With winter at hand, the virus whips up winds of uncertainty
New York: Coronavirus cases spiking nationwide. A chill, existential and literal, setting in once more. And now: a winter likely to be streaked by a soundtrack of sirens instead of silver bells.
It was winter when the pandemic began, and it will be winter long before it's over. Weary and traumatised from months of death and confinement, Americans are being handed mixed messages, from governments to their own internal clocks running haywire on flattened time.
Shouldn't it be over by now? After all, vaccines are here. But before the average person will get inoculated, winter will exact its toll. The holidays are wreathed in danger for those who travel and may spread the virus and those who don't and may suffer from isolation. Small gifts of normalcy, like in-person schooling and indoor dining, are being interrupted again. A new president will take the helm of a deeply cleaved country. And a belated reckoning with social issues marches on.
We need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it's not going to be easy," Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's top infectious-disease expert, was saying as early as September.
Now, winter is at hand a winter like no other in living American memory. And with its arrival Monday, a nation holds its breath. I think there's a pretty common sentiment that a lot of people feel like the world is falling apart, says Monica Johnson, a psychologist in New York who primarily serves patients from marginalized groups.
For months now, activities like socially distanced hangs in parks and bike rides have been the social capital that has allowed many Americans to reclaim a semblance of pre-pandemic life. New York's CitiBike broke its monthly ridership record in September, a Lyft spokesperson says.
Winter is different. Going outside becomes a very different act in the cold, and indoors where winter naturally draws us when the temperatures drop is where the virus has spread most aggressively. Exhibit A: public transportation, typically a mainstay of American cities in foul and fine conditions. Ridership of subway, bus and commuter rail systems has plunged this year.
Metropolitan Transit Authority bus operator Regan Weal has driven three Manhattan routes over the course of the pandemic, the beginning of which was mentally exhausting, she says. While both ridership and conditions for drivers have improved, she says, it remains fraught. More than 130 MTA workers have died of COVID-related causes.
I worry about when it gets cold, and now people are going to want to be on the bus more because they don't want to walk to the train," she says.
Novelist Laura Ingalls Wilder titled one of her Little House books The Long Winter. Barbara Mayes Boustead, an Omaha-based meteorologist instructor with NOAA, used Wilder's writing as inspiration to co-develop the Accumulated Winter Season Severity
Index.
