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December 15, 2022 |
With the traditional ringing of the bell we bring this meeting to order!
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Welcome to this week’s meeting of the eClub of the State of Jefferson.
I am Bob Gibson, President of the Rotary eClub of State of Jefferson. Welcome to this week’s meeting. I hope this finds you well.
By now, you have received the ballots for our election of Board members and officers and ratification of Bylaws. Please return your response to Jean Hamilton. We are handling the vote in this manner because we didn’t have the required quorum at our Zoom meeting last Saturday. I understand a Zoom meeting on a Saturday morning in December is challenging. “Time” becomes our most valuable asset. Thank you for your assistance with this.
Sunday morning, I attended the general membership meeting of the No Borders Rotaract Club. They held the meeting on a “new-to-me” platform, Discord https://discord.com/ . It was a wonderful meeting that combined fellowship and service. The program was about the challenges of global immunization. It was truly an international meeting. They are maximizing the value and utility of technology to carry on their good work. When you have the opportunity, I encourage you to visit one of their meetings.
Thank you for your interest in our Club and your commitment to “Service above Self.”
Enjoy the meeting.
If you have any questions or comments, I am available. My e-mail address is: bob@bluewaterphoto.net.
email president@StateOfJeffersonRotary.org
eClub Board Meeting
Dec 15, 2022 08:00 AM
District Grants Meeting January 14, 2023, at 9:00.
This meeting will be via Zoom,
December is Disease Prevention and Treatment Month
We believe good health care is everyone’s right. Yet 400 million people in the world can’t afford or don’t have access to basic health care.
Disease results in misery, pain, and poverty for millions of people worldwide. That’s why treating and preventing disease is so important to us. We lead efforts both large and small. We set up temporary clinics, blood donation centers, and training facilities in underserved communities struggling with outbreaks and health care access. We design and build infrastructure that allows doctors, patients, and governments to work together.
Our members combat diseases like malaria, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, and polio. Prevention is important, which is why we also focus on health education and bringing people routine hearing, vision, and dental care.
How Rotary makes help happen
We educate and equip communities to stop the spread of life-threatening diseases. Rotary members have hundreds of health projects underway around the world at any given time.
Gift of Life changes lives
By Magdalen R Leung, Rotary Club of Richmond Sunset, British Columbia, Canada, and a member of the Health Major Gifts Initiative Advisers committee
Through my participation in global grants from The Rotary Foundation, I have seen how the lives of 600 children in China have been changed for the better in the past ten years.
I have been involved in four global grants to support Gift of Life in Shanghai, China. These grants, ranging from $150,000 to $200,000, have provided life-changing heart surgery to children as young as three months old, with most of the children ages five or six.
Part of every grant is training for new doctors and nurses to perform the surgery and to ensure post surgery care. Training new medical staff in remote areas has reduced costs by allowing the children to have post-operative care locally rather than having to endure a long bus or train journey to Shanghai.
I have been asked from time to time why I spend so much time in a different country helping these children. On one of my first trips to the hospital, a doctor explained that one little girl needed emergency heart surgery, but her family could not pay for it. I asked him how much and he said $5,000. This small sum for one child’s life. The hospital just wanted the commitment that the money was available. My Rotary club made the commitment.
One year later, I went back to visit this little girl. She opened her shirt to show me her surgery scar and said, “look this is my zipper.” I said it’s so beautiful and she said, “do you think I would ever get married with this?” I said, yes, I guarantee you will get married. It is this child and all the others that make me want to raise more dollars and save more children.
The parents come and kiss you and hug you and say thank you. They want to give me gifts, small things to me, great gifts for them. Sometimes they give bags of peanuts, hand-made slippers or a scarf. This is from families with next to nothing. How can a person not want to work on the next grant and the next?
December is Disease Prevention and Treatment Month in Rotary. Make a donation to this area of focus at www.Rotary.org/donate. You can also support an area of focus with a gift in your estate plans or by establishing an endowment.
No Borders Rotaract
No Borders Rotaract is the eClub's sponsored Rotaract club, founded in 2015, No Borders is a Global Rotaract club. Visit their website to see what a great job they are doing.
