I was a weirdo at the beginning of March — I have spent so much time with my head buried in how pandemics work, how diseases spread, how viruses replicate, how to build the perfect pandemic, etc, that as soon as I saw the virus leave China, I started having panic attacks. I was supposed to go to San Antonio for AWP on March 4 — not only did I have to be there for the literary magazine I work for, but I had been asked to read at an offsite, which is a big deal. But then I kept looking at the numbers in Italy — it was bad. It was very very bad. The death numbers were starting to echo what China was admitting to, and then some, and I freaked out. And then San Antonio had a bunch of cruise ship passengers with known confirmed cases and one of them went to the goddamned MALL and I just thought, you know what? I’m out.
So I cancelled. And then the entire university pulled out and no one went, so I didn’t feel as much like a freak. And then I had scheduled Weetacon Rehab to be in Vegas — and something like 20 people were coming to Vegas. I figured it would be okay — maybe — I didn’t feel right about it but again, I didn’t want to let anyone down. And then the numbers were rising. And I knew with the long incubation period between catching the virus and showing symptoms that the planes would be petri dishes. And no one was taking it seriously. So on March 11, about ten days before people were set to arrive, I pulled the plug on it. I wrote to the people who were coming, alerting them that Weetacon Rehab was going to be postponed until a date to be determined later. I summed up my reasons for what (at the time) seemed like an overwhelming amount of paranoia and caution:
I’m very disappointed, and I’m sure you are as well. Like you, I have been watching with concern about the rise of the COVID-19 viral epidemic. As of this morning, WHO has declared it a pandemic. We’ve been told to teach online if possible, and that’s just to students who already live here. Many campuses are rescinding in-person classes through the end of May.
The only way to keep this thing from killing more people is to limit social spread — and an alarming number of cases are specifically related to exposure while people were traveling. The mounting evidence and unease made Weetacon Rehab in Vegas next weekend feel very ill-advised and downright stupid. But here are a few other things that brought me to this decision:
- While the COVID-19 survival rates are good for healthy, low risk people, for some it requires ICU and respiratory intubation. Think about the doctor in Wuhan who was young, fit and knew how to protect himself, and he succumbed to this virus. While the prevailing attitude about this illness is that it’s no big deal because of the low-ish fatality rate, Esteban still has PTSD nightmares from his very short stint on intubation. I still have nightmares from trying to communicate with him while he was on intubation. You do not want that. It is certainly not a “just a flu” situation if you end up with one of the severe strains.
- The survival rates are less good for many, such as older folks, folks with diabetes, asthma, heart disease and other immuno-compromised conditions. There are many Weetaconners who have some or many of those conditions, and there are many Weetacon loved ones who are higher risk as well. It’s entirely possible that we could inadvertently be infected and asymptomatic, then bring those viruses back to our loved ones. You also do not want that.
- It’s not only about the people we know — none of us wants to accidentally kill someone.
- The Las Vegas mayor and Nevada governor seem to be in a state of denial which makes me distrust their decision making process. Mayor Carol Goodman literally said to don’t worry about it because you get sick on an airplane anyway, so what’s the problem. Las Vegas is traditionally the worst hit economically by any kind of snafu — it never has regained the same level of spending since 9/11 and in 2008, the economy here was so crashed that people STILL talk about their lives in terms of pre- and post-2008. We’re already in a huge slump after Route 91 shooting — the powers that be are TERRIFIED of anything that would impact tourism.
- The Las Vegas health system is notoriously terrible. Thinking about numbers, there are just over 4,000 hospital beds in Las Vegas greater metro area — regular hospital beds as well as ICU beds, in a city that has over 2M permanent residents and about 100,000 visitors on any given day. I have zero faith in Las Vegas medical care and have heard horror stories from so many people about how criminally terrible the doctors are here on a normal week. I REALLY don’t want to end up relying on them for keeping people I love safe, and foresee a very real situation where trauma centers are quickly overwhelmed and staff needs to make prioritization of care decisions due to lack of resources, as they did with Route 91.
- Part of this is likely because I’m writing a novel centered around a pandemic, but I’ve been studying epidemiology for over a decade and the numbers of confirmed cases we have now in the US are where Italy was 11 days ago. Italy is now in lockdown to try to control the spread and the ICUs are cutting off ICU resources for higher risk and older patients because they cannot handle the crush of needy. The only difference is that Italy had free access to the testing kits, while the US healthcare must get permission to test and are sending away people with no known travel to red zones untested. This is the text book case for unchecked spread. I’m probably over thinking this. I really hope I’m over thinking this. God, I really hope I’m wrong.
