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Between You and Me

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By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

There are some funny stories I could share with you about being a woman in business this Women’s History Month. Like any storyteller, I may be repeating myself with a couple, so please indulge me with your patience. I hope they will give you a chuckle even if you’ve already heard them. 

First though, I would call your attention elsewhere in the newspaper and on our website to a section in which local businesswomen are participating in this month’s spotlight. They have sent in headshots of themselves and have answered one of three questions that we posed: how do you balance work-life duties; who inspired you; what words would you offer younger women interested in following in your footsteps? Please look for them and enjoy their responses. We hope you will also shop in their stores and use their services, thus supporting both the local economy and minority-owned enterprise.

We started the first newspaper, The Village Times, on April 8, 1976. After some wildly chaotic and exciting first months, just before Christmas, I was waiting in line at the deli across from the office when I was greeted by the ad director of a local competitor newspaper. We had met several times before, and he was filled with the good cheer of the season.

“Congratulations on your new venture,” he said. “The paper looks very good every week.”

“Thank you,” I replied, thinking it was a generous thing for him to say to another publisher.

“You tell the fellow up there that he’s doing a great job,” he added, pointing upward to my office building on the hill.

“What fellow?” I asked, ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ crossing my mind.

“Aw, c’mon,” he said with a laugh. “We all know you have some guy up there running the show.”

“Merry Christmas,” I replied and took the encounter back to the staff of half a dozen wives and mothers, who howled.

Then there was the time I was seated on the dais next to the New York Press Association’s keynote speaker, Mike Wallace. It was the Spring Convention, 1984. On his other side was the association’s president finishing his meal, and I was the president-elect. Wallace, good journalist that he was, chatted with us throughout the dinner, sincerely asking about the names and locations of our newspapers. After it was my turn, and I answered his queries, he looked at me and asked, “And where is your husband?”

I could hear the president choking on his food as he feared my response. “He’s at home watching the children,” I answered with a smile. At this point, the president was able to get out, “No, she is the owner and publisher of her paper.”

Wallace turned back to me, patted my arm, and after a long pause, offered, “Forgive me, my dear. I’m an old dinosaur.”

Here’s another. It was 1978 and I had arrived the night before the NYPA convention was to start. I was already checked into the hotel and was eating dinner in the dining room with a book for company. “May I join you?”

I looked up and saw a pleasant-looking man smiling down at me. “Yes,” I answered, returning the smile and assuming he was another early arrival for the convention. We exchanged names and hometowns, chatted briefly about the weather in Albany, and then he slid his room key across the tablecloth. “Come up about 9:00,” he instructed.

I stared at him puzzled, then realized what he was saying. “Why would you think I would be coming to your room?” I asked astonished.

“Well,” he said, “you are down here in the hotel eating by yourself.” He withdrew the key and quickly left. I looked around, realized I was the only woman eating alone, skipped dessert, paid the check, rode the elevator up to my room, and once inside, double-locked the door.

That was life in the fast lane for a woman in business in the 1970s.

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Stock photo

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

The second time around, of course, I knew the routine: where to drive, what paperwork to fill out, how quickly the shot would be administered into my designated vaccine arm, my left, then how I would have to wait in case of an immediate reaction. After the allotted 15 minutes, there being none, I left and drove myself home, picking up a sandwich for supper at the deli along the way.

Shortly after I finished eating and got up from the table, however, I started to feel a bit lightheaded. By the time I had cleaned everything up, I was decidedly dizzy. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, got into pajamas and, book in hand, tucked myself safely into bed. After a couple of hours, when my inoculation site began to hurt, I took two Tylenol and ultimately fell asleep.

The next morning, Sunday, the dizziness had stopped and I was wolfishly hungry. Thinking that was a good sign, I hurried out of bed only to realize that my left upper arm seriously ached, and upon inspection, was red, hot and swollen. It remained that way throughout the day and the next, until it finally dawned on me to apply ice to the area. Almost immediately the swelling was reduced. Otherwise, except for a slight and short-lived headache, the kind one might get when coming down with a cold, I had no further difficulties.

Now that I have had both vaccines, what does that mean?

