A Midwestern take on the current hysteria

OMG, I’m gonna die! LOLLOLLOLLOL!

They’re not buying into it. The AP offers a fair report, though with a strong whiff of disapproval: “Surging virus cases get a shrug in many midwestern towns”

ELMWOOD, Neb. (AP) — Danny Rice has a good sense of how dangerous the coronavirus can be.

What puzzles him are the people who have curtailed so much of their lives to avoid being infected by the virus.

“I’m not going out and looking to catch it,” he said, sitting at a cluttered desk in his auto repair shop in the tiny eastern Nebraska community of Elmwood. “I don’t want to catch it. But if I get it, I get it. That’s just how I feel.”

Plenty of people agree with Rice, and health experts acknowledge those views are powering soaring COVID-19 infection rates, especially in parts of the rural Midwest where the disease is spreading unabated and threatening to overwhelm hospitals.

It’s not that people in Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Iowa and elsewhere don’t realize their states are leading the nation in new cases per capita. It’s that many of them aren’t especially concerned.

Wayne County, home to 6,400 people in southern Iowa, has the state’s second-highest case rate, yet its public health administrator, Shelley Bickel, says mask-wearing is rare. She finds it particularly appalling when she sees older people, who are at high risk, shopping at a grocery store without one.

“I just want to get on the speaker and say, ‘Why don’t you have your mask on?’ It’s just amazing,” Bickel said.

Jenna Lovaas, public health director of Jones County, Iowa, said even now that her rural county has the state’s highest virus rate, people have opted not to make any changes, such as protecting themselves and others by wearing masks.

“They don’t think it’s real,” she said. “They don’t think it’s going to be that bad or they just don’t want to wear a mask because we’ve made it a whole political thing at this point.”

In part, though, some of those views are hard to fight because of the reality that many people have no symptoms, and most of those who do get sick recover quickly. And treatment advances mean that those who become seriously ill are less likely to die from the virus than when it first emerged in the spring. Even though cases and the death toll are rising, infectious disease experts note that death rates appear to be falling.

Like most people, Jay Stibbe, 52, of Fargo, North Dakota, said he and his family are respectful of COVID-19 protocols and wear masks where required. However, Stibbe said he doesn’t see enough “concrete information” about the virus to stop him from going about his normal life, even though North Dakota leads the nation in the number of virus cases per capita.

In Plattsmouth, Nebraska, Karen Prohaska, 76, said she generally doesn’t wear a mask in her downtown purse and jewelry shop but will put one on at the request of a customer. When customers come into the store with a face covering, she asks if they’d like her to don one as well. Most say no and ask if it’s OK for them to remove theirs.

“I hope that I don’t get the virus, but I’ve never really been a germophobe,” Prohaska said.

The pandemic hasn’t stopped Mary Gerteisen, of Eagle, Nebraska, from visiting her 96-year-old father on weekends to watch football. Gerteisen said she understands the risks, given her father’s age and vulnerability, but she also weighed the fact that he’s in the early stages of dementia and often believes family members have abandoned him.

“There are times when I think that I do need to take the pandemic more seriously,” she said. “But I want to see my dad, and I don’t know much longer I have with him. I would love for him to live to 100-some years old, but if he comes down with (the virus), he’s lived a good, long life.”

I wish the reporter had also asked her interviewees about their political and religious leanings because I suspect she was speaking with Republicans and, perhaps, people with a strong faith. Democrats lean heavily towards demanding that the government protect them from all risks, and in those states with Democrat governors, the government is happy to oblige: shelter-in-place mandates are surging faster than new positive-test rest results for Whu Hu Flu.

As this pandemic has gone on, it’s become evident that Progressives, even young cubbies who have essentially zero chance of getting seriously ill, fear COVID far more than their less-enlightened fellows. I can’t account for their irrational fear, other than to point out that these people have irrational feelings about lots of things, but I’m struck by the question, what are these people so desperate to cling on to? Progressives seem to me to live a drab, humorless, joyless existance, one governed by guilt, anger, and fear of social disapproval of their peers — what’s fun about that?

There might well be a life after this one, but even if there isn’t, do you want to spend this one locked alone in your Prius and muttering from behind your Dr. Faucci-approved mask, “that’s not funny!”?

Better, I think, to go visit your 96-year-old father and reassure him that his family hasn’t deserted him. You’ll both be happier, and maybe even live longer.