I have fallen down somewhat on my self-assigned brief of keeping a plague diary, so it's time for an update on daily life here at the Oakes compound as we approach the end of Pandemic Year Zero.
I am still working from home, if you can really call it working. I do pass most of each day in the vicinity of the drafting table I use as a standup desk in the back bedroom that is my home office, although I have to admit that, a good amount of the time, I'm just lying under it fantasizing about smoking opium on a beach in Vietnam as a tsunami rolls in and other dreams of oblivion. Most of the rest of the time, I am helping Axl with his virtual lessons, and then here and there I manage to fit in a little of the work my employer expects me to be accomplishing.
Mondays through Thursdays, both Petra and Belle leave the house each morning, Petra for ten-hour workdays and Belle to attend the one-room schoolhouse my mother operates in her garage. On Fridays, we give my mom a break and keep both kids home, and the reason Petra started working 4/10s is so she can have these days off and lend a hand with the children's virtual educations. I am, as noted earlier, hardly a paragon of productivity during the first part of the week, but I wouldn't be able to get a damn thing done with both kids home absent Petra's help.
This is especially the case now because, with the start of the second semester in late January, the children's schoolwork turned from a sad joke into a demanding challenge.
During the first semester, the children were enrolled in our county's "remote instruction" option, which involved no actual instruction and, for the most part, fairly simple assignments. Our biggest headaches that semester came less from trying to help our children understand their lessons than from trying to stay organized with a mixture of paper and online assignments, the latter due each day but the former needing to be compiled and dropped off during weekly "packet exchanges" at their school.
But the county school board terminated remote instruction with the end of the first semester, and—with the start of the second—we shifted the children into what's known as "the state virtual school," a program predating the pandemic that was primarily designed for advanced students seeking enrichment.
We were warned, accurately as it turned out, that this program would require significantly more work of the children. This is a good thing, of course, from a certain point of view. Axl starts middle school next year, and it is hard to see how the flurry of undemanding busywork that was being sent home last semester would have prepared him in the slightest.
On the other hand, it was nice that, back in the fall, neither of the children required an outsized amount of adult guidance or assistance. Now each day is a full school day for everyone, children and adults alike, along with a full workday for the adults, and the constant interruptions and impossibility of concentrating on either the children's instruction or my job for more than a few minutes at a time feels like it is shriveling my brain and bringing on early dementia.
One of the toughest aspects of our current circumstances is not making all of these sacrifices but wondering whether making them is even really necessary, or if an excess of caution has led us to over-react. Over the last two weeks, there has been a steady drumbeat of advisories that, on balance, schools, especially elementary schools, increasingly seem to be relatively safe places when it comes to the risk of virus transmission. Certainly schools seem safe enough, and the downsides of keeping all children home dire enough, that it is easy to understand the pressure state and federal officials are feeling to reopen them as soon as possible.
I'll admit I am readier to hear this kind of thing from the current White House than I was from the former, but there are still a couple of problems. First, this emerging consensus concerning the relative safety of reopening schools only snapped into firm shape a week or so after the deadline for withdrawing our children from virtual school and returning them to the classroom. It would seem we have no option but to lie in the bed we've made for the rest of this school year.
Next, although I look with massive sympathy and not the slightest scrap of envy on the officials who must make these decisions, and although I understand and mostly accept the basis for their calculations, I also know that those calculations go something like this: schools may be relatively safer, but no one is saying they are totally safe; reopening them will therefore result in at least some excess illness, disability, and death at the margins; there won't, however, be so much excess illness, disability, and death that the downsides of reopening will strike most people as outweighing the costs of remaining closed. QED, time to reopen.