First, it means that I have to wait 14 days before the full preventive effect of the vaccines take effect. Then, and only then, a curtain will lift and I will be able to walk out into the sunshine. At least, that is how I would like to think of my life changing two weeks from now. But not completely, I have learned. Yes, I will be able to socialize in small groups in homes with others who have also been twice inoculated. That means friends around my age. We will not have to wear masks nor remain socially distanced. Hallelujah! 

I will also be able to meet with my unvaccinated family in single family units at a time — son, daughter-in-law and their children — if they have been living together the whole time and are basically healthy. According to CDC guidelines, this can happen in a home and without requiring masks or our standing six feet apart. The very thought of hugging them makes me dizzy again, this time with pleasure.

In public places, however, we should continue with the same precautions of masks, social distancing and frequent hand washing, as well as avoiding poorly ventilated spots. Scientists do not yet understand if we can still carry and inadvertently transmit the virus. Also they don’t know exactly how well or for how long the vaccines protect against the disease. There are, as we know, ongoing multiple mutations by the virus, some of them more contagious and more virulent than the originals, and scientists are not sure how well vaccines will protect against those variants.

Meanwhile, we who are vaccinated need not get tested or quarantine if we are exposed to the virus, unless of course, we come down with symptoms. We are advised not to gather with unvaccinated people from more than one household and should avoid joining medium or larger groups. 

Further, we are still advised not to travel long distances and to stay home if possible until more facts are known. This is disappointing, but travel brings exposure to more people and the possible spread of variants. Every time there is more travel, there is a surge of cases, the experts point out. If we go to a gym or restaurant, the risk is lower, but we should still be aware and take the usual precautions, like wearing a mask on the treadmill or while waiting for a meal. 

So we are returning to normal life but slowly and with great care.

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Photo from Pixabay

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

“What are you doing for enrichment these days, now that you can’t see a Broadway play or go to the opera or comfortably travel to new countries?” asked a longtime friend the other day. “Do you feel like you are in a desert?”

I had to think about that for a moment. True, those events she mentioned that I so enjoy have been on hold throughout this unimaginable pandemic we are enduring, and I certainly miss them. While I have my work with the newspapers and digital media that keeps me happily occupied, the pleasure I take in the cultural side of my life has not disappeared. It’s just changed. I’ll tell you how and see if you agree.

Yes, I love to travel. But, you know, reading books and taking trips have much in common. A faithful subscriber, who writes to me often and sends me clippings that he finds interesting, sent me a column from The Wall Street Journal by Elizabeth Bernstein. 

“Books expand our world, providing an escape and offering novelty, surprise and excitement, which boost dopamine,” she comments. “They broaden our perspective and help us empathize with others. And they can improve our social life, giving us something to connect over.” She could just as correctly be describing travel.

Bernstein goes on to quote Mitchell Kaplan, owner of independent book stores Books & Books and co-founder of the Miami Book Fair. “You disconnect from the chaos around you. You reconnect with yourself when you are reading.”

The Midnight Library

I certainly agree. At the moment, I am reading The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. In this New York Times bestseller, he takes up a subject that has at one time or another occurred to all of us: what if I had taken another road in my earlier life? It brings to mind the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken,” as it deals with the many choices the young heroine in the novel could have made differently. 

And ultimately, the story reconnects us with ourselves, as travel does for me. What if I had gone south instead of north on my trip? What would I have experienced? Whom would I have met? That is not so different from: what if I had gone to a different college, taken a different major, married a different person, settled in a different place? Books, like travel, stimulate, entertain, and if they are good books with universal themes, speak to you personally. 

Of course, you don’t get to eat the different native cuisine when you read that you do when you travel. Books and travel: analogous but not the same. Yes, books are a magic carpet that can transport you to any place in the universe, but I surely do miss the physicality of travel, of throwing a few articles of clothing and my toothbrush into a suitcase and hitting the road.

As to other enrichment in my life, I have become captivated by movies on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu. Well, some of those films offer cultural enrichment, some just good old entertainment. I fell in love with Outlander, the time-travel series I stayed up until all hours binge-watching, as I have previously mentioned. Since then there have been many that I would recommend, including some that were finalists for the Golden Globes awards that I was able to watch on my Smart TV.

Nomadland, which won for best motion picture, is about a slice of life in America that few of us see. The story follows an older widow who outfits her vehicle so that she can live in it and travels around the Southwest, working occasional spot jobs to sustain her along the way. She meets up with others doing the same, and they are mutually supportive even as they are fiercely independent. Her journey is one of self discovery, revealed through her choices, even at an advanced age.

