Tom Shakely

Unlike with Spanish Flu a century ago or Hong Kong Flu in the 1950s, today we’re receiving constant and more or less real time information about the pandemic we’re experiencing. But how much of the information we’re receiving is valuable? How much of it is true? One of the things that’s incredibly difficult, despite our information glut or because of it, is to figure out is just how much of a threat this virus really is.

“I’m 26. Coronavirus Sent Me to the Hospital,” writes Fiona Lowenstein:

I’m 26. I don’t have any prior autoimmune or respiratory conditions. I work out six times a week, and abstain from cigarettes. I thought my role in the current health crisis would be as an ally to the elderly and compromised. Then, I was hospitalized for Covid-19. …

While I was shocked at the development of my symptoms and my ultimate hospitalization, the doctors and nurses were not at all surprised. After I was admitted, I was told that there was a 30-year-old in the next room who was also otherwise healthy, but who had also experienced serious trouble breathing. The hospital staff told me that more and more patients my age were showing up at the E.R. I am thankful to my partner for calling the hospital when my breathing worsened, and to the doctor who insisted we come in. As soon as I received an oxygen tube, I began to feel slight relief. I was lucky to get to the hospital early in the crisis, and receive very attentive care. …

Millennials, if you can’t be good allies, at least stay home to protect yourselves. Our invulnerability to this disease is a myth — one I have experienced firsthand. Countries in Europe and Asia are reporting younger and younger patients. The New York Times reported this week that nearly 40 percent of hospitalized Covid patients in the U.S. are under 54 years old. What’s worse is that when medical professionals have been forced to make choices about who lives and who dies, our generation is often chosen to receive treatment. So not only are we risking our own health, our presence in hospitals diminishes the care other groups may receive.

Hospitalizations for younger people seem to be the exception rather than the rule. Testimonies like this are helpful, but the broader point seems to have remained constant, which is that the risk for younger people (say those 45 and younger) is more about the older loved ones you might compromise as an asymptomatic carrier.

Today’s the Feast of the Annunciation. I’ve had a postcard-sized version of this depiction of the Annunciation in my kitchen for a year or so, since first picking it up at the University of Mary when I was finishing my bioethics coursework. Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) painted the original work.

“A Prayer for Generosity” appears on the reverse of the University of Mary postcard I have, and reads in part:

O Gracious God of Our Lives, grant us the generosity and courage of Mary at the Annunciation. So turn our hearts toward you that we would hear the call of your Son, Jesus, and respond to the gift of our vocation. Protect and deliver us from selfishness and fear so we can receive abundantly the grace to give our lives away in love. We ask you this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Along with it, here is something that my friend, Fr. Chris Walsh, shared today:

Breathe on me, breath of God,
Fill me with life anew,
That I may love the things you love,
And do what you would do.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
Until my heart is pure,
Until with you I have one will,
To live and to endure.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
My soul with grace refine,
Until this earthly part of me
Glows with your fire divine.

Breathe on me, breath of God,
So I shall never die,
But live with you the perfect life
In your eternity.

Edwin Hatch, 1835-1889

Ari Schulman asks something we’re all asking: “What’s the plan?”:

How long is this going to last? As terrible as a pandemic would be, is averting it really worth a new Great Depression? What is the endgame?

As a pandemic loomed, the country moved in remarkably short order from shrug to shutdown. Understandably, some are already questioning the wisdom of this move, noting how little information we’re acting on and the devastation the shutdown is already wreaking on the economy. The New York Times grants shutdown skepticism the frisson of “taboo.”

Much of this skepticism still misunderstands just how devastating the pandemic would be — not only in lives lost but in damage to the economy. The skeptics are wrong in the near term. For now, we have no other choice. But they are right that this cure cannot be tolerated for long. And they are right too that there is no consensus on when the shutdown will have achieved its aim, or on when the benefits will no longer outweigh the costs. …

The shutdown is not a plan; it is a hasty but necessary retreat. Its purpose must be to shrink cases, and ramp up our infrastructure, enough to switch to more targeted suppression measures.

We already have a gold standard for fighting epidemics: early identification of symptomatic patients, contact tracing, isolation of those infected and exposed, and widespread random sampling of the population to detect new outbreaks among unidentified contacts. Only by identifying and isolating the sick can the healthy get back to work.

The crucial lesson is that we need not endure mass closure for the duration of the pandemic. We are only stuck doing it now because we were caught with our defenses down, failing to implement the normal methods early enough.