Then I come across the story of, say, a 29-year-old whose experience of COVID-19 included 61 days in a coma, "ICU psychosis," and the amputation of one leg at the knee. I know that the odds are in favor of my not being infected at all, that—even if I am infected—my experience of the disease is statistically almost certain to be quite a bit better than that man's was, and that, either way, catching the disease from my children is pretty much the least likely of all possible infection vectors. Yes, yes, of course I know all that—and yet, all things considered, the personal potential downsides of this disease seem dire enough that perhaps a few more months of brain-shriveling work-from-home-while-also-being-a-teacher is worth it.
Besides, so what if I trust the current occupant of the White House more than I did the former? Here in West Virginia, all of the same people remain in charge, and they do not inspire confidence.
I will admit up front that our governor does deserve credit for some of the decisions he has made in response to the pandemic. For example, he closed schools much earlier and delayed reopening them in the fall much later than I ever would have predicted. Relative to other Republican governors, he displayed at least a soupçon of courage in issuing various closure and stay-at-home orders in the pandemic's early months. He issued a mask order, albeit not one he felt able to actually enforce, and he not only urged West Virginians to get vaccinated but received his own shot live on television. Speaking of vaccinations, you may have heard that our state has so far been one of the most successful in this area as well (although I can't help but wonder if this is as much an accident of geography and population density as was the virus's initially slow spread here). 
There were moments during the last year, in other words, when I was surprised to realize that I felt at least a little grateful that this man was our governor (at least as opposed to, say, a human-shaped pile of shit like Brian Kemp or Ron DeSantis). It was disconcerting to try to reconcile this feeling with my overall picture of the man, which was less than glowing. This, after all, is a man who, in mid-2017—less than a year after winning the governorship for the first time, his debut in electoral politics—betrayed the voters of West Virginia by switching his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican. By his own account, this reversal of loyalties came not because of an evolution in his political beliefs but rather because of his discovery that Trump's least favorite son, Eric, not only enjoyed hunting and fishing but also knew how to change a flat tire. (Eric is pictured, left, with his brother, enjoying hunting. No photographic evidence of Eric's ability to change a flat tire could be located by press time.)
He speaks in a salad of folksy aphorisms and awkward cliches. Just this morning, I read in the paper his assertion that one of his cabinet secretaries "could probably sell bread to starving Russians on credit." In context, this was clearly intended as some kind of compliment but—just like his amazement at Eric Trump's willingness to risk his manicure spinning a lug-nut wrench—it suggests he is not a hard man to impress.
It should also be pointed out that, since March, his most regular "public" appearances have been in the form of virtual press briefings broadcasted from a private room at the state capitol. The only other people allowed to be present are certain other state officials and whatever staffers are needed to operate the virtual gizmos.
The press is only allowed to join these briefings remotely, with reporters' names being drawn from a hat for the chance to ask questions and no opportunity to follow up if the governor's answer wanders off.
Despite or maybe because of the fact that he received his vaccine shot live at one of these briefings, it was not lost on the state's school-system employees that he and his "coronavirus czar" appeared afraid to be in the same room with reporters and members of the public even as they assert that it is safe for unvaccinated teachers to reenter classrooms packed full of students.
I would also like to point out, just so that it is noted for the record somewhere on the internet, that Lawrence Wright—in his 40-page New Yorker article examining how the U.S. so royally fucked up its pandemic response—gets his one mention of our governor exactly backwards. He describes Justice as "read[ing] out the names of West Virginians who had died of COVID" at these briefings, but in fact the man did no such thing.
Instead, in a kind of ritual incantation at the beginning of each briefing that eventually made me want to bang my head on my desk, he would update the death toll, beseech us "not to let these wonderful West Virginians become just a statistic," and then do just that by reciting a coldly generic litany of, basically, the demographics of the dead: "a 72-year-old male from Boone County," "a 56-year-old female from McDowell County," and on and ad nauseam on.
Then there were the maps.
Sometime in the summer, the W. Va. DHHR (Department of Health and Human Relations) launched an online map intended to communicate the extent of infections and magnitude of infection risk in each of our 55 counties. Ostensibly based on the same framework as the Harvard Global Health Institute's "COVID-19 Risk Levels Map," our state's risk map seemed forever to be being "tweaked" throughout the summer and fall.
