One reason a federal judge struck down Gov. Bill Lee’s mask opt-out order in Shelby County is that students wearing face masks in school is more efficient, easier, and cheaper than Lee’s plan to protect disabled students.
U.S. District Court Judge Sheryl Lipman’s Friday ruling says that Shelby County’s mask mandate for students is legal. The ruling strikes down Lee’s order that allowed parents to opt their children out of the mandate. This means that all students will have to wear a mask at school in Shelby County starting Monday.
Lee’s opt-out order was delivered in mid-August. Legal challenges to it rose later from Shelby County and private attorneys working for disabled school children at greater risk of Covid’s effects than most. Attorneys said those student could not safely return to school with other maskless students. On these complaints, Lipman had temporarily halted Lee’s order earlier this month, but the order was set to expire Friday.
The new order states plainly, “schools cannot implement adequate health measures to ensure Plaintiffs’ access to school with the executive order in place.” The “unmasked presence” of other students “creates the danger to these plaintiffs.”
The order reads that local school boards won’t be able to give these disabled students reasonable accommodation to keep them from harm. Lee’s order, it says, eliminated Shelby County’s mask mandate “to create more costly and complex measures to protect every child with a disability.”
Lipman said Lee and members of his adminstration have said publicly that masks reduce the transmission of Covid-19. Mask requirements were already in place in Shelby County with set-ups for classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, school buses, libraries, and P.E. classes — none of which would need to be changed with the existing mandate.
To do it Lee’s way and individualize processes and supports for disabled students could possibly come with new facilities like larger gyms or outdoor seating areas. It could also call for more teachers to monitor masked and unmasked students, as well as complex policies and schedules for moving between classes or to school buses. All of these could change, too, if parents change their minds on masking their children.
”The accumulation of costs, alternative schedules, and other changes stands in stark contrast to the cost-effective, minimally burdensome requirement for children to wear masks when at school,” Lipman’s order reads.
The doctor wished for a miracle drug, pain and regret in a bottle.
Inside the room, his colleague was dying of Covid-19. Outside the room, the doctor — Dr. Stephen Threlkeld, a Memphis infectious disease expert — waited with members of the dying person’s family.
“We wished we could bottle the pain and regret of that process, to give people just a taste — a drop — of that to realize that this is now a choice that people are making, to get this illness and to die of it. There is no reason for this to continue.”
Eighteen-Month Pandemic Check-Up
Covid’s second verse is the same as the first in many ways. It’s come with familiar things like mandatory face masks, social distancing, and an unshakable worry about what comes next. But we now know the second verse, the Delta variant, is more infectious, faster, meaner, catching on with a younger audience, and — maybe the most frustrating part — it’s mostly preventable.
Experts here say late summer’s record-setting rise in cases is a “surge of the unvaccinated.” Healthcare leaders say 99 percent of Covid patients they see now are unvaccinated. That’s a stat, not hyperbole.
That figure is, of course, likely heavy on those now broadly called “anti-vaxxers,” right-wingers who put personal freedom before public health. Many, too, are otherwise healthy people in their 20s and 30s whose reluctance to get a vaccine remains a mystery to many health officials.
But a huge chunk of Shelby County’s population are unvaccinated not by choice. No vaccine is yet approved for children under 12. Pediatric Covid cases comprised nearly 40 percent of the county’s active cases late last week. The kids are getting sick. There’s no medicine to protect them. And we’re sending them to school with hundreds just like them.
Thanks to the more contagious Delta variant and vaccine hesitancy, the Covid situation in Shelby County last week was as dire as it’s ever been before. Historic high rates of new cases, hospitalizations, test positivity rates — the fundamental data used to measure the Memphis area’s Covid health — make that dire situation an unfortunate reality.
Last Thursday, Doug McGowen, the city’s chief operating officer (COO), reported two grim milestones. More people were being treated in Shelby County hospitals at one time — 721 — than in any previous time in the 18-month pandemic. Area intensive care units (ICUs) were treating 203 patients, and 518 people were in acute care. Across the county, 163 people were intubated, setting another Covid record here.
Through the difficult data, however, rises a sort of delicate optimism. Some numbers started to soften, officials said. But predictions on the figures came laden with plentiful anxious caveats from experts bitten by Delta’s global surprise.
New case rates blasted past records Memphians thought terrifying in January. The week after Christmas, nearly 18 percent of Covid tests were coming back positive, significantly more than the previous high of about 15 percent. Consider that for the past three weeks, the figure has hovered at around 21 percent. But it has hovered, and some officials harbor that the spread may have stabilized.
Officials at Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis said Covid cases there crested at 172 this past winter. Weeks ago the hospital had 10 Covid patients, but Delta cases there stair-stepped and hit 152 recently. That number has since stabilized, too. The figure encourages Threlkeld and others at Baptist, who say that, if the number holds, they may have receded from the brink of a dire logistical situation. But optimism is indeed delicate and truly tempered with anxious caveats.