The No Borders Rotaract brings together young professionals from across the world to exchange ideas, develop leadership and professional skills, and have fun through service.
As an online global service club you can live anywhere and still be an active member of No Borders. We have two online meetings each month that focus on leadership, professional development skills, life hacks, updates on global humanitarian efforts, and advancements through Rotary. We also work together on projects in our local communities and abroad.
Meet the No Borders club officers
President
Name: Zoe Hershenson
Vocation: Freelance Writer and Proofreader
Home Country: United States of America
Vice President I President-Elect
Name: Aishwarya Saxena
Vocation: Education
Home Country: India
Secretary
Name: Anja Jungmayr
Vocation: Environmentalism
Home Country: Austria
Treasurer
Name: Sierra Mayer
Vocation: Teaching & Art
Home Country: United States of America
Member at Large
Name: Anshuman Nayak (Moon)
Vocation: Defense R&D, Government of India
Home Country: India
Immediate Past President
Name: Karl Uzcategui
Vocation: Higher Education Administration
Home Country: United States of America
The Rotary Foundation transforms your gifts into service projects that change lives both close to home and around the world.
Since it was founded more than 100 years ago, the Foundation has spent more than $4 billion on life-changing, sustainable projects.
With your help, we can make lives better in your community and around the world.
Our mission
The Rotary Foundation helps Rotary members to advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace by improving health, providing quality education, improving the environment, and alleviating poverty.
What impact can one donation have?
- For as little as 60 cents, a child can be protected from polio.
- $50 can provide clean water to help fight waterborne illness.
- $500 can launch an antibullying campaign and create a safe environment for children.
Po’Pay: The Little-Known Pueblo Hero Who Led the First American Revolution
Nearly 100 years before the American Revolution, another war of independence took place on American soil—against Spanish colonizers. Coordinated by Tewa leader Po'Pay, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 saved Indigenous cultures from destruction under a feudal system that enslaved inhabitants of the region and forced them to convert to Christianity.
The rebellion, fought in what is now New Mexico, resulted in a rare victory for tribal nations against European colonizers. Although it succeeded in repelling the Spanish for only 12 years, that was long enough to secure the ancient traditions, languages and homelands of Pueblo people to this day.
“If they had lost, we would not be here. That is what was at stake in 1680. I would not be here, and the languages of our ancestors would not be here,” says Jon Ghahate, cultural educator at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a member of the Laguna and Zuni Pueblos. Ghahate uses historical records compiled by the Spanish, as well as his peoples’ own oral narratives, to tell the story of the revolt.
Conquistadors: ‘We Will Do to You All the Harm and Evil We Can’
Ever since the arrival of conquistador Francisco Vázquez de Coronado in 1540, Indigenous agrarian peoples of the desert Southwest had resisted incursions by the Spanish. The most famous resister, Po’pay (whose name means “Ripe Squash”), was born around 1630 into the Ohkay Owingeh, or San Juan Pueblo community near present-day Española. He became a prominent leader and member of a medicine society, but lived under the harsh Requerimiento (or “requirements”) brought by the Spanish to the region.
This quasi-religious doctrine, established in 1513, authorized the Spanish to subjugate Native Americans and force them to abandon their own faiths. According to the document, meant to be read by conquistadors to the local Indian people, failing to submit would have dire consequences: “We will take you and your wives and children and make them slaves, and as such we will sell them, and will dispose of you...and will do to you all the harm and evil we can.”
“It was their traditions, their cultures, the spirituality, their languages—thus their very existence—which were now under assault,” Ghahate said. Unlike the Spaniards’ dogmatic scriptural tenets and doctrines, Pueblo peoples believed that “all things living and inanimate are connected, are part of a big cosmic cyclical construct that has no beginning nor end. We as human beings are merely just a part of it.”
(photo-Statue of Po’pay at NSHC)
The Revolt Took Extraordinary Coordination—and Knotted Ropes
In 1675, Po’pay and his followers met at Jemez Pueblo to discuss the Spanish encroachments on their lands, raids by their Apache and Navajo enemies and a drought, which the people thought could be ended by a return to traditional ceremonies and practices.