Others I have enjoyed include The Dig, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, East Side Sushi, Penguin Bloom, Red Sea Diving Resort and the delightful series, Firefly Lane. I don’t feel like I am in a cultural desert, but I want it all back.

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METRO photo

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

It seemed like a good idea in the moment. The clock on the oven read 7:00 p.m., and I wanted to watch the PBS News Hour on Channel 13. But I was also hungry. So I reached into the fridge and took out one of the smoothies I make in advance to last me the week. 

This one was in an open top container that I had covered with plastic wrap. I threw the cover in the trash, plunked a straw into the purple drink, picked up a coaster to rest the drink on and headed up the stairs to the television in the bedroom.

After switching on the overhead light, I picked up the remote, put the coaster on the bedside table, settled myself into the adjacent overstuffed chair and reaching over, put the container of smoothie on the coaster. To my horror, the coaster skittered out from under the container, which tipped over and splattered its contents across the carpet, spotting the nearby bedspread, the wall behind me, even the lower slats of the blinds across the room. In an instant, 32 ounces of smoothie lay spread out before me.

“Holy cow!” I yelled. (That’s not what I really yelled, but this is a family newspaper.) The speed with which I had just ruined the bedroom stunned me. I jumped up, grabbed some towels from the nearby bathroom, and on my hands and knees, breathlessly tried to sop up what had not already soaked into the blue carpet.

Finally, I sat back to stop my panting and to survey the damage. It was awesome what some liquid in a cup could do to an otherwise orderly room. It occurred to me then that this wasn’t just ordinary liquid. This was probably the most nutritious contents this carpet could have sucked up. Let me tell you what I put into my smoothie. 

First I pour into the Vitamix a cup of soy milk, then one cup of pomegranate juice. Next I add one banana, then 2 tablespoons of unsweetened chocolate and 2 tablespoons of flax seed meal (not the seeds.) Then comes the good part: 8 ounces of baby bok choy, 8 ounces of baby kale, 2 cups of frozen cherries and 2 1/2 cups of frozen blueberries. The mixer makes all of this into a drink, and I will have one healthy carpet, albeit devilishly stained.

I am able to joke about this because, incredibly, the story has a happy ending. Just as I was sitting in the middle of the floor, about to cry, the phone rang. It was a dear friend, and when I told him what had just happened, he offered to come right over with his shop vacuum and some kind of magic reagent that he loaded into it. He was truly an angel, passing the suction wand over the spill again and again until the original color of the carpet reappeared. He then put some kind of absorbent powder over the main body of the spill, to be left there for a couple of days and then vacuumed up. When I did so, the damaged area was restored to its former pristine condition.

When I look at the carpet now, I think how wonderful it would be if we could just vacuum up whatever unfortunate circumstances had ever befallen us. Imagine having a giant vacuum that could suck away the misery of COVID-19, returning our lives to what we had always thought of as being normal. It could also remove any hurts or regrets, any shadows of past events or unhappy relationships that we might be carrying throughout our lives. 

Yes, it is true that we learn from our mistakes and our experiences. But we don’t need all of them to become better people. We certainly didn’t need a novel coronavirus, even if it did teach us that we could order groceries delivered and work from home. We could borrow from Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, and using our magic vacuum say, “Out, damned spot!” 

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Photo from Pixabay

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

A year ago, most of us were going about our usual lives, shopping for food, carpooling our children, occasionally eating out, going to a movie or a play, traveling with our families during Presidents’ Week, entertaining friends in our houses, and working at our job sites.

Today the only pursuit still left on that list is shopping at the supermarket. We didn’t know that within two weeks, our lives would start to change, and that a month later the entire world would be altered.

The change agent? The novel coronavirus was the villain, otherwise known as COVID-19. Seemingly out of nowhere, the virus launched itself onto the human population. Where did it come from? How did it start? Was China somehow at fault?

A World Health Organization team of scientists returned last week from Wuhan, China, considered to be the first place with a coronavirus outbreak. Dr. Peter Daszak, who has worked with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and is president of EcoHealth Alliance in New York, was a member of the team, and was interviewed about their findings by The New York Times.