“I am flat through underestimating this pandemic,” Threlkeld said at a press event at the hospital last week, “so you will not get me saying it’s going to be fine anymore.”
It’s from this high and tenuous peak that we look back at the long slog through the Memphis version of the global Covid-19 pandemic. From here, we can look back on the early days when we couldn’t even test for the virus, when some of us learned to live and work from home. Others, frontline workers, especially grocery store workers, were heroes. Every commercial began with “in these tough times.”
We can recall the early optimism in Operation Warp Speed and the race to build a vaccine to stop the spread of the disease. When it arrived, there was a dash to sit in long lines at the Pipkin Building. Some posted photos of vaccine cards to social media, sometimes exposing sensitive information if a finger was in the wrong place.
Those vaccines are the difference-maker now as we turn to look ahead, to the future side of this peak. They saved the day, almost. Covid case rates got so low, we pulled our masks off and gently kissed normalcy. But that was fleeting, as we know, ripped away by a virus variant propagated in the unvaccinated, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the chief medical adviser to President Joe Biden and a medical adviser to former President Donald Trump.
From this frightening precipice, though, some experts believe they may even be able to see the end, the real one.
Courtesy of the Department of Health Policy at VUMC
How It Happened
Memphis didn’t blow it. Covid trend lines look basically the same for Shelby County, Tennessee, the U.S. at large, and the world. In fact, government bodies in Memphis were far more conservative than those in other parts of the state when it came to letting down our Covid guard.
Consider that in late April, even as Covid seemed to start winding down in Shelby County, Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland extended the city’s state of emergency, the same one issued as the pandemic began in March 2020.
“Covid-19 continues to present a danger to public health through community transmission, which has resulted in significant loss of lives in Shelby County due to the virus and has strained the hospitals and public health system,” reads the order, which was recently extended.
Seven days after Strickland’s new emergency order, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee was ready to call the game and get back to work. His order lifted any mask mandates in 89 counties, those without their own health departments.
“Covid-19 is now a managed public health issue in Tennessee and no longer a statewide public health emergency,” Lee said in an April statement. “As Tennesseans continue to get vaccinated, it’s time to lift remaining local restrictions, focus on economic recovery, and get back to business in Tennessee.”
We know now that Covid is far from “managed,” but that’s not to malign Lee. No one predicted Delta’s rise. Leaders here were so sure the thing was done, they closed the $51 million Covid overflow hospital in the former Commercial Appeal building on Union without ever seeing a single patient. But it wasn’t only government leaders who were caught off guard.
“I was certainly not expecting the way this has played out,” said Dr. Diego Hijano, an infectious disease expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. “We knew the virus would move through the vulnerable and we always thought about the unvaccinated.
“Obviously, it makes sense that all the kids who were isolated are getting infected and that’s driving a lot of what we’re seeing. But I did not expect things to change so dramatically.”
Looking nationally, researchers told The New York Times in mid-July that the coast was clearing. Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said he thought the “United States has vaccinated itself out of a national coordinated surge, even though we do expect cases pretty much everywhere.” Kristian Andersen, a virologist at the Scripps Research Institute, said, “I don’t expect that we will get close to the kind of mayhem we saw earlier.”
At the end of June, the national seven-day rolling average of new cases was around 12,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). On July 27th, it was 60,000. At the same time, Shelby County’s average rose from 46 new cases to 358. The figure’s latest peak was August 24th at 821. It fell slightly to 746 on August 27th, the latest figure available as of press time.
In the Hospital
Remember “bending the curve”? The phrase seems an Alpha-variant relic these days. But it was a major goal of pandemic-management tactics like mask mandates, indoor capacity limitations, and social distancing. Hospitals and healthcare professionals are essential to everyone, and no one wanted them overrun with Covid patients. So, we wanted to “bend” the new-case trend line downward.
With little appetite left for Covid restrictions, no one talks much about bending the curve anymore, but hospital capacity remains a red-hot issue.
Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris saw the situation firsthand last week on a tour of Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis. Every room in the ICU was full and it seemed “every patient was in a very, very serious situation,” Harris said.
“I was struck by the idea that not everyone in this community that will be struck by Covid, will be safe because there’s not enough experts around and not enough technology to go around.”
The area’s hospitalization record set last week surpassed numbers only seen in the previous week. The number would be astronomical if older residents had not been prioritized in the vaccination effort.
While children (age 0-17) now represent the highest number of active cases in the county, many don’t require hospitalization when they get sick. (As of last week, Le Bonheur had 28 Covid patients, seven of them in the ICU.) The age range of hospitalized adults with Covid is now largely between 20 and 40 years old. That’s “not normal,” according to Shelby County Health Department Director Dr. Michelle Taylor.