“In Pueblo thought and culture, when religion is suppressed, the natural order of life is disrupted,” wrote Ohkay Owingeh member Matthew Martinez, meaning “a threat to the livelihood of the people.”
Yet the Spanish outlawed traditional practices. Po’pay and 46 other Pueblo leaders were convicted of sorcery for continuing them; three were hung in public, one leader hanged himself in jail rather than face the same fate. Po’Pay was among those publicly flogged.
On his release, Po’pay went into hiding at Taos Pueblo, far to the north. From there, he spent four years organizing a rebellion that would involve almost all of the dozens of Pueblo communities scattered around the region. Secrecy was paramount. By some accounts, Po'Pay was said to have killed his own son in-law, who he suspected of treachery, to keep the plan secret.
History of Christmas Trees
The history of Christmas trees goes back to the symbolic use of evergreens in ancient Egypt and Rome and continues with the German tradition of candlelit Christmas trees first brought to America in the 1800s. Discover the history of the Christmas tree, from the earliest winter solstice celebrations to Queen Victoria’s decorating habits and the annual lighting of the Rockefeller Center tree in New York City.
How Did Christmas Trees Start?
Long before the advent of Christianity, plants and trees that remained green all year had a special meaning for people in the winter. Just as people today decorate their homes during the festive season with pine, spruce, and fir trees, ancient peoples hung evergreen boughs over their doors and windows. In many countries it was believed that evergreens would keep away witches, ghosts, evil spirits, and illness.
In the Northern hemisphere, the shortest day and longest night of the year falls on December 21 or December 22 and is called the winter solstice. Many ancient people believed that the sun was a god and that winter came every year because the sun god had become sick and weak. They celebrated the solstice because it meant that at last the sun god would begin to get well. Evergreen boughs reminded them of all the green plants that would grow again when the sun god was strong and summer would return.
The ancient Egyptians worshipped a god called Ra, who had the head of a hawk and wore the sun as a blazing disk in his crown. At the solstice, when Ra began to recover from his illness, the Egyptians filled their homes with green palm rushes, which symbolized for them the triumph of life over death.
Early Romans marked the solstice with a feast called Saturnalia in honor of Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Romans knew that the solstice meant that soon, farms and orchards would be green and fruitful. To mark the occasion, they decorated their homes and temples with evergreen boughs.
In Northern Europe the mysterious Druids, the priests of the ancient Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreen boughs as a symbol of everlasting life. The fierce Vikings in Scandinavia thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god, Balder.
Christmas Trees From Germany
Germany is credited with starting the Christmas tree tradition as we now know it in the 16th century when devout Christians brought decorated trees into their homes. Some built Christmas pyramids of wood and decorated them with evergreens and candles if wood was scarce. It is a widely held belief that Martin Luther, the 16th-century Protestant reformer, first added lighted candles to a tree. Walking toward his home one winter evening, composing a sermon, he was awed by the brilliance of stars twinkling amidst evergreens. To recapture the scene for his family, he erected a tree in the main room and wired its branches with lighted candles.
Who Brought Christmas Trees to America?
Most 19th-century Americans found Christmas trees an oddity. The first record of one being on display was in the 1830s by the German settlers of Pennsylvania, although trees had been a tradition in many German homes much earlier. The Pennsylvania German settlements had community trees as early as 1747. But, as late as the 1840s Christmas trees were seen as pagan symbols and not accepted by most Americans.
It is not surprising that, like many other festive Christmas customs, the tree was adopted so late in America. To the New England Puritans, Christmas was sacred. The pilgrims’s second governor, William Bradford, wrote that he tried hard to stamp out “pagan mockery” of the observance, penalizing any frivolity. The influential Oliver Cromwell preached against “the heathen traditions” of Christmas carols, decorated trees, and any joyful expression that desecrated “that sacred event.” In 1659, the General Court of Massachusetts enacted a law making any observance of December 25 (other than a church service) a penal offense; people were fined for hanging decorations. That stern solemnity continued until the 19th century, when the influx of German and Irish immigrants undermined the Puritan legacy.