Where the Harvard map used four color codes—green ("on track for containment"), yellow ("community spread"), orange ("accelerated spread"), and red ("tipping point")—and recommended stay-at-home orders starting at the orange level, West Virginia not only widened these categories slightly but eventually added a whole new color category, gold. It was hard to avoid concluding that the purpose of the gold category, lodged as it was between the better yellow and the worse orange ones, was to make it harder for counties to reach the orange level and the restrictive response actions, including the dreaded cancellation of high school sports practices and games, that would result.
Next came the West Virginia Department of Education's map. The purpose of this map was not at first clear, for it used the same data and color-coding parameters as the DHHR map. One difference was that, while the DHHR map was updated daily, the WVDE map was updated only weekly, on Saturdays at 5 p.m. In counties coded "orange" or "red" on WVDE's Saturday map, instruction for the following week was required to be fully remote, with no sports practices or games.
Some counties never even tried to offer remote instruction (except when infection levels temporarily forced them to), and not a single one that did try turned out to be able to actually deliver it effectively. Even in those counties that made the attempt, parents still had the option of sending their kids to school, either full-time in some counties or—as in ours—on what was known as the "blended" model. In the latter, half the students attended Monday-Tuesday and the other half Thursday-Friday. Wednesdays were reserved for the "rigorous cleaning" of school buildings and/or time for teachers to "plan" (that is, to sob silently at their desks).
One of the issues with the WVDE map was that the parents who would otherwise have been planning to send their kids to school on a given Monday would only learn on Saturday evening that they now had 36 weekend hours to make alternate childcare arrangements.
The other issue was that the WVDE map was based on Thursday data. It was not infrequently the case that, by a given Monday, conditions in a certain county might have worsened considerably, even as its schools were forced to proceed on the basis of the Saturday map's stale Thursday data.
Heaven help the parent who, at such a moment, clicked over to the Harvard Global map and noticed how much worse everything looked there.
For most of the fall, in other words, the ground did not feel solid underfoot. It was unclear whose data to trust and what decisions to make in response.
One question that came up was why students seemed to be the only ones being asked to make any real sacrifices in response to spikes in infection in their respective counties.
This question came most sharply from student athletes and their families. Although I didn't exactly share their reasons for asking, it sounded like a valid question to me.
Since mid-summer, after all, there had been no shutdown orders for any category of business in this state aside from periodically imposed and withdrawn restrictions on nursing home visitations. Even if you found it possible to trust a CDC that was clearly compromised by its own experience of undue political influence, that agency's official line remained that, although in-person instruction could be considered relatively safe, this was only true if—in response to rising infection rates—meaningful preventive measures were being taken in both the building and throughout the community.
Because such measures weren't being taken, and because the decision-making around the state and school risk-level maps seemed so obviously politically motivated and even eccentric—well, let's just say that more than a few of us found we were reluctant to trust our families' health and even lives to a tax-dodging coal-boss governor and the one-time kindergarten teacher and, more recently, rootless bureaucratic drifter who, early in the pandemic, received a sort of field promotion to state schools superintendent.
So that's where we are: tumbling in the barrel, with no clear sense of which direction is up.
The other day, recognizing the increasingly dark place I seem to be in and unable to convince myself that what sometimes looks like the end of the tunnel isn't, in fact, the headlights of the 3:10 to Yuma, I started the intake process for one of those online counseling services but gave up halfway through. I found myself filled with resentment at some of the questions, because they implied illnesses I don't think I have.
I'm not ill, at least I don't think so. I am, instead, living in a kind of hell that is no less hellish for including so many elements of privilege that I know I'm really not allowed to experience it as hellish.
Anyway, I'll leave it there for today.
I think I hear a train coming.
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