They walked around the Huanan Seafood Market, which is regarded as the source and is still blocked off to all but disease investigators. According to Daszak, the Chinese are “absolutely petrified of this virus catching hold again.” They were following severe protocols of testing, isolating and quarantining even as they were working closely with the W.H.O group.

The market was closed on December 31 or January 1, and a team of Chinese scientists then went in and swabbed every surface, collecting over 900 samples. Many were positive, including some animal carcasses. “A farm with rabbits [that was at the market] could have been really critical,” Daszak said. Or bats, stray cats, rats, live snakes, turtles and frogs, all of which were there. There were 10 stalls that sold wildlife, some peopled by vendors from South China provinces where the virus is found in bats. Some of the earliest patients with the disease had links to other markets as well, and some had no links to the Huanan market at all.

The final hypothesis of the W.H.O. team, and the Chinese scientists who worked with them throughout their visit, was that the viral pathway was wildlife, through a domesticated wildlife link, into Wuhan. In particular, Daszak suspects bats, from Southeast Asia or southern China, of getting into a domesticated wildlife farm. The viruses then jump from infected animals on the food supply chain or from their handlers to the dense population of humans that buy the animals at the markets.

There are actually many strains of this abundant family of coronaviruses, and bats and other mammals carry them. The SARS and MERS versions are just a couple that spilled over the species barrier and infected humans. So inevitably there will be more after COVID-19, and they could even cause future pandemics. Aware of that reality, some infectious disease scientists are working to produce a vaccine that will nullify all coronaviruses. Researchers are calling for a global effort to develop such a one-shot vaccine or a super vaccine. There have even been some promising early results.

Coronaviruses were first identified in the 1960s, but were initially thought only to cause mild colds. Then in 2002, a new coronavirus appeared. That was SARS-CoV, named for severe acute respiratory syndrome, and it was deadly.

In 2012, a second species of the coronavirus spilled over from bats, causing MERS, which stands for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, first reported in Saudi Arabia, and today we have SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19.

As we now know from the graphic of the virus shown by the media, the virus has spikes, which are proteins on its surface. If an antibody can be formed that sticks to the spike, it can prevent the pathogen from entering human cells. A genetic molecule, created by BioNTech called messenger RNA, works that way in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines against COVID-19.

Now we need a pan-coronavirus vaccine. It’s on the way.

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Photo by Pixabay

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

Last Saturday I received my first of the required two vaccines against COVID-19. The inoculation itself was painless. The person who administered the shot was a broad-shouldered young man with curly black hair, deep brown eyes and prominent cheekbones that led to a white-tooth smile. He pinched the skin of my arm just below my left shoulder, and I knew the deed was done only when he discarded the needle into the red can. I think you can see why the entire experience was painless.

As you, who have tried undoubtedly know, it was not easy to get an appointment for the vaccine. My family and friends and the children of my friends were all on the phone or on their computer keyboards for hours trying over and over again to make contact with the right person in a reasonably close location to schedule the vaccination. Finally, the daughter of a close friend secured a time slot for me at the Javitz Center in New York City, and then my son found one sooner at Jones Beach.

I know that some people are passing up the opportunity to get vaccinated. They are concerned, among other reasons, that it has not been tested sufficiently since it was developed with unprecedented speed. What will the long term effects of the vaccine be? No one knows because there has not been a long term so far; we do know that the immediate effects have been studied for the short term in thousands of patients in clinical trials. The results and the efficacy have been excellent. So I decided that I would risk any unknown long term negative effects from the vaccine against the already known long-haul negative consequences from the disease and go for it.

I had heard that after-effects were not uncommon during the 24 hours following the vaccination, and indeed I did experience a couple. Two or three hours after I returned home, and after my dinner, I suddenly was enormously fatigued. I managed to climb the stairs to the bedroom, despite feeling light-head, and I slid into bed, where I then spent the night and enjoyed a sound sleep. I awoke to an aching arm, but that wasn’t the main problem. When I tried to walk, my right leg was, I thought, in spasm. I assumed I had slept in an awkward position and that I could walk it off, but the pain intensified. As the day went by, I endured only with the help of repeated Tylenol capsules, vitamins, a banana and ultimately the distraction of the big football game.

The next day, little more than 24 hours later, I felt perfectly fine. I was timid about walking, but there was no problem. Do I know that the leg pain was the after effect of the shot? I don’t, of course. 