“I am personally ill when I think about the number of young people — or people of any age — but particularly those in their 20s and 40s with little children [being treated in the hospital for Covid],” said Dr. John Craig, a thoracic surgeon with Baptist Medical Group. “It is sad beyond description, and to see this go through my community, it’s a terrible thing.”
Dr. Jeff Wright, medical director for Baptist Memorial Hospital-Memphis’ critical care program (which includes the ICU), said the average Alpha-variant ICU patient was around 60 or 70. The average age of death in ICU patients is now 30, and these deaths average once a day.
“These were not 35-year-olds that had lots of medical problems,” Wright said. “They all had jobs … and families. It was tragic.”
These patients die of single-organ failure, lung failure, Wright said. Most times Covid isn’t stressing an existing comorbidity (like cancer or liver disease) in these patients like it did before in older patients. Younger patients also tend to stay in the hospital longer than older patients, he said, sometimes three to four weeks, instead of the two weeks older patients typically stayed, keeping hospital beds full and capacity low.
There’s a higher cost.
“Nurses are in there eight hours a day on end, FaceTiming with families of dying patients,” Threlkeld said. “You lose a little piece of yourself when that happens, and it’s happened a lot to those folks.”
How It Ends (Probably)
Richard Webby thinks we’re still halfway through the pandemic, or maybe 75 percent of the way. Not only does he have an infectious disease lab at St. Jude with his name on the door (the Webby Lab), he’s also the director of the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds.
“There’s no way of knowing, right?” Webby said. “I think this is as bad as this virus is going to get in terms of speed of replication, how potentially transmissible the virus could get.
“I’d like to think that once we do get through this and get more population immunity both through national infection, unfortunately, and through vaccinations, we’ll get back down again, and maybe we’ll stay a little bit lower and get through it.”
Webby thinks Covid will likely settle into a winter disease, somewhere between the flu and the cold. Threlkeld agreed, noting four other coronaviruses — which may have started as pandemics hundreds of years ago — circulate as colds these days.
“What we hope is that by getting everyone vaccinated, it will drive this disease into becoming something like the current coronaviruses that caused the common cold,” he said. “They infect many people and their kids, and [kids] do well compared to adults with those types of infections. So, they have some immunity, but it’s not perfect. They’ll get it again later but it won’t be as severe. Then, by the time you get it multiple times as an adult, you just don’t get very sick from it at all.”
In the shorter term, Threlkeld said case counts could rise again in the winter as everyone heads indoors, just as the numbers spiked last year. But he said, “[W]e might see this thing really taper off when we look at the springtime.”
Hijano said he’s stopped predicting the virus because “sometimes when we think we’ve got it, we really don’t have it all.” The timeline is up to us, he said.
“We’ve had the tools in our hands,” Hijano said. “But as we keep resisting vaccination and mitigation strategies, it will prolong the time.”
The health department’s latest mask mandate said restrictions may be loosened if case counts fall or if 700,000 of people in the county get vaccinated. As of Friday, 467,296 had been vaccinated, nearly 67 percent to the goal of 700,000. Average daily vaccinations last week were 1,854. If that rate continues, it would take about 125 days (four months) to vaccinate the remaining 232,704 people to get to 700,000. Keep it up and Shelby County would have a major reason to toast New Year’s Eve.
Until then, Dr. Aditya Gaur, director of St. Jude’s clinical research on infectious diseases, knows what works and knows how you feel.
“I know you are tired of hearing the same thing over and over about wearing your mask, staying home, and not socializing,” he said. “A part of that is that the people who have been doing it intensely are the ones who continue to do it intensely, although they are tired of it. But the people who never had the appetite for it still don’t have an appetite for it.”
McGowen, the city’s COO, is likely tired of talking about Covid, too, directing much of the area’s response to the pandemic and giving regular updates on the situation. Last week, he asked for help.
“We’re asking that everybody, that you just do the right thing,” he said. “We understand this has been a rough 18 months for everyone in our nation. But it is not the job of the city government or county government or the health department to navigate this alone. Nor is it the responsibility of the hospitals to navigate this alone and be just the net receiver of those who are very sick.
“It is individual by individual, person by person, who complies with common sense and doing the right thing that will get us through this pandemic.”
It’s become almost a daily story in the media: Some outspoken anti-vaxxer dies of Covid. Some are repentant in their final days, like conservative radio talker Phil Valentine of Nashville, who, after coming down with the disease, changed his tune and urged his listeners to get vaccinated — before he died on a ventilator. Others have gone to meet their maker still insisting that a) Covid was a hoax, b) the vaccines don’t work, or c) they really just had the flu.