In 1846, the popular royals, Queen Victoria and her German Prince, Albert, were sketched in the Illustrated London News standing with their children around a Christmas tree. Unlike the previous royal family, Victoria was very popular with her subjects, and what was done at court immediately became fashionable—not only in Britain, but with fashion-conscious East Coast American Society. The Christmas tree had arrived.
By the 1890s Christmas ornaments were arriving from Germany and Christmas tree popularity was on the rise around the U.S. It was noted that Europeans used small trees about four feet in height, while Americans liked their Christmas trees to reach from floor to ceiling.
The early 20th century saw Americans decorating their trees mainly with homemade ornaments, while the German-American sect continued to use apples, nuts, and marzipan cookies. Popcorn joined in after being dyed bright colors and interlaced with berries and nuts. Electricity brought about Christmas lights, making it possible for Christmas trees to glow for days on end. With this, Christmas trees began to appear in town squares across the country and having a Christmas tree in the home became an American tradition.
READ MORE: 25 Christmas Traditions and Their Origins
Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree
The Rockefeller Center tree is located at Rockefeller Center, west of Fifth Avenue from 47th through 51st Streets in New York City.
The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree dates back to the Depression era. The tallest tree displayed at Rockefeller Center arrived in 1948. It was a Norway Spruce that measured 100 feet tall and hailed from Killingworth, Connecticut.
The first tree at Rockefeller Center was placed in 1931. It was a small unadorned tree placed by construction workers at the center of the construction site. Two years later, another tree was placed there, this time with lights. These days, the giant Rockefeller Center tree is laden with over 25,000 Christmas lights.
Christmas Trees Around the World
Christmas Trees in Canada
German settlers migrated to Canada from the United States in the 1700s. They brought with them many of the things associated with Christmas we cherish today—Advent calendars, gingerbread houses, cookies—and Christmas trees. When Queen Victoria’s German husband, Prince Albert, put up a Christmas tree at Windsor Castle in 1848, the Christmas tree became a tradition throughout England, the United States, and Canada.
Christmas Trees in Mexico
In most Mexican homes the principal holiday adornment is el Nacimiento (Nativity scene). However, a decorated Christmas tree may be incorporated in the Nacimiento or set up elsewhere in the home. As purchase of a natural pine represents a luxury commodity to most Mexican families, the typical arbolito (little tree) is often an artificial one, a bare branch cut from a copal tree (Bursera microphylla) or some type of shrub collected from the countryside.
Christmas Trees in Great Britain
The Norway spruce is the traditional species used to decorate homes in Britain. The Norway spruce was a native species in the British Isles before the last Ice Age, and was reintroduced here before the 1500s.
Christmas Trees in Greenland
Christmas trees are imported, as no trees live this far north. They are decorated with candles and bright ornaments.
Christmas Trees in Guatemala
The Christmas tree has joined the “Nacimiento” (Nativity scene) as a popular ornament because of the large German population in Guatemala. Gifts are left under the tree on Christmas morning for the children. Parents and adults do not exchange gifts until New Year’s Day.
Christmas Trees in Brazil
Although Christmas falls during the summer in Brazil, sometimes pine trees are decorated with little pieces of cotton that represent falling snow.
Christmas Trees in Ireland
Christmas trees are bought anytime in December and decorated with colored lights, tinsel, and baubles. Some people favor the angel on top of the tree, others the star. The house is decorated with garlands, candles, holly, and ivy. Wreaths and mistletoe are hung on the door.
Christmas Trees in Sweden
Most people buy Christmas trees well before Christmas Eve, but it’s not common to take the tree inside and decorate it until just a few days before. Evergreen trees are decorated with stars, sunbursts, and snowflakes made from straw. Other decorations include colorful wooden animals and straw centerpieces.