I do have a date for the second shot, which is scheduled for early next month, and apparently there is a dose reserved for me to receive at that time. Will the vaccine protect me? From what I have read and been told, it takes about two weeks before the body develops any immunity, and with the one shot, that is perhaps only 50 or 60 percent. The second vaccination brings the immune system to about 94 percent — or so the evidence has shown. Now, with the new mutations that are freely developed by the viruses with each reproduction in new victims, the scientists are not sure. Vaccinations are racing against viral reproduction.

There can be many minute mutations of the viruses’ genetic sequences. More worrisome is recombination. That means the coronavirus mixes large chunks of its genome upon reproduction, and that is common and surely happening. Recombination might enable different tiny variants to combine and make the virus more potent inside a victim’s body.

The question is, will the vaccine hold these newly minted intruders off? Scientists are studying variants and recombination, but they don’t yet know. So far, so good.

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Photo from Pixabay

By Daniel Dunaief

Daniel Dunaief

For the past week, I’ve had birds on my brain.

For starters, Central Park birders headed to the famous urban greenway recently to catch sight of a snowy owl, the first time people documented the presence of the bird in the park in about 130 years. 

I wrote to a bird expert, Noah Strycker, who is both a celebrated avian author, having written “Birding without Borders,” and a master’s candidate at Stony Brook University in the laboratory of Heather Lynch, a penguin scientist and the IACS Endowed Chair for Ecology & Evolution.

Strycker responded to numerous questions about the owl and the snowstorm that blanketed the region earlier this week.

In response to a question about exactly what might bring a snowy owl to the city, Strycker suggested that these birds often “irrupt,” a word for traveling greater distances than normal, south from their normal Arctic range in winters following good breeding summers. 

“Their appearance in New York may be related to an abundance of lemmings in the Arctic last summer,” Strycker wrote. In other words, these well-fed birds may have been able to journey further from the Arctic after a bountiful summer.

While Strycker didn’t catch sight of the owl this time, he did see one on Long Island last winter. They appear on the south shore almost every year, although it’s unusual to see one in Central Park because they prefer beaches and open areas, which are closer to a normal tundra habitat.

As for the rare birds Strycker has seen in the area, he said he got to see a Western Tanager and an Ash Throated Flycatcher in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn this fall. These are birds from the western part of the country, which don’t visit the Empire State too often.

Vagrant birds, which occur in areas outside their typical range, can appear in the area, a byproduct of a wrong turn during a long migration. So, what happens to birds during a snowstorm, I wondered.

For the snowy owl, if he were still here, the precipitation probably wouldn’t have been much of a problem, as his name suggests.

“Flying through falling snowflakes isn’t as much of an issue as flying in high winds, which do, occasionally, literally blow birds off course,” Strycker wrote.

During the storm, many bird species will tuck themselves in a protected spot, like in a dense tree to ride out the flakes.

Noah Strycker with a northern saw-whet owl

“This is a good time to watch your hedges and evergreen trees, which provide nice cover in the winter,” Strycker suggested.

Strycker said people could do seed eating birds — like sparrows, finches, cardinals, doves, chickadees, and jays — a favor by restocking a feeder before a snowstorm.

“They will all come to bird feeders for sunflower seeds and suet,” he said.

Snowy owls, on the other hand, don’t need handouts or feeders. They find their food, typically small mammals, by using their keen senses of sight and hearing. Shaped like a disc, an owl’s face concentrates faint sounds of rustling under the snow, allowing it to find prey it can’t see.

Strycker has always wanted to find an owl footprint in the snow, which looks like a snow angel. The owl lands on the snowy landscape to find its prey and lifts off, leaving footprint evidence of its meal.

As for the effect of the snow on a bird’s survival, Strycker said most of the birds in the area manage through the colder months.

“Snowstorms have been occurring in New York for a very long time, so birds that spend the winter here have mostly adapted to surviving them,” Strycker wrote.

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Photo from Pixabay

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

When General Motors announced last week that the company would aim to sell only electric cars and trucks by 2035, it shook up the industry. There are already electric cars on the road, although they number fewer than one percent.

Tesla, the electric car maker, has been much in the news lately since Wall Street values the company at more than ten times that of General Motors, and indeed, more than Toyota, Volkswagen, Ford and General Motors combined. 

