January is the quietest time of the year in the airport concessions design and construction business. Most people are taking advantage of the time off granted by what we plainly call "The Holiday Season". For Michelle and I, its the best time of the year for us to have down time together. By the end of 2019, Michelle received one of those love letters from an airline company, putting a joyous spin to the fact that she traveled the equivalent of around the world nearly twice...with that one carrier alone. So, in January, we both had plenty of time to catch up on acting like we had a normal daily routine that include reading the news. Our younger staff--two brothers and their best friend, were enjoying various holiday traveling plans. Nick, having spent the last year trapsing from Philadelphia to Boston for the majority of the work weeks, was enjoying a romantic european vacation with his girlfriend.
Sometime in January, Wuhan, China, hit the news cycles, hard. Reports told of a super contagious new virus that was showing a 4% fatality rate. By the beginning of Feb, reports told of other nations taking drastic precautions, including travel restrictions, recalling graduate students learning abroad, quarantines... By this time, Michelle was back at work, having just flown from Austin straight to Boston, staying at the airport hotel for the week, and then on to meetings the next week at PHL. Also, near the middle of January, Nick had returned to PHL from his late holiday vacation to Italy.
We all had been talking by phone about getting back into things. In early Feb, Michelle and I talked specifically about whether I should source some masks for the team. The command decision was "no", don't buy any masks right now. We already had a few respirators with vapor filters that we use for painting, and I had new, unused filters.
After our talk, the lingering concern I had, though, was all this talk about N95 rated masks being considered the more appropriate filter for protection against the Corona Virus, and I didn't know enough to know whether a vapor rating on our cartridges met the N95 standards. So, I got online to find the answer. That's when I realized we are in a new world. A new scary world: no one is giving clear information, and there is no fucking plan to give clear information. The government agency responsible for the ratings presented its information in a tone that clearly was designed to maximize its liability protection, rather than to give us information that the layman can really find useful. I'm a lawyer. So I think its fair criticism. And the Federal government, the toppity top leaders, like Trump, were saying, to the public, the flu is deadlier, its going to disappear. A gaslighting of tragic proportions.
Little did I know then that as I was searching for clear credible information, the president of the united states, Donald Trump, was secretly telling prize winning journalist Bob Woodward that the virus is both highly contagious via the air and highly deadly as compared to even "your most strenuous flu". The fact that the POTUS intentionally replaced a Plan with a GasLighting was, though, because of my research on the vapor filter question, always known to me.
By early February, the CDC already had a page on masks and links to N95 ratings--for masks and respirators. And it looked like the respirators we had may be N95 rated. But the only way to know was to go the manufacturer's or retailer's websites, where there is a lot of info given on each mask and filter cartridge product. Also at each website, the public could see that many, many, N95 kit was already sold out. Over and over again, I could see that so many other people had information that we apparently weren't getting, and they were acting on that information, and buying masks.
So I made a unilateral decision that day to buy what I could that seemed to be N95 rated. Much of what I ordered would take 5, 6 weeks to arrive. I couldn't even get disposables. Thinking outside the box, I went to a welding supplier to get what I needed, and then to a motocross vendor to get more.
By this time, back at our PHL office, Nick had been back to work for about two weeks. Coincidentally, two weeks after Nick got back into the office, both his office mates were hit with weird cases of "bronchitis" like "colds". Mind you, Michelle had not been to the PHL office yet. Nevertheless, she and I were growing increasingly wary of her attendance at the airports, either to travel or to work. About a year ago, when Michelle started a treatment therapy which suppressed her immune system, I found out that airports generally don't have a formal way of notifying its community of employees, contractors, etc. of infectious disease "events". The best someone like Michelle can do is to monitor the local epidemiology/health office to which the airport usually reports such things--and stick their personal plan of not licking things like hand rails, and washing your hands frequently. The Boston office gave us good details about hang time vs. particle sizes, distances, etc. And, I am now a lot more vocal about the illogical rhetoric of the anti-vaxxer's platform.
After spending the last week of January in PHL, Michelle headed back to Boston for a long stint at Logan. By Tuesday, she admits that she is not feeling well. By Wednesday, she has a fever. By Friday, she has no appetite--things don't taste good, a massive migraine, exhaustive fatigue, and an employee that abandons his boss in a hotel room while she's down hard to get back to his own bed for the weekend. By Saturday, I had the hotel staff verify life and commit to taking her some food.
I contacted the Boston epidemiology office and asked them to test Michelle. They curtly told me that Logan is not a "cluster" and that she had not traveled to Wuhan, so, no, she wasn't getting tested. Oh, I drove the point home that its a fucking virus and she works in two of the nation's largest international airports/terminals every day. Still, that office had NO desire to act like the paid public servant-science office that it is. No one there expressed any real understanding of an aggressive contagion, and no desire or curiosity to obtain a real understanding.
As February proceeded, Boston would have its day in the news as an early Covid-19 hotspot. Boston leaders, as the Boston Globe would report, represented that its Corona clusters originated with a teacher returning from a holiday trip to Italy and with a man traveling through Logan to a Boston convention center for the day. Its tragic how we are fed well wrapped stories, how both public-servant scientists and impartial journalists just don't fully understand the human's neurologically-based tendency to "complete the story", their aversion of hanging strings, unexplained causes, other facts. Other cases.
