Time to move on past deniers

Today is the first day of autumn. In some ways, it’s the perfect time to coin a phrase, playing off spring: Hope falls eternal.

After a year and a half of the majority of Americans doing their best to overcome the COVID-19 pandemic, not just for themselves but for schools, businesses, friends and complete strangers, today is a day to acknowledge that some of those on the other side of the fence — the naysayers, the deniers, the anti-vaxers, the conspiracy theorists, whatever you wish to call them — aren’t going to change their minds.

If the planet-sized mounds of evidence haven't persuaded them thus far that the pandemic is both real and real deadly, you could reason, nothing will.

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat understands. Like health experts and journalists all over the country, North Idaho popped up prominently on Westneat’s radar last week because so many here have succumbed to the misinformation and disinformation peddled by those opposing masks and vaccines.

See if this opening from Westneat's most recent column sounds familiar:

When I wrote last week about how northern Idaho was surging with COVID-19 cases, to the point that hospitals had triggered a plan to ration medical care, I got a slew of correspondence from people there saying: No we aren’t.

“We don’t have any outbreaks here,” one insisted. “I know a few people working in Kootenai Health, the largest hospital in the area, and they are not busy at all. They are actually overstaffed in the ER.”

Wrote another: “I am in Coeur d’Alene and serve hundreds of customers and I’ve heard of nobody that’s been hospitalized, or who has even got COVID. I am disgusted at the inaccuracy of your article.”

Said a third: “More fearmongering by the media about our so-called ‘pandemic.’”

I wrote back to these Idahoans, attaching an alert from Kootenai Health itself, the main hospital in their own town, Coeur d’Alene. It’s entitled “Kootenai Health implements crisis standards of care as COVID-19 cases soar.” It details how the hospital is so jammed it converted its conference room into an overflow field clinic for COVID-19 patients.

One of the Idahoans wrote back, not to say he may have misjudged the situation, but to instead accuse the hospital of now being part of my conspiracy: “My initial thought on reading this is the hospital may be falsely reporting to get more COVID funding. I will dig into it.”

Is this normal? More than a year and a half into our pandemic odyssey, I find this ongoing behavior to be the most baffling part of the story — that there remains a group of citizens, not sure how large, who refuse to acknowledge that a major health event is even happening. Or if it is, that it’s a big deal.

We’re approaching 700,000 dead in the U.S., and yet every day I still get feedback from readers who insist it’s all overblown.

You can read the entire column here: https://bit.ly/3koIFkI

And if anybody's still looking for one clear local shred of lethal evidence, check out this news story about a 46-year-old Coeur d'Alene nurse who died of COVID-19: https://cnn.it/3lO8sSO

In the meantime, friends, do your best to reach the reachable. Let's narrow our focus so beautiful leaves are the only things blowin' in the autumn wind.