‘They just don’t care.’ Anger toward COVID-19 deniers mounts as pandemic hits crisis
Since March, Laura McConnell has been living in the finished basement of her Kansas City home, away from her husband and stepson upstairs.
Her reason: Her husband thinks COVID-19 is fake news.
“I am married to someone who does not feel we should wear masks or social distance, or take any precautions. Very frustrating,” said McConnell, who sells school supplies for a living. “I understand. I’m sick of it too. I’m sick of wearing a mask. I want to go back to normal. But I think a lot of people are sick of it and are feeding off each other.”
Her mother has stronger words about such people, especially as Thanksgiving and the holiday season threaten to spike the infection rate even more.
“I am just incredibly, incredibly angry, because I feel like if we had taken this seriously from the beginning we would not be in this mess,” said Jan Bombeck, a retired school librarian in Overland Park who has not been inside a restaurant or grocery store since March. “And I feel like it’s an incredible failure of leadership in our country.”
Anti-maskers and COVID-19 deniers have made the headlines, storming state capitols and county commission and school board meetings without masks. They are aggrieved and unconvinced that COVID-19 is as bad as scientists say. McConnell’s husband, who did not want to speak to The Star, tells her that she’s “afraid of a virus that’s not as bad as the flu,” she said.
But hundreds of thousands of their fellow Americans now disagree. They are angry and resentful, too, some safely hunkered down at home and not about to step foot in any public arena full of the maskless unwashed.
Like Bombeck, they feel they have been doing everything health officials have asked of them — wearing masks, physical distancing, keeping their social circles small. They have changed their lives to keep themselves and others safe, and they are tired of people who refuse to do the same.
They worry when they hear Kansas City doctors warn that if everyone doesn’t help “bend the curve” again, patients could die when an overwhelmed health care system can’t care for all of its patients, not just those with COVID-19.
Health care workers who are literally begging the public on social media to mask up are some of the most vexed.
“I think it’s even more frustrating as a health care provider, to be honest,” said Summer Baker, a registered nurse at Menorah Medical Center who has protested during the pandemic with her fellow National Nurses United colleagues about needing adequate personal protective equipment at work.
“I do think that, if we don’t turn this corner, if everybody doesn’t become united and follow the science and do the things that need to be done, I just don’t think we’re going to get through this well. The strain on the health care providers is real, and it’s coming to a head.”
COVID fatigue “is ramping a lot of people up,” said Dr. Darrin D’Agostino, executive dean and vice provost for health affairs at Kansas City University.
“I consider myself a very balanced person that likes to hear both sides of the story, and even I’m having a hard time listening because it’s so overwhelmingly the way of, ‘it’s my right to make any decision I want,’ and, ‘these mandates don’t work.’
“And it’s getting very difficult to hear that because we have science that says it does work.”
At a press conference Monday where Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas announced new COVID-19 restrictions, Dr. Erica Carney, the city’s medical director of emergency medical services, reiterated the public’s responsibility.
“It is no lie that our hospitals are at an unprecedented capacity right now. Our hospitals are full,” said Carney. “As health care workers, we are no longer the front line. In the community you guys now are the front line.”
“Well,” said Bombeck, “good luck with that.”
‘It’s not worth it’
Rachel Gonzalez is coming home from college for the holidays, but there will be no place set for her at the Thanksgiving table. Instead, she’ll be eating her turkey and all the fixings by herself, in her sister’s basement in Independence, where she’ll also be sleeping the next few nights on the sofa.
She’s being cautious, keeping her family safe from COVID-19. So it ticks her off when she sees others not taking this historic pandemic seriously — like other students posting photos of themselves in big groups, without masks.
“I think a lot of people are selfish,” said Gonzalez, 22, a political science major. “They have an attitude that they will be fine if they get it, but they don’t think about the people they can infect with their reckless actions.”
Gonzalez had a scary run-in with coronavirus, when one of her suite mates at Missouri Western State University in St. Joseph got infected. There wasn’t enough Lysol in the world for her to disinfect door handles and everything else around that dorm room.
“I think it’s disrespectful to call COVID-19 a hoax when over 200,000 in the United States have died of it,” said Gonzalez. “Also disrespectful of the people on ventilators and to the front line workers who have to tell people that their loved ones have died.”
Health experts fear the holidays will make matters worse as people gather indoors. On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advised Americans to avoid traveling over Thanksgiving and not to spend the holiday with people from outside their household. But will they?
A national survey by The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center revealed that even though the majority of Americans plan to be cautious — such as banning guests with COVID-19 symptoms — nearly 2 in 5 will likely attend a gathering with more than 10 people and a third will not ask guests to wear masks.
“We’re going to look back at what happened during this holiday season and ask ourselves, ‘Were we part of the solution or were we part of the problem?’” Dr. Iahn Gonsenhauser, chief quality and patient safety officer for the medical center, said in a statement.
