This country is beginning to be familiar with the names of people affected by the coronavirus. Fortunately, we know more people who have become infected and survived than those who’ve succumbed to the illness.
If the names of the victims are not familiar to us, they are to someone we know. That’s what happens when a pandemic like the coronavirus begins its sweep through a state, and particularly a small community.
This month has brought the shock of losing to the virus a perennial winner of judgeship races in Southwest Georgia, where we live part-time. Nancy Stephenson of Albany was a well-respected probate judge (similar to a circuit judge in Mississippi) for 27 years, having never faced an opponent. Her husband, also a judge, tested positive for the virus as well.
Albany’s plight is well documented. The city of about 75,000 people has endured one of the highest rates per capita of COVID-19 infections in America. The death rate has spiraled, turning a national news spotlight on the city that it would wish to avoid.
Blakely, the smaller town where we do most of our business, socializing and churchgoing, has been slammed with the coronavirus. The city’s mayor tested positive and is recovering. A few Blakely residents have died from the disease’s wrath.
Thankfully, Blakely still has an acute-care hospital with a 24-hour emergency room — fast becoming an anomaly in this era of sagging healthcare fortunes in Rural America.
Our institution has shown remarkable resilience in recent years. A couple of mergers failed, but the corporation managing the hospital and its clinics nowadays seems capable of bringing high quality medical care to the community.
Neither Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Tennessee nor Texas — almost a Southeastern Conference of states — expanded the Medicaid program three years ago. Louisiana gamely said “yes.”
Debate has raged lately over how the turndown states will be affected, particularly financially, in handling the coronavirus.
What many people in this “SEC” do not know is that their federal tax dollars, estimated at $152 billion over 10 years, are paying for Medicaid expansion in states that gave a thumbs-up to expansion.
Recent news reports have indicated a possible move by the federal government to incentivize states to expand Medicaid by offering to fully pay the tab for three years. How could they say no to such a carrot? (Some will likely figure a way, unfortunately.)
Recently we saw on television 18-wheeler refrigerated trucks in New York backing up to hospitals with racks inside them for body bags. I thought I had never seen anything like it in my life.
And then I remembered I had in fact seen something like this. When I arrived for Navy duty in Saigon in 1968, I had witnessed body bags holding young Americans at Tan Son Nhat airport. It was a few weeks after the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive on that city and across South Vietnam.
After the war ended in Vietnam, Oliver Stone made a movie about it called “Platoon.” It opens with Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. It’s a beautiful and haunting piece of music which seems like the soundtrack for these days — for our “new war,” commanded by the so-called “Wartime President.”
The dire predictions of how many countrymen will be infected and how many will die due to the coronavirus are beginning to hit home for most of us through these various images.
Yet by all accounts we remain in the early stages of fighting the coronavirus. We can only hope and pray the misery will somehow be shortchanged.
Mac Gordon is a native and part-time resident of McComb. He is a retired newspaperman. He can be reached at macmarygordon @gmail.com.