This is not a hypothetical point: South Korea managed to control its outbreak without ever resorting to mass closures. It did so through a combination of massive testing, rigorous contact tracing, and isolation of the infected. Not only were people with symptoms tested and quarantined, but authorities went through considerable effort to track down people who may have been in contact with the sick and test them as well.

We may need to borrow methods from South Korea, Israel, and Singapore, which have accepted a level of surveillance that is incompatible with the “old normal” of American life, but which may need to be tolerated for a year or two if we are to lift the shutdown. It is urgent for our national leadership to offer a clear vision of what the “new normal” of post-shutdown life will look like, how we will balance its requirements against civil liberties, and how we will achieve it as quickly as possible. …

As we near the end of the shutdown’s first week, public resolve seems firm. But without a clear vision from our leadership, the problem is not so distant as a shutdown lasting a year and half, but a backlash arriving much sooner. Conversely, we can endure the pain and hardship of this phase for much longer if we all know how it will end.

[But t]he problem in the near term is not whether the plan for victory is too costly. It is whether we have a plan at all. The chief priority of our leadership must be to offer us this vision before the end of the shutdown period they have defined — a week from now — arrives.

I can’t imagine Americans tolerating the sort of surveillance state that other nations have adopted, partly because China is the greatest example of the 21st century technological surveillance state and theirs is not an example liberty-minded nations would seek to emulate. At the same time, if we have no national strategy for returning to normal while at the same time we quarantine and shut down the economy, it’s possible we’re adopting a “worst of both worlds” approach to this pandemic—where we get none of the positive benefits of aggressive mitigation and all of the costs of economic self-destruction.

We’re quarantining, we’re self-isolating, and some of us are in a straight up lockdown due to the virus. No better time to work on our habits—to consider the actions were choosing and what sort of person we’re choosing to become. Fr. Thomas Petri offers a great introduction to Saint Thomas Aquinas’s thought on this:

Focus your attention on this for a few minutes, and think about it in relation to your own habits—especially in this time. That’s what I’m doing.

“We are masters of our actions.”

It’s the first Sunday since public Masses were suspended due to the virus. A friend shared herself singing “The Old Churchyard” to mark this Laetare Sunday. Laetare means “rejoicing.” As Lent looks towards Easter and we face the grim reality of this virus’s killings and disruptions, our cause for rejoicing is Christ’s resurrection and the prospect of the sunshine bursting to wake up the dead:

Come, come with me out to the old churchyard
I so well know those paths ‘neath the soft green sward
Friends slumber in there that we want to regard;
We will trace out their names in the old churchyard

Mourn not for them, their trials are o’er
And why weep for those who will weep no more?
For sweet is their sleep, though cold and hard
Their pillows may be in the old churchyard

I know that it’s vain when our friends depart
To breathe kind words to a broken heart;
And I know that the joy of life is marred
When we follow lost friends to the old churchyard

But were I at rest ‘neath yonder tree
Oh, why would you weep, my friends, for me?
I’m so weary, so wayworn, why would you retard
The peace I seek in the old churchyard?

Why weep for me, for I’m anxious to go
To that haven of rest where no tears ever flow;
And I fear not to enter that dark lonely tomb
Where our Savior has lain and conquered the gloom

I rest in the hope that one bright day
Sunshine will burst to these prisons of clay
And old Gabriel’s trumpet and voice of the Lord
Will wake up the dead in the old churchyard

I read Fr. George Rutler’s latest column/reflection in my inbox today, and it’s a great meditation in light not only of Lent, but also of the renewed concern with suffering and death that this virus is bringing to our consciousness:

In our exceptional times, the President has declared a national emergency. This is not unprecedented, and I have an oral tradition of my own family witnessing to the influenza epidemic of 1918, when my grandparents’ venerable parish rector survived the infection while ministering to the ill, but whose two daughters died. The causalities were much higher than now, with a much smaller global population.

We pray for our leaders, and the scientists enlisted to mitigate the spread of infection. We also deplore those who would exploit this crisis for political gain. Our Lord had the greatest contempt for demagogues. It is thankworthy that months ago, our government prudently imposed barriers on immigration from China, in spite of criticism from politicians who faulted that policy for what they called “xenophobia.”

In any generation, crises provoke a reaction to the fact of human mortality. In their anxiety, those unwilling to acknowledge that tend to decry catastrophes as if they were intrusions into the obvious circumstance that life is a fragile gift. So they become paranoid about disease, demographics, climate change and other metaphors for the simple reality of impermanence.