Michael Richert wonders whether some of the people he went to high school with in Kansas City might be part of that problem.
Though he lives near Los Angeles now, he keeps up on Facebook with former classmates. He was shocked when earlier this month he saw an invitation to a “Friendsgiving” party in the back room of a Lee’s Summit bar.
But it was a line about wearing masks that upset Richert: “Bring your mask to get in and to use as you feel comfortable.”
“It’s strange because I personally know two people in our high school class who, within the past few weeks, have posted about being COVID positive on Facebook,” he said. “So it’s not like the organizers aren’t aware that it’s affecting people, they just don’t care.
The event hit a nerve. Richert’s mother was recently in the hospital with COVID-19.
“To be holding a gathering of people indoors with masks right now seems like a really unwise decision, but to suggest that mask wearing indoors around a large group of people is optional is a real slap in the face to everyone who has caught it,” he said.
‘Now I do none of that’
McConnell said her husband was “on board” with COVID precautions when shelter-in-place orders first went into effect in March. Then he tired of them.
“I think other people he’s with, they’re not following social distancing and they’re not wearing masks or doing the things they should be doing, so why should he? I guess I kind of get that,” she said.
But her mom’s life doesn’t look anything like it did pre-pandemic.
When her son and daughter-in-law began working from home, Bombeck took over watching her granddaughter for them. Now the 5-year-old is taking kindergarten classes virtually, and Bombeck is “Zooming with 19 other kindergartners all day.”
“My hair is down to my shoulders and it’s white. I haven’t gotten it colored. I haven’t been to a store or a restaurant since March 11,” said Bombeck.
“I order everything, including my groceries, online. I have been to a few socially distanced driveway parties over the summer … so basically I have done nothing. I have a couple of family members who have compromised immune issues, so I felt like I needed to be safe for them.”
She saw the stories about frustrated South Dakota nurse Jodi Doering who went viral after she tweeted that some of her patients dying of COVID-19 insist it’s not real, or that “there must be another reason they are sick.”
“There are actually people who are ill with it who don’t believe they have it because they have been convinced in some alternative universe that it doesn’t exist and I don’t think they’re going to do anything differently,” said Bombeck.
“This is the time we don’t need to be giving up, we need to be digging in and staying home and taking care of each other,” said Bombeck. “All the people that are saying I refuse to wear a mask, they’re just dragging this out longer. They don’t realize by resisting it they’re making it worse for themselves.”
A Zoom Thanksgiving?
D’Agostino at Kansas City University believes people’s minds can be changed.
“That’s the eternal optimist in me, that’s the teacher in me. It’s a matter of educating,” he said. “Here’s how I look at it. I don’t want to be responsible for giving somebody else a disease. I can’t say that that’s the doctor in me. That’s the human in me. …
“And nobody in the United States has the right to harm another person. There is nothing that says that.”
He knows there’s confusion about the virus — and there was a lot in the beginning as scientists got up to speed — because he still hears questions like this one: How come when the coronavirus came out people were saying don’t wear masks and now we have to?
“This is still an issue, even though we’ve over and over and over again talked about why,” he said. “I think some of the statements from different organizations have been very clear. In the beginning, we didn’t know about asymptomatic carriers. That came a few months after. So when this first came out, we didn’t know we had to protect all comers.”
In 27 years of working in medicine, through the Ebola outbreak in the United States, “I have never seen a virus act like this. Ever, ever,” he said. “And I don’t think there’s a historical reference that even comes close to this.”
And that might explain why people “are inflamed over those who are not doing the best they can to protect each other,” he said. “And that is because we have groups of people, different demographics, that do extremely well with this, get nothing more than mild cold symptoms, or none at all. And they move on.
“And we have other people who get this and within days are on a ventilator, need dialysis, and die. And that dramatic difference is fueling a lot of people because they can’t tell the difference. If the virus is that bad, how come it doesn’t happen to everybody?”
Vaccines will help, but anyone who gets the virus after the vaccines are in use “will likely get really sick,” he said.
“They won’t be the asymptomatic carrier because we’re going to have vaccines and we’re going to have very few people that don’t have immunity, so the ones that get it are going to generally have something wrong with their immune system, or other things …
“But what does that mean? That means we’re going to learn to live with this. There’s an end to this pandemic.”
But a problem remains, he said: That so many people refuse now to follow the safe practices of wearing a mask, staying physically distanced from each other, washing their hands and staying out of crowds.
And add to the list canceling the family Thanksgiving feast this year. He has.
“I actually asked my dad not to come in. The plans were made months ago,” said D’Agostino. “And I said, ‘Dad, I really am uncomfortable with you traveling to a state that is so out of control in terms of COVID cases. …
“It hurts. I like seeing my dad, he loves seeing the grandkids. We just can’t.”
Gonzalez hasn’t figured out yet what Thursday will be like for her family. “I could always Zoom them from downstairs,” she said.
And in another basement, McConnell said she might be ordering Chinese food.
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