POINTS OF HISTORICAL INTEREST | Terry E. Hill
April 2021
My only risk is carpal tunnel,
a mousy affliction from months of sorting names for tests positive and negative,
arraying by age and zip code, coding for race,
coding for home, nursing home, boarding home, group home, homeless shelter.
Death certificates read like social work notes: married, divorced,
no school versus high school versus college, usual occupation, father’s name,
mother’s maiden name, country of origin.
This being a California county, I count forty different origins, everyone
now come to a common COVID end.
It wasn’t easy for them, straining for the words behind those well-intended N95s,
remembering Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Australia, Bangladesh, Bolivia….
The rules for numbers in poetry are imprecise.
Langston Hughes wrote 240,000 into a poem about Johannesburg miners, but
did he say two hundred forty or two hundred AND forty?
The rules for coding are imprecise.
If a 95-year-old gets COVID and dies four months later, is that a COVID death?
Four months of irksome days, intractable nights, no visitors
and her daughter my cousin who would have lived at bedside.
It’s easier to focus on numbers. I was pursuing patterns
in the data, mapping risks, hoping to inform interventions, as they say, hoping
to be of use. In long-term care 6,600 cases, of whom 40% staff.
Here are four positives from the same house, looks like husband, wife,
and the next generation, working as aide and housekeeper, in kitchen and laundry,
the roles we used to call domestic service.
The internet photo shows a trim front yard, child’s scooter on the walk.
If a nurse gets COVID and hangs herself three months later, is that a COVID death?
Yes patterns emerge, but who’ll be surprised that rich fared better than poor?
Vaccines have hit the reset key, previous patterns are merely historical.
In long-term care 600 deaths, but twelve is a better number, imaginable. Twelve
deaths of staff, of whom ten in those domestic roles, ten from those other countries.
Privacy precludes specifics, so in my report I just say all were people of color.
Besides, the patterns are now past, previous, of historical interest only.
Terry E. Hill is an aging geriatrician in Oakland, CA, with a long history of publishing in healthcare and more recent history in literature, e.g., in Vita Poetica, The Healing Muse, and the All Shall Be Well Anthology. He grew up in rural Georgia but left to get a B.A. in literature from Reed College. He spends time writing reports about for-profit long-term care corporations for the California Attorney General’s office.