- Vacations are something we do when we don’t have other things to worry about, like global crises. Vacations are not worth dying over. This is the epitome of non-essential risk. If one of you got sick and died because of an insistence to have Rehab in the face of our own CDC saying “cancel everything now”, I would never forgive myself.
- If you stay home, the worst thing that happens is you have a Netflix and Chill weekend next weekend. If you come, the worst thing that happens is– I don’t even want to think about it, but the worst thing is so really really really bad.
That week — the week before Spring Break, there had been noises about teaching online and a gentle suggestion to see what we could, as teachers, needed to migrate to online teaching for the rest of the semester. Cool, I am running an advanced fiction workshop this semester, but it sounded like a GREAT time to avoid campus, so I enacted online teaching that week and hosted my fiction workshop through Google Hangouts. Those meetings were very entertaining — almost like having class outside. My students were primarily teleconferencing from various spots on campus — including several who were in the same giant computer bank inside the first floor of the campus library. I was confident that I could, if needed, teach the rest of the semester doing that — after all, the job I had left to do grad school had been all about sharing and collaborating with content via online deliverables.
A few days after this, MGM announced it was voluntarily closing its resorts and casinos. A day or so after that, Nevada’s governor shut everything down that was nonessential (like the rest of the resorts and casinos, along with a bunch of everything else) and all schools were closed for at least a month. Just like that, a full third to half of the Las Vegas residents were unemployed.
When my class met again after Spring Break, their faces were different. Things had time to sink in. They were eager to be there, fully and wholeheartedly fixed in attention. We spent a lot of time talking about how the semester would go from that point forward. I gave them the option of just calling it a day for the semester — just treat the class as though it was an 8 week class instead of a 16 week class. No, they universally insisted. They wanted the class. They wanted something to look forward to. They wanted to use the time to write. In fact, they wanted MORE exercises. They wanted MORE timed writing prompts. They wanted to workshop MORE.
Okay. This we could do. However, one of the transactional things that I always hate about teaching is that I hold something over them — their grade. In some ways, it’s an incentive to learning because it holds you accountable. But in other ways, it is a pressure that doesn’t need to be applied. And many other professors had replaced the in-person labs and lectures with MORE homework and requirements for discussion. One student said she had a panic attack the last night of Spring Break because she realized that her workload for the semester had literally doubled — work that was counted as 40% of her final grade had deflated in some cases to 10% of the grade.
My fiction workshop was already a pass/fail class — they don’t get a grade, just credits or no credits. I decided that whatever grade they had as of the Sunday night before we came back from break was the worst that their grade could be. The far majority of the class was passing at that point, so for the people who weren’t, they could still push their grade into passing (and then they too couldn’t do any worse than that even if they just stopped coming and handing things in) but it would mean that they only had to do the things they wanted to do, as writers and as members of our small literary community that we had created around our workshop table.
Now in week 11, these authors are showing me what it is to have passion.
Some of them have stopped coming — one because she works at a pharmacy and has been pulling extreme hours while also taking organic chemistry and a biology lab that had doubled the requirements overnight. One student has COVID-19 right now. Another is going through something and hasn’t shared the details but this kid has been in my class for three semesters now, has never missed a class nor an assignment this entire time until three weeks ago when the quarantine started. But what matters most to me is that they get to make the choices that work best for them, from the place they are right now. They are making sacrifices. Writing fiction, above all else, can’t be something you have to do because someone is forcing you to do it. And it shouldn’t be something that costs them something dear, whether that’s a GPA, a funding grant, or a job — or just the breathing space to not think about what everyone else needs from them at that moment. I trust them that they are making the right choices for them — and I’m confident that if they were to share what was keeping them from attending, I would agree that they were making the right decisions. Attending a fiction workshop is literally the least important thing going on right now. It should ideally be an oasis — not a demand.
But what is remarkable is that the people who are doing the work? Are working it. They are pulling forth the most groundbreaking work I’ve seen yet. Some are writing 10K words a week. Some are submitting to journals. It’s been amazing to be part of this explosion of creativity in the midst of all of this chaos and devastation.
We’re going to be okay. In the midst of death, we are in life, and in the face of uncertainty, we create art. We’re going to be okay.