Christmas Trees in Norway
Nowadays Norwegians often take a trip to the woods to select a Christmas tree, a trip that their grandfathers probably did not make. The Christmas tree was not introduced into Norway from Germany until the latter half of the 19th century; to the country districts it came even later. When Christmas Eve arrives, there is the decorating of the tree, usually done by the parents behind the closed doors of the living room, while the children wait with excitement outside. A Norwegian ritual known as “circling the Christmas tree” follows, where everyone joins hands to form a ring around the tree and then walk around it singing carols. Afterwards, gifts are distributed.
Christmas Trees in Ukraine
Celebrated on December 25th by Catholics and on January 7th by Orthodox Christians, Christmas is the most popular holiday in the Ukraine. During the Christmas season, which also includes New Year’s Day, people decorate fir trees and have parties.
Christmas Trees in Spain
A popular Christmas custom is Catalonia, a lucky strike game. A tree trunk is filled with goodies and children hit at the trunk trying to knock out the hazel nuts, almonds, toffee, and other treats.
Christmas Trees in Italy
In Italy, the presepio (manger or crib) represents in miniature the Holy Family in the stable and is the center of Christmas for families. Guests kneel before it and musicians sing before it. The presepio figures are usually hand-carved and very detailed in features and dress. The scene is often set out in the shape of a triangle. It provides the base of a pyramid-like structure called the ceppo. This is a wooden frame arranged to make a pyramid several feet high. Several tiers of thin shelves are supported by this frame. It is entirely decorated with colored paper, gilt pine cones, and miniature colored pennants. Small candles are fastened to the tapering sides. A star or small doll is hung at the apex of the triangular sides. The shelves above the manger scene have small gifts of fruit, candy, and presents. The ceppo is in the old Tree of Light tradition which became the Christmas tree in other countries. Some houses even have a ceppo for each child in the family.
Christmas Trees in Germany
Many Christmas traditions practiced around the world today started in Germany.
It has long been thought that Martin Luther began the tradition of bringing a fir tree into the home. According to one legend, late one evening, Martin Luther was walking home through the woods and noticed how beautifully the stars shone through the trees. He wanted to share the beauty with his wife, so he cut down a fir tree and took it home. Once inside, he placed small, lighted candles on the branches and said that it would be a symbol of the beautiful Christmas sky. The Christmas tree was born.
Another legend says that in the early 16th century, people in Germany combined two customs that had been practiced in different countries around the globe. The Paradise tree (a fir tree decorated with apples) represented the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. The Christmas Light, a small, pyramid-like frame, usually decorated with glass balls, tinsel and a candle on top, was a symbol of the birth of Christ as the Light of the World. Changing the tree’s apples to tinsel balls and cookies and combining this new tree with the light placed on top, the Germans created the tree that many of us know today.
Modern Tannenbaum (Christmas trees) are traditionally decorated in secret with lights, tinsel and ornaments by parents and then lit and revealed on Christmas Eve with cookies, nuts and gifts under its branches.
Christmas Trees in South Africa
Christmas is a summer holiday in South Africa. Although Christmas trees are not common, windows are often draped with sparkling cotton wool and tinsel.
Christmas Trees in Saudi Arabia
Christian Americans, Europeans, Indians, Filipinos, and others living here have to celebrate Christmas privately in their homes. Christmas lights are generally not tolerated. Most families place their Christmas trees somewhere inconspicuous.
Christmas Trees in Philippines
Fresh pine trees are too expensive for many Filipinos, so handmade trees in an array of colors and sizes are often used. Star lanterns, or parol, appear everywhere in December. They are made from bamboo sticks, covered with brightly colored rice paper or cellophane, and usually feature a tassel on each point. There is usually one in every window, each representing the Star of Bethlehem.
Christmas Trees in China
Of the small percentage of Chinese who do celebrate Christmas, most erect artificial trees decorated with spangles and paper chains, flowers, and lanterns. Christmas trees are called “trees of light.”