Nonetheless, this was a sharp turn for G.M. And as the largest automaker in the United States and the fourth largest in the world, what G.M. does affects everyone else down the automotive line.

It is no coincidence that the announcement came only a day after President Biden signed an executive order directing his administration to fight the problem of climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency is developing tough new tailpipe pollution regulations to control the largest source of planet-warming emissions in the short term. G.M. is aligning itself with the new administration’s goal in its drive to electric power. Furthermore, just three months ago, China ordered that most vehicles sold there must be electric by 2035. China is G.M.’s and the world’s largest market.

So all roads would seem to be pointing to a preponderance of electric cars by 2035, at least as of the present. But there remains a significant hurdle in the production of electric cars. While countries can certainly create charging stations along the roads in the same fashion as we now have gas stations, and President Biden has asked for 500,000 public charger stations to be built by 2030, the challenge is the batteries required by the cars. 

The battery packs have to be big, and right now to be big means to be expensive. Gasoline engines for equivalent cars cost less than half as much. China is the leading producer of these batteries, and of electric motors, which is not surprising since Chinese leadership has long viewed its dependence on oil imports as a considerable vulnerability. 

Therefore, major auto companies, like Daimler and Toyota, are already manufacturing their electric cars in China. So will many of the Ford Mustang Mach-E models be made there. Tesla started making cars in Shanghai over a year ago to sell in China.

So, folks, it would seem that in our not-too-distant future, we are destined to own electric cars. G.M. is planning to spend $27 billion to introduce 30 electric models by 2025, just a short generation away for those buying new cars this year. They are building a plant in Ohio to make batteries for those vehicles and to develop better batteries. G.M. now feels it could make electric vehicles that would cost no more than gasoline ones. And when G.M. in October offered its Hummer electric pick-up truck, enough orders had come in within a day to fill the entire year’s planned production. 

The Chinese have cleverly offered their huge consumer market in exchange for technical information. Through joint ventures with companies of other nations, along with their own considerable research, they have become the leader in battery development. Further rounding out the picture for the urgency of electric vehicles is the ban by Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands on new gasoline and diesel cars as of 2030.

Utility companies will have to improve their output by as much as 25 percent, which they can do at considerable expense. Guess who will be paying the tab! But the increased rates should be offset by the savings in gasoline, at least that would be the plan.

Power plants would also have to engage in some sort of rotation so that not everyone can charge their vehicles at the same time. They would also help the global climate change situation by using more solar and wind instead of coal and natural gas, in short by cleaning up the power grid.

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Photo from Pixabay

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

As they say in literature, it is the best of times and the worst of times. You could almost say it is also a tale of two cities. Yes, the vaccine has now been developed and produced to counter the novel coronavirus. We will require two shots, whether we get the Moderna or the Pfizer-BioNTech brand, and there may even be a third possibility, one from Johnson & Johnson, that will only be a one shot deal. That’s the wonderful news.

Less than wonderful is the distribution thus far. Despite best intentions, it has been spotty and disorganized. Locations that are supposed to be vaccination sites have had to turn people away because they have run out of the vaccine or never received the shipment to begin with. Getting an appointment, as opposed to standing optimistically for hours in a line, has become an exercise of pounding the keyboard of the computer or dialing on the phone for hours on end, looking for a slot with availability. 

Just about everyone I know is being helped by their children and grandchildren in this frustrating pursuit of inoculation. Those who have received the shot are living in a different city from those who have not.

To complicate the already complicated situation, the wily virus is doing what viruses do: mutating ahead of the vaccines. So far, the pharmaceutical companies are saying that their products are effective against the new strains, perhaps a little less so against the variant from South Africa than the one from the United Kingdom. 

Brazil has a variant as well. And while non-American citizens originating in those countries are, for the moment, banned from entering the United States, scientists know those mutations are already here, having arrived before the ban, from Britain and Brazil so far and most probably South Africa as well. 

Worse than potentially evading the vaccines is the increased degree of contagion those viruses already possess. The knowledge that scientists are already hard at work catching up to the newer strains is comforting. Such an adjustment could take six weeks, however, according to Moderna. Or perhaps a third shot of the existing vaccine might work against the variant.