Death is nothing new. Until now, everyone has done it. Our Lord would speak of it with a strange mixture of gravity and nonchalance. It is prelude to a permanent realm of which every anatomical breath is an intimation by virtue of its impermanence. Anxiety ignores the promise that accompanies the warning: “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.”

Saint Charles Borromeo led a procession in prayer to mitigate the plague in Milan in 1576, caring for upwards of seventy thousand dying and starving people. Death meant nothing to him, save an opening to Paradise. For all his mystical intuitions, he also enjoyed playing billiards, and when asked what he would do if he had only fifteen minutes more to live, he responded, “Keep playing billiards.”

One of the Church’s youngest saints, Dominic Savio, told Saint John Bosco that if the Holy Angel blew his trumpet for the end of all things while he was on the playground, he would just keep on playing. That is how we should want to play each day of our lives, in a friendship with God that will not find Heaven unfamiliar. In 1857, fourteen-year-old Dominic’s last earthly words were: “Oh, what wonderful things I see!”

A saint is one who can stand at the eternal gates and say, “Hello. I am home.”

That a very Christian way to understand death, adopting “a strange mixture of gravity and nonchalance” about death as something natural to our fallen state and terrible in its consequence, and yet simultaneously unnatural in terms of God’s desire for us to share in eternal life.

If we lack the capacity to imagine that there can be such a thing as eternal life, that is simply a sign of how fundamentally death has warped our vision.

Great profile of Andreas Widmer, professor at The Catholic University of America, who is in quarantine at the university’s campus in Rome with his family:

Looking on the “bright side” or seeking the “silver lining” of something like a lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus is not naivete, but an exercise of one’s God-given will, said a U.S. professor locked down in Rome with his wife and son.

Andreas Widmer, a former member of the Pontifical Swiss Guard now teaching in the business school at The Catholic University of America in Washington, arrived in Rome with his family in early January to teach at the university’s Rome campus. It was also to be an extended time of rediscovering the city where he served in the guards from 1986 to 1988 and where he met his wife 32 years ago.

Now the Widmer family, a security guard and an Italian woman who works for the Australian Catholic University program on the same site as the CUA Rome campus are locked down together or, as he put it, have formed a small community.

Widmer, in a WhatsApp interview from just a few blocks away, told Catholic News Service, “We take too little advantage of our will, of our freedom in the sense that we are raising our fists against something we don’t control. And then we don’t do squat about what we actually control — yet that would make all the difference.”

The Rome campus is housed in a former convent and still includes a chapel. Before the lockdown and before all the students were sent home in early March, a priest from the Pontifical North American College would come to celebrate Mass.

“But the Eucharist is in the tabernacle so we can do morning and evening prayers down there,” Widmer said March 17. “Everything we need we have. It’s an extended retreat.”

Although Italy is on lockdown, people are allowed to leave their homes to buy groceries, go to the pharmacy and walk their dogs. The police can and do stop people on the streets to ask why they are out; they can give tickets to those without a valid reason for being on the street, although usually they just encourage them to hurry home.

The Widmers home-school their son, Elias, 15, “so his schedule has been exactly the same as it was before,” his father said. The big difference is that he no longer has 35 university students to interact with and sit with at dinner. But his home-school program includes online, interactive courses and he uses WhatsApp and Skype for calls with friends and family.

“I asked him the other day, ‘On a scale from one to 10, how worried are you?’ And he says zero.”

Widmer, who teaches entrepreneurship with a focus on Christian principles, especially the proper use of human will and freedom, said dealing with a lockdown is the perfect time to exercise God-given capacities for contributing to the common good and focusing on personal growth.

“No matter what, you can react, and you can make it beautiful,” he said. As his students were preparing to leave, he said he urged them to make their last days in Rome beautiful and to go home and make their 14-day quarantine beautiful as well.

“You can purposely, consciously do this,” he said. He and his family now “have this rhythm of going to visit the Lord in the Eucharist downstairs, you know, to make it beautiful.”

The students were told to go home just a week before their spring break was to begin. Almost all of them had plans to travel in Europe, he said. There were tears for upset plans and lost opportunities.

But, he said, he tried to explain to them how “life is, in a sense, a constant rehearsal for dying — not in a morbid way — but in a sense of losing something or ending something.”

“One day God is going to demand your life from you,” he said he told the students, “and you’re going to say — just like you’re here in Rome saying — ‘But I haven’t gone to Greece yet!’”

Deciding when life will end “is not up to us,” he said, but the way each person reacts to the “little deaths” in life is.

A practice I picked up last year, something that I try to remember every morning when I wake up, is to pray: “Here am I, Lord, I come to do your will.”