Christmas Trees in Japan
For most of the Japanese who celebrate Christmas, it’s purely a secular holiday devoted to the love of their children. Christmas trees are decorated with small toys, dolls, paper ornaments, gold paper fans and lanterns, and wind chimes. Miniature candles are also put among the tree branches. One of the most popular ornaments is the origami swan. Japanese children have exchanged thousands of folded paper “birds of peace” with young people all over the world as a pledge that war must not happen again.
Christmas Tree Trivia and Facts
- Christmas trees have been sold commercially in the United States since about 1850.
- In 1979, the National Christmas Tree was not lighted except for the top ornament. This was done in honor of the American hostages in Iran.
- Between 1887-1933 a fishing schooner called the Christmas Ship would tie up at the Clark Street bridge and sell spruce trees from Michigan to Chicagoans.
- The tallest living Christmas tree is believed to be the 122-foot, 91-year-old Douglas fir in the town of Woodinville, Washington.
- The Rockefeller Center Christmas tree tradition began in 1933. Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, brought the Christmas tree tradition to the White House.
- In 1923, President Calvin Coolidge started the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony now held every year on the White House lawn.
- Since 1966, the National Christmas Tree Association has given a Christmas tree to the President and first family.
- Most Christmas trees are cut weeks before they get to a retail outlet.
- In 1912, the first community Christmas tree in the United States was erected in New York City.
- Christmas trees generally take six to eight years to mature.
- Christmas trees are grown in all 50 states including Hawaii and Alaska.
- Ninety-eight percent of all Christmas trees are grown on farms.
- More than 1,000,000 acres of land have been planted with Christmas trees.
- On average, over 2,000 Christmas trees are planted per acre.
- You should never burn your Christmas tree in the fireplace. It can contribute to creosote buildup.
- Other types of trees such as cherry and hawthorns were used as Christmas trees in the past.
- Thomas Edison’s assistants came up with the idea of electric lights for Christmas trees.
- In 1963, the National Christmas Tree was not lit until December 22nd because of a national 30-day period of mourning following the assassination of President Kennedy.
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Teddy Roosevelt banned the Christmas tree from the White House for environmental reasons.
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In the first week, a tree in your home will consume as much as a quart of water per day.
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Tinsel was once banned by the government. Tinsel contained lead at one time. Now it’s made of plastic.
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The best-selling trees are Scotch Pine, Douglas Fir, Fraser Fir, Balsam Fir and White Pine.
weekly@StateOfJeffersonRotary.org
Nearly 9 out of 10 deaths are now in people 65 or older, the highest rate since the pandemic began.
President Biden may have declared the coronavirus pandemic “over,” but from John Felton’s view as the Yellowstone County health officer in Billings, Mont., it’s not over, just different.
Now, more than ever, it is a plague of the elderly.
In October, Felton’s team logged six deaths due to the virus, many of them among vaccinated people. Their ages: 80s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 90s. They included Betty Witzel, 88, described by her family as a tomboy who carried snakes in her pocket as a child and grew up to be a teacher, mother of four, grandmother of nine and great-grandmother of five. And there was Nadine Alice Stark, 85, a ranch owner who planted sugar beets and corn.
Yellowstone County made the decision early in the crisis to recognize each death individually, and Felton said that is as important as ever to acknowledge the unrelenting toll on a still-vulnerable older generation, while most everyone else has moved on.
“I think about someone’s grandfather — the plays they wouldn’t watch, the games on the football field they wouldn’t see,” he said.
And while older Americans have consistently been the worst hit during the crisis, as evident in the scores of early nursing home deaths, that trend has become more pronounced. Today, nearly 9 in 10 covid deaths are in people 65 or older — the highest rate ever, according to a Washington Post analysis of CDC data.
Some epidemiologists and demographers predict the trend of older, sicker and poorer people dying at disproportionate rates will continue, raising hard questions about the trade-offs Americans are making in pursuit of normalcy — and at whose expense. The situation mirrors the way some other infectious diseases, such as malaria and polio, rage in the developing world while they are largely ignored elsewhere.
S. Matthew Liao, a professor of bioethics, philosophy and public health at New York University, argued that it is possible to keep the economy open while still aggressively pursuing a national booster campaign and requiring masks in health-care settings and nursing homes, for example. But U.S. leaders have chosen not to do so, he said. That worries him.