So while the vaccine may be the best of times, we still have to get there, and the worst is now upon us. Sooner or later, we hope sooner, we will get the logistics of distribution worked out, but most of us will not reach that point of inoculation until mid-summer or fall at the earliest. Meanwhile more people will become ill, especially in the poorer nations unable to buy vaccines in large quantities. And with our global interactions, what pathogens exist elsewhere in the world will also come here with their new mutations.

So what can we do to help ourselves through these next few months?

Let’s remember that a simple handful of actions we already have taken can keep the viruses at bay. Washing our hands thoroughly, multiple times a day ( I practically bathe in hand lotion after all those washings); maintaining social distancing of at least 6 feet, preferably 15 feet, inside as well as outside; and wearing masks are effective defenses, if only we follow them. Working remotely and limiting travel have further contributed to containment.

On the subject of wearing masks, and at the risk of boring you with repetition because I wrote about this last week, I want to urge you to consider wearing two masks. Since the new strains are more contagious, meaning they can spread more readily, having a double barrier for them to pass through doubles our chances of escaping the disease. 

The growing recommendation is to wear a surgical mask underneath and a cloth mask on top. I have tried it and find this no more uncomfortable than a single mask, and I am happier with the thought of being better protected. I throw away the surgical mask and wash the cloth one often to preserve its effectiveness, making for myself a sort of double-bagged wall.

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Male cardinal. Photo by Kyle Barr

By Leah S. Dunaief

Leah Dunaief

Three things I want to tell you about today. 

The first is of a friend who knocks on my window each day that the sun is out. At first, he annoyed me, distracting me from my keyboard or my Zoom screen. But as the social distancing and the isolating in place have continued, I changed my tune. 

When he doesn’t come, I miss him for he keeps me company. He has brought color to my winter world with his improbable crimson feathers easy to spot among the brown limbs of the naked trees and the often slate sky. By now you have probably guessed that I am referring to a cardinal, one who calls my property his home, too. 

He is not just content to share my trees, however. He wants in to my house. Well, not exactly. When the sun is shining, he sees a reflection of my surrounding bushes in my glass windows and thinks he can just continue to fly in their direction. I give him a high mark for determination because he tries over and over again. 

At the same time, I have to give him a low mark for intelligence because he doesn’t seem to learn from his abrupt crashes that the way is blocked for him. I guess the term “bird brain” would be appropriate, but I don’t want to discourage him since he reminds me that there is life outside my house, and he doesn’t seem to cause himself any damage with his efforts.

The second thing to share is that we have binged our way through the eight episodes of “Bridgerton,” a new historic series on Netflix, and I would give it a B+. It’s a little slow and talky, in the way of Jane Austen, but it has real worth for some of its subject matter. The main theme deals with the impossible position of upper class women in 19th century Europe.

The poor things had but two goals in life: to marry well and to produce heirs. This was for the good of the family and only incidentally for their own benefit, so they suffered from lots of family pressure and control. That’s old hat, though, for us 21st century viewers.

However, the series is somewhat original for populating London in the 1800s with a totally integrated cast. The Duke is black and the debutante is white, but that’s just for starters. The one theme that’s absent is any discussion of racism. There is none. You can pretty well guess how the love story ends up, but it’s fun watching the couple and their supporting cast get there.

The third subject is more serious and important to share. You know by now that our new president is making it mandatory to wear face masks in federal buildings and on planes, trains and buses that cross state lines. He is also urging the rest of us to wear masks at least for his first 100 days in office. “Observational studies have suggested that widespread mask wearing can curb infections and deaths on an impressive scale, in settings as small as hair salons and at the level of entire countries,” according to an article by Katherine J. Wu in the Science section of this past Tuesday’s The New York Times.

Now comes further advice about mask wearing. Double-masking is even better and for obvious reasons. In order for the droplets that carry the virus to get to our nose and mouth, they have to work their way through the tangle of threads in a cloth mask or the filter in a surgical one. Double the masks and we double the difficulty. The best arrangement, we are advised, would be a face-hugging cloth mask over a surgical mask. As if one weren’t miserable enough, now we are urged two.

Yes, the vaccines are here and more are coming, but it will take a while for the logistics of delivery to get ironed out. And the numbers of patients stricken with the disease keep escalating, so we have to continue to maintain our distancing, our hygiene and yes, our masks.

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