Old Left-Hander
For decades, it was the sign-off for every Cincinnati Reds radio broadcast. Joe Nauxhall was the youngest to every play major league baseball when he joined the player-short World War II Reds roster in 1944. He was fifteen. When the War was over it was back to Hamilton High School and then the minors, but in 1952 he returned to the big leagues, and played, mostly for the Reds, until 1966. The next year he began his second career as a radio commentator on Red’s radio, a stretch that lasted until 2004.
On long trips, my Dad would listen to Red’s games. As we drove through the pines of Michigan, or across the New York Thruway, or down through Kentucky, it was always a taste of our hometown, Cincinnati. And since the Reds were broadcast on WLW Radio, a clear channel AM station using the maximum wattage allowed, you could hear the games almost everywhere. We could sit on a beach in Canada and catch the scratchy end to August games.
And when it was over, we’d know. Joe would signoff, always with his signature phrase:
“This is the old left-hander, rounding third and headed for home”.
Butcher’s Bill
We have reached a terrible milestone in our national experience: twelve months of a world pandemic. There are few alive who have experienced a world like this, the very few who are as old as my Dad would have been this July, 103. And they were babies, born in 1918 during the “Spanish” flu epidemic, that took 675,000 American lives in twenty-six months. We are sadly ahead of their pace: today’s butcher’s bill over 520,000 gone to COVID.
But unlike the post-World War I world, our science is serving us well. All my grandparents’ generation could do was wear masks, avoid crowds, socially distance and increase ventilation. And, just like today, they had their “anti-maskers” (there were entire anti-mask societies) and scoff-laws. Some wore their masks with holes cut in the front to accommodate their cigars.
Recently in the United States those same common-sense preventions again became political pawns. Wearing a mask and obeying state regulations somehow got wrapped up in the polarization of our politics, a mark of our affiliation rather than a social duty to protect each other. How many additional lives that cost is unknowable, but the scale is likely in the hundreds of thousands. By allowing politics to overrule science, our nation has paid an extraordinary price. With four percent of the world population, we have twenty percent of the world’s deaths.
Science
But the great difference between now and the year of Dad (and Mom’s) birth, is science. From the beginning we knew what caused our disease. And we put the great engines of our scientific industries to task: find treatments and find vaccines. Today, the third vaccine, this one produced by Johnson and Johnson, will receive clearance for public use in the United States. It, along with the Pfizer and Moderna products, will be rushed into arms.
Four million doses of the one-shot J&J vaccine will immediately be apportioned as soon as the final approvals are made. Sixty-six million doses have already been administered to Americans, with more than thirteen percent of the population vaccinated. The goal: 100 million doses by April. President Biden predicts that the shot(s) will be available to everyone in the nation by August. Other vaccines are waiting in the wings, just concluding their scientific trials.
We already are seeing the benefit of immunization. Nursing home residents, the most likely to die from COVID, were among the very first targets of vaccination in the US. Death rates there have fallen seventy percent since the shots began. The concept of “herd immunity”, that so many folks are immunized that viral transmission is slowed to a near halt, is foreseeable.
We are rounding third, and headed for home.
Dancing in the Base Path
Ohio has hit what we call “false spring”. After weeks of snow coverage, sub-freezing temperatures and clouds, the ice is melting. When I was coaching high school track this was the time of year where I’d have to yell “KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON” to my high school boys. After months of twenty-degree weather, the forty-five-degree sunshine would feel like summer, and they’d rip off their sweats and even shirts in the workout. What would feel like Arctic blasts come May felt like Florida beaches in February.
With vaccines and possible “herd immunity” in sight, it’s easy to feel like those bare-chested runners. It feels like spring, almost summer. It’s time to drop all the protections of coats and sweats, of social distancing, masks and restrictions. Let’s go play!! We should get together!! Let’s celebrate the end of our long pandemic winter!!
But we aren’t there – yet. America is so close to solving our national scientific equation, but we have not crossed the plate. We have rounded third, and we are headed for home, but the score doesn’t count – yet. We are dancing in the base path.
Home
And as we dance, it’s still possible we might get thrown out.
The virus doesn’t think, it just acts. It doesn’t know that herd immunity, eighty percent or more vaccinated is on the horizon. The virus does what it does, replicate, infect, replicate some more. It doesn’t know that defeat is imminent. And it will continue to do what it does, until we actually have all those shots in arms. We can still have another spike, another jump in the death rate, another lengthy butcher’s bill. It isn’t necessary, but it’s possible. It’s up to us.
We have rounded third, and we are headed for home. We need to keep our heads down, and get across the plate.