“There’s a bit of ageism, so to speak, attached to it,” he said, adding, “People, even if they are older, they still have as much claim to live as me.”
In an open letter published Oct. 7 in the BMJ, formerly the British Medicine Journal, Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health, and about a dozen other experts emphasized that “pandemics do not end with a flip of the switch.”
“Despite the widespread belief that the pandemic is over, death and disruption continue,” they wrote.
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and other officials have justified their pandemic reset by emphasizing that Americans have more tools to fight the coronavirus than they did a year or two ago. This includes not only vaccines, booster shots and rapid tests, but antiviral pills that can be taken at home and have been shown to greatly reduce severe illness and death if taken early.
“We can now prevent almost all of the deaths that are happening,” she said at a news briefing this month.
However, Walensky acknowledged that deaths among the elderly, especially those with multiple chronic conditions, is “a real challenge.”
“An additional infection,” she said, referring to covid-19, “is something that may turn something they are able to stably live with to something they are not.”
Epidemiologists tend to divide the pandemic into three distinct periods. In the first year, from March 2020 to March 2021, the United States experienced about 500,000 deaths. The toll was about the same the following year. In the third year, the nation is on track to lower that count significantly, to 150,000 to 175,000 deaths — barring a curveball in the form of a new variant.
That means that coronavirus is likely to rank third as a cause of death this year. By comparison, heart disease and cancer kill roughly 600,000 people each year; accidents, 170,000; stroke, 150,000; and Alzheimer’s, 120,000. Flu, in contrast, kills 12,000 to 52,000.
A recent CDC report on covid-19 mortality contained more good news — most notably, a rapid drop in deaths beginning in March that led to a relatively stable period from April through September when there were 2,000 to 4,500 deaths weekly.
But the reduced death toll has not been experienced equally among all age groups.
Unlike flu, which impacts both the very young and the very old, the coronavirus appears to put mostly older people at higher risk of severe disease and death. The proportion of deaths among those 65 or older has fluctuated from eight out of 10 in the first few months of the pandemic, to a low of 6 out of 10 when the delta wave struck in the summer of 2021, to a high of 9 out of 10 today.
Last month, people 85 and older represented 41.4 percent of deaths, those 75 to 84 were 30 percent of deaths, and those 65 to 74 were 17.5 percent of deaths, according to a Post analysis. All told, the 65-plus age group accounted for nearly 90 percent of covid deaths in the United States despite being only 16 percent of the population.
The vulnerability of older people to viruses is neither surprising, nor new. The more we age, the more we accumulate scars from previous illness and chronic conditions that put us at higher risk of severe illness.
When it comes to the coronavirus, though, deaths in Americans over 65 fell dramatically after the arrival of the original series of vaccines since seniors were the most likely to get them. But booster rates for older Americans are now lagging: According to the CDC, 98 percent of those ages 65 to 74 and 96 percent of people 75 and over completed an initial two-shot course. Those rates fall to 22 and 25 percent respectively for the new omicron-specific booster.
To minimize further loss of life ahead of a feared winter surge, the White House announced Tuesday that it was launching a six-week push to increase booster uptake in seniors and other groups that have been disproportionately affected.
“The final message I give you from this podium is that please, for your own safety, for that of your family, get an updated covid-19 shot as soon as you’re eligible, to protect yourself, your family and your community,” Anthony S. Fauci, the president’s chief medical adviser, said during the briefing, billed as his last before he retires next month.
The issue of age and the pandemic has been a source of tension throughout the pandemic.
When hospitals were hit with a crush of patients in the spring of 2020, some of the debates about allocating scarce resources centered on age. In documents drafted by some medical institutions, “stage of life,” a proxy for age, was sometimes recommended to be used as a tiebreaker in decisions about who should get a ventilator or a bed.
A number of experts, including Liao, expressed discomfort with such rankings. “I really disagree with that view,” he said. “You can imagine a 70-year-old who can do everything — can enjoy friendship, read books and go to movies.”
