a data base wrangler, not a communications pro, so we parted ways after a year–but amid the ongoing politicization of climate science, I was inspired to learn how people from many faith traditions saw protecting the planet as a moral calling.

I am also a realist, which is why General Motors’ announcement that it will stop making gas-powered cars by 2035 strikes me as a very big deal. President Biden has already reversed many of his predecessor’s anti-environmental moves, which Donald Trump had in turn reversed from the Obama era. But GM knows it prefers certainty over the regulatory roulette of policy by executive order, so the automaker isn’t waiting for government to tell it what to do: It’s proactively committing itself to electric cars. It’s a bold and important move for a legacy American company, especially since transportation is the number one source of carbon emissions in the United States.

The year 2035 also is the Biden team’s target for zero fossil fuel emissions from power plants, which are the second largest source of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, after transportation. As climate reporter Coral Davenport said on “The Daily” from The New York Times this week, this benchmark, coupled with another Biden goal to eliminate all carbon from the U.S. economy by 2050, “is also exactly in line with what scientists say is required to avoid the most devastating effects of a warming planet.” We all know that those effects—severe storms, fires, drought, and rising seas—have already begun, and they’re not going away. Rather, this is about keeping the planet safe for people to inhabit at all.

American business and the new administration agree: It’s time to think big. Think about how, within 14 years, we could slash pollution as big transportation companies go electric and our electric plants go renewable. It would mean good new jobs for the folks who used to work in the oil, coal, and gas industries. It would mean America leading the world in a cause that really matters. Yet 14 years is not a long time at all. It’s been 14 years since I took my kid to hear Al Gore say that yes, the country that ended slavery, gave women the right to vote, fought World War II on two fronts, beat communism, beat apartheid, fought for civil rights, and went to the moon could win over global warming.

We all used to talk about 2020 vision, and we all know how that worked out. Now, 2035 vision appears to be in sight. It’s not as catchy as 2020 vision, but if we can stick to these timetables—if we refrain from moving the goalposts yet again—we have a decent chance to halt the ultimate pandemic.

Click here to hear “The Daily” on Biden’s climate plan and here to read my account of Al Gore at Boise State in 2007. Thank you for reading Surely Joy!

Pandemic postcard #43: Wonder

January 15, 2021January 11, 2022 Julie Fanselow

That’s my word for 2021: wonder. I appreciate this word for its many layers of depth and meaning. To wonder can mean to be astonished and amazed, and it can mean to dwell in a state of scientific curiosity or philosophical pondering. Occasionally wonder can signify all of the above, all at once. I think we call that transcendence.

Wonder is what led me to become a journalist: wonder as a license to ask questions and be inquisitive about how the world works. We live in the golden age for this sort of wonder, since answers to our questions are as close as the computer in our pocket. Yet if the past year–and especially the past week–prove anything, it’s that most big questions defy easy answers. I am grateful for the working journalists who are asking the questions anyway, and for the historians who are trying to make meaning of our times even they unfold, and for everyone who is navigating our layered pandemics and shutdowns and breakdowns with open hearts and open minds.

Although I appreciate wonder of all kinds, I am especially partial to wonder as magic and awe. This sort of wonder is what compels me to stop whatever I’m doing to watch the sunrise or notice the play of shadows and light in my apartment. I am grateful for these small, sublime moments. They seem to be happening more often amid and perhaps because of the chaos of the world, and I am grateful for this, too.

Wonder as awe often leads to wonder as curiosity. This scientific sense of wonder has been the key to our species’ survival and it may save us yet. The scientists of long ago discovered fire and the wheel and the fact of the Earth’s orbit around the sun. Today, our scientists seek to address a global pandemic and tackle climate change. They are heroes in an era of competing narratives and cognitive dissonance, yet they’ve also long recognized the inadequacy of facts to explain much of the human condition. Take Albert Einstein, who wrote this in his book Living Philosophies:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead —his eyes are closed. The insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.

Or, if you like, Tom Waits. He’s neither a scientist nor a theologian, but I think he’s onto something here:

We live in an age when you say casually to somebody “What’s the story on that?” and they can run to the computer and tell you within five seconds. That’s fine, but sometimes I’d just as soon continue wondering. We have a deficit of wonder right now.

I prize this sense of wonder as much as that of wonder as awe and curiosity. This philosophical strand of wondering helps us ponder whether and how the world could be a kinder, more just, more generous, and more loving place. It’s this sense of wonder that can make us more comfortable resting in mystery and reckoning with nuance and shades of gray. It’s what compels me to keep writing these columns for myself and for the few who see them. (Thank you, dear reader.)

Wonder as awe enriches our souls. Wonder as curiosity can lead to greater knowledge and wisdom. And sometimes, wonder itself is enough. May it be all those things for me and for you and for our world in 2021.

I’m curious to know whether you’ve adopted a word or phrase of the year for 2021. If so, what is it and why is it calling to you at this time?

This week’s videos: Iris Dement sings her song Let the Mystery Be; The Wonders perform in my favorite movie, That Thing You Do!; Mary Oliver reads her poem The Summer Day.

Pandemic postcard #39: I think we have a shot

December 18, 2020April 26, 2021 Julie Fanselow

“We are in the valley of the shadow of death. It is really dark. We know the sun is going to come up over a mountain at the other side of the valley, but it can’t rise fast enough.” — Science reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr., discussing the state of the pandemic on “The Daily” from The New York Times

“In North Dakota, you’ll see the most beautiful sunrises. Today is the most beautiful sunrise.” — Fargo physician Dr. Rishi Seth to reporter Jack Healy, last Monday just before he received one of the first COVID-19 vaccinations given in the United States

Mark well this middle week of the darkest December, for we will never forget it. For all their multitude of sins, big pharma and big government have come to the rescue, and men and women of science and medicine are now rolling up their sleeves to accept the best-ever holiday gift—a vaccine that has arrived just in time to help them gird for the many months of battle still ahead.

How fitting, too, that this historic event is taking place at the solstice, when we have mere hours of daylight in much of the Northern Hemisphere. The valley of death is still all around us, in relentlessly grim pandemic statistics and in months of Congressional dithering amid job and housing insecurity and long lines at the food banks. But the vaccines are arriving, more slowly than promised but much faster than we expected. Truth is finally dawning for many who’d prefer fiction, and the long nights will soon get a little shorter, minute by minute.

Bless the anonymous angels of encouragement

Given the events of this week, it feels like the world is leaning into the light as never before, actively choosing hope and repair over despair. Hope is a choice we’ll need to keep making over and over this long winter. Yet we need the darkness, too, as a time of rest and reflection. Even as we anticipate the return of what we knew as normal, we can use these winter months to consider what we want to save from this long pandemic year.

I want to hold onto the knowledge that even in a year I earned very little income, I found ways to share what I have—my time and talent, mostly, but even some treasure–because my government and my family and my friends have been generous to me. Amid this year of unparalleled loss and inept leadership, there has also been also widespread recognition that “all of us need all of us to make it,” in the words of the Rev. Theresa Soto.

Together, we have an opportunity to start remaking our world. We can end the pandemic through science, we can encourage reason as a road to happiness, and we can adopt mutual care and concern as the ground on which we stand.

Here are links to The Daily’s interviews with Donald G. McNeil Jr. (Dec. 14) and healthcare professionals receiving the first vaccines (Dec. 15). Deep gratitude to the essential workers who have labored overtime all year, and for whom much hard work remains. May you stay well.