For many of us, it is way too easy to reduce this pandemic to statistics: How many positive tests in Cook County; how many in Minnesota; how many people hospitalized; how many in ICU; how many died. Unless we know someone who has suffered severely, all sorts of filters – including generally beneficial regulations like the HIPAA Privacy rule – keep us from witnessing the very real, very horrible human impact the pandemic is having.
We do not hear, for example, of the Cook County residents who have been required to wait hours for hospital treatment in Duluth because there were no beds available or no staff free to see them.
Unless we are directly involved, we have little appreciation for just how flat out both the medical and administrative staff at North Shore Health and Sawtooth Mountain Clinic are working to keep us safe.
And almost none of us gets a glimpse into the long hours and demanding work being invested in managing the pandemic by county government – from Mike Keyport and retiredbut recalled Jim Wiinanen at Emergency Management to Grace Grinager and her overworked team of public health workers, including the intrepid team of contact tracers. Include as well Public Health and Human Services Director Allison McIntyre and her dedicated staff working to meet the needs of families put at risk in myriad ways by the pandemic. There are a host of others making similar contributions.
Too few people fully grasp as well the heavy, heavy burden being borne by the educators and elected school board members who are being called to make wrenching decisions about where and how children will be taught – decisions that severely affect the lives of many Cook County families. Frequently, those decisions are a matter of choosing the least bad option. Making them is not something anyone relishes – nor something for which they ever will receive much in the way of thanks.
This litany is not intended to cause us to feel sorry for these folks; that is not what they desire. Rather, we need to honor the work they do by doing our own work with similar diligence. One nurse said recently that she and her colleagues don’t want our sympathy, they want us to stop trying to kill ourselves and others through reckless behavior. They want us to take mask wearing as a deadly serious requirement, to take great care in keeping a proper distance from others, to avoid the sort of places and gatherings that are most responsible for spreading the virus. And to please, please cooperate with public health tracers and quarantine recommendations.
We need to recognize that the COVID-19 pandemic has reached the five-alarm stage. We all are needed now to show up and do our part, and our part begins with strict diligence in keeping ourselves safe so that others in our community might be safe too.
Jim Boyd, Grand Marais
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