Jo Rowland, parish nurse at the Harvest Church in Billings whose job includes supporting congregation members and their families through covid illness and death, said society failed many of its elderly in another way, too: through safety protocols at the beginning of the pandemic that left them to die alone.
As more continue to fall victim to the virus, she said, we need to be more thoughtful about how to celebrate their lives and treat their deaths with dignity. “It’s a different type of grief losing an older person,” she said.
While some fault covid-19 policies for not doing enough to protect the elderly, others criticize age-based policies implemented elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, for example, a matrix of recommendations based on age left some seniors feeling they were being discriminated against. Even as stores and restaurants began to open in the summer of 2020, the National Health Service still advised people 70 and older to stay home or “shield.” In Colombia, the government sought to protect older people by closing centers that offered activities for them through August 2020. The policies became controversial for restricting freedom of movement.
Elfriede Derrer-Merk, a geriatric nurse from the University of Liverpool, and others wrote in a journal article in August that many older people felt angry and frustrated that their individuality was ignored.
The “undifferentiated way in which especially the role of age as a risk factor was discussed, and the inclusion of all people above the age of 65 into one homogeneous risk group, often neglected … the diversity of older people and their characteristics and thus drew criticism for fueling ageism in society,” the authors wrote.
Tara Swanigan’s father was in the first wave of deaths that occurred in 2020.
Charles Krebbs had celebrated his 75th birthday shortly before he was infected in July. He had retired from his job as an appraiser in Phoenix and was spending his time reading, gardening, picking up his grandson from school and accompanying him to his football games. He was strong and extraordinarily healthy, Swanigan recalled, but the virus nonetheless ravaged his lungs and he had to be put on a ventilator. He died that August.
Swanigan said she was heartened to hear about President Biden’s campaign to encourage older Americans to get booster shots. But she and other members of Marked by Covid, a nonprofit founded by two women who lost parents to the virus, advocate for more protections for people who are vulnerable, such as additional coronavirus testing. She continues to be shocked by how callous some people have been when she has talked about her father’s death. “Well, your dad was super old,” she recalled one man telling her on social media.
“For seniors and the immunocompromised, it’s almost like we’re saying, ‘You don’t matter. We’d rather just not be inconvenienced,’” she said.
Masks are a particular pain point.
“I was hugely disappointed when they took away the mask mandates for airplanes and other public transportation,” she said.
Given the minimal disruption to daily life from face coverings, and their major impact on curbing transmission, according to studies, she does not understand why public health leaders have stopped promoting their use.
Even one of the most recognizable seniors during the pandemic, Fauci, the National Institutes of Health scientist who is 81, no longer wears a face covering in many public appearances. In pictures from 2020, Fauci was always seen with a mask. Even when he threw the ceremonial first pitch that year on MLB Opening Day between the New York Yankees and the Washington Nationals, and was outdoors and 60 feet away from another human being, he was masked.
But last month, when the infectious-disease doctor accompanied TV host Stephen Colbert to a Walgreens in New York City to get a booster shot, neither wore a face covering.
Fauci, through his office, declined to comment on that decision. But in a White House briefing on Tuesday, he talked about face coverings as just one of “multiple interventions and multiple actions” people can take to protect themselves, saying each individual should evaluate their own risks, as well as those of the people around them.
Given the scripted nature of such photo opportunities, the decision to forgo masks horrified Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at the University of California at Irvine. “The message is ‘don’t bother masking,’ ” he said in an interview. “We have given up, and the fact we’ve given up means we don’t care about a certain amount of deaths.”
Noymer, who studies covid-19 mortality, argued that the notion that we can prevent almost all deaths given the pullback of mitigation policies is disingenuous.
“I don’t think they are being totally candid” about the number of deaths the country will face, he said of U.S. officials. “I think it is bleak, and I am trying to steel myself for the winter to come.”
Fenit Nirappil contributed to this report.
Thanks to eClub Rotarian Greg B. and his friend Ralph for this puzzle.
Ralph designs train puzzles. Enjoy! Click here to go to the puzzle page.
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