If you believe in the “culling the herd” philosophy of naturally developed “herd immunity,” I ask you to remember my mom.
And consider the five years she lived that she almost certainly would not have lived if she’d been infected with COVID-19.
What were those five years worth, to her and to us? What are five years of life — even in a diminished state as they were for Marie Woster — worth to anyone? To anyone’s family?
To the world, really, and the principle that all life is precious?
That’s part of what we’re talking about when we talk about allowing herd immunity to lope on its own through the human herd and produce an “acceptable” death rate from COVID-19.
I’ve been thinking about what’s “acceptable” since I saw a report on a disturbing survey indicating that 57 percent of Republicans and 31 percent of survey respondents overall considered the U.S. death toll related to COVID-19 infections at the time — about 176,000 — as “acceptable.”
I have to think that unacceptable survey results came from a combined pathology: The Trump effect, a lack of empathy, and a level of hardened cynicism that diminishes the value of certain lives. The lives that some apparently consider to be second class are not the young and the strong and those free of serious pre-existing conditions that can lead to complications and death after contracting COVID-19.
My mom was a jumble of pre-existing conditions following a massive heart attack in 1999 when she was 81. She survived two flat-line experiences, one in her Chevrolet in Chamberlain, where she was slumped over in full arrest when the ambulance crew arrived after her emergency cell-phone call.
They got her heart started, got her to the hospital in Chamberlain, and by airplane to Avera Hospital in Sioux Falls. Her heart stopped again on the flight but was started again.
When the will to live defeats the odds
Somehow, she survived all that, followed by several days on a respirator, and then survived a bypass surgery and heart-valve replacement. After that, she survived a staph infection in the surgical wound and a succession of gruesome surgeries and solemn announcements of 10 percent-survival odds.
Obliterating the odds, my mom emerged from all that with her intellect and wit and eyesight and hearing and sharp tongue intact. But she also had an assortment of serious heart and lung and mobility ailments that left her open to an infection that could have been and almost certainly would have been fatal.
The kind of infection that COVID-19 has proven to produce, sometimes for anyone but especially for those with already impaired health and age-related vulnerabilities.
My mom lived a good life at the Waterford complex in Sioux Falls, mostly independent in her little apartment. She made new friends and loved visits from old friends and family and become known throughout Waterford for her sassy style and ready sense of humor.
She never returned to her independent life in Chamberlain, her old Chevrolet, her frequent trips to Reliance, and her busy coffee-drinking schedule. The freedom she knew and treasured was gone. But she made new coffee friends at Waterford and tried new foods in lunch trips by van from the senior center to restaurants around town.
She never drove again. But, oh my, she got around.
My mom lived to see my son and daughter play basketball for O’Gorman. She lived to see them graduate and head for college. She met newborn great-grandchildren and was showered with attention by visiting nephews and nieces and their kids, and grandkids.
She continued to play a ragtime piano for all to enjoy up until the point where her dying heart simply couldn’t pump enough blood to keep her fingers dancing across the keys.
She lived a good life for more than five years. Not an easy life. Not a full life in the way she had known it before the heart attack. But good. Very good. Valuable beyond calculation, to her and to us.
When it was finally time, her strong spirit gave in
My mom died in July of 2004, long before the emergence of the novel coronavirus that now dominates the news and inspires unrelenting political clashes. Had the virus arrived during my mom’s last five years and had it invaded Waterford or latched onto her while she was out with a group of friends having lunch, she almost certainly would have died.
And I guess her death would have been considered “acceptable” by some because she was old and ill and seriously compromised by other medical conditions. She would have been one of those culled by the natural process toward “herd immunity” as some see it.
But she would have lost five years or three years or one year, depending on when COVID caught up with her. She would have lost time that she otherwise would have had -- full, rewarding, inspiring time, for her and for her family, including me.
I was living in Sioux Falls then. So, I was with my mom a lot. So were my kids and my siblings and their kids and other members of my family. And that time with her was priceless. And it’s that kind of “priceless” time lost that we’re talking about in most of the COVID-19-related deaths.
Those with dementia or even-more complicated physical ailments than my mom's certainly couldn’t live the life she lived. And maybe some family members would be relieved, even in their grief, that the profound suffering of a loved one was over. Or not. Only they would know that.
But most of the COVID deaths involved people closer to my mom’s level of life. And many had much more mobility and fewer health challenges than she did. Some were much younger and had very full lives, living with treatable disorders that turned fatal when COVID was added.
Each life was priceless in its own way.
When losses go far beyond the “acceptable”
Perhaps there is, from a numerical perspective, an “acceptable” number of deaths for this virus — some cold mathematical reality that couldn’t have been avoided. If it exists, I don’t know what that number might be.
But I’m pretty sure it’s not 176,000, or 186,000, which we’ve now passed. Nor is it 196,000, which we’ll soon pass. And it’s certainly not 400,000, which some medical professionals fear we could reach if we don’t as a society take this virus more seriously.
Whatever its awful mortality potential, we’re still figuring out COVID-19. There’s still a lot we need to learn and understand. And many of those who say the most these days seem to know the least, and sometimes seem to feel the least.
I hope we can fight through the idiocy of political division to reach some sort of humane way forward, based on compassion and science rather than ignorance and feckless, fuming partisanship.
We see so many numbers these days on infection rates and mortalities that it’s easy to forget that each number is a life. And each life is precious in its own way.
Every day of my mom’s last five years was proof of that.