Three conservative radio hosts have died in recent weeks: Valentine and two Florida talk-show mainstays — Marc Bernier and Dick Farrel. All three disparaged the vaccine, masks, and distancing; trashed the CDC; and told listeners not to fear Covid. Bernier tweeted: “Now the government is acting like Nazis, saying ‘get the shot.’” Farrel tweeted: “Why take a vax promoted by people who lied 2u all along about masks, where the virus came from, and the death toll?” He also called Anthony Fauci “a power-tripping lying freak.”
This week, Joe Rogan, aka the “little ball of anger,” the most popular podcaster in America, announced that he’d contracted Covid. Rogan, unsurprisingly, is also an anti-vaxxer. He claims that he is taking a horse dewormer to treat his case. I hope he is as lucky as he is stupid.
But it’s not just radio hosts who are dying from denial of science and common sense, who are losing the ultimate bet, making the deadly choice to pick ideology over science and medicine. It’s evangelical ministers, politicians, anti-mask leaders, and other assorted right-wing spokespeople, now dead because they bought the bilge being spewed by Valentine and their cohorts, and, even worse, by prominent talk-show blatherers with national audiences, like the loathsome and hypocritical Tucker Carlson (who’s been vaccinated) and Laura Ingraham (also vaccinated), to name just two. Their lies are quite literally getting people killed.
Several country music stars and boomer rock heroes like Eric Clapton and Van Morrison are also virulent and outspoken in their anti-vax, anti-mask positions. The latter two have written horrible songs about losing their freedom. To be idiots? Most of Kid Rock’s maskless band caught Covid at the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally last month. (South Dakota’s Covid infection rate went up 700 percent following the gathering.)
Locally and statewide, we are seeing the results of a low vaccination rate and anti-mask sentiment, due mostly to ignorance and ideology. Parents in this county and this state are intentionally sending their children to school, unmasked and unvaccinated, convinced that all these deaths, these ever-rising case numbers, these young people dying in our hospitals, are somehow a Joe Biden/Anthony Fauci plot to take away their freedom. Their own children (and ours) are being sacrificed on the altar of know-nothing ideology, aided and abetted by GOP state governors, including our own absurdly incompetent Bill Lee, who when asked how he planned to deal with the fact that Tennessee now has the highest infection rate in the nation, answered that he didn’t plan to “change strategy.”
“Strategy?” No, Bill. “Strategy” is a plan, a course of action, a way to take on a problem sickening and killing the people in your state. Sitting on your ass and saying that “parents know best” is not a strategy. You are an embarrassment, a wanna-be DeSantis, a mini-Trump with the charisma of a pine-stump.
King Arthur and the Black Knight
All this reminds me of nothing so much as the fight scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, in which the Black Knight refuses to allow King Arthur to pass. In the ensuing sword fight, the knight’s left arm is hacked off. “’Tis but a scratch,” he proclaims, fighting on. When his right arm is severed, he still refuses to surrender.
“Look, you stupid bastard,” says Arthur. “You’ve got no arms left!”
“’Tis but a flesh wound,” says the knight.
Then a leg is sliced off, then the other. Still he persists, shouting insults and threats, a noisy torso on the ground. “The Black Knight never loses!” he shouts.
Governor Reeves talks as, among others, Commissioners Wright and Mills listen
If there is an ideal place in Shelby County for Republicans to feel at home and certain of their turf (both physical and psychological), it is surely the expansive country manse that Brent Taylor has built in suburban Eads and periodically offers as a haven for this or that visiting GOP dignity. Taylor, who has occupied several local governmental positions and is now chairman of the Shelby County Election Commission, has served many party dignitaries by offering them his home as the site for a fundraiser, as he did Thursday night. For Tate Reeves, governor of Mississippi.
Aside from the hospitality, the house itself — half of it a replica of the Governor’s Mansion of Texas, the other half a reconstruction of the Mississippi Governor’s Mansion, has its own charm.
7th District Congressman David Kustoff was an early speaker at the affair, making plain his disapproval of Democratic President Joe Biden’s handling of troop evacuation from Afghanistan: “A catastrophe on Biden’s watch,” he called it. “No exit plan!”
The next GOP eminence up was Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett, who told the crowd, “It’s been an interesting time to be the chief election officer in the state of Tennessee, or really the chief election officer anywhere in the country. What I want to show each and every one of you is that we’re going to do everything we can to make sure that we, whenever we count the votes, you know, we count them once — no more, no less.”
Eventually, following a gracious proclamation in his honor presented by Shelby County Commissioners Mick Wright and Amber Mills, and read aloud by Mills, there was Governor Tate Reeves, and, though he used the word “solidarity” relative to the ongoing national emergency, he wasted no time conveying his dispraise of Biden: “Since the election of this president, I don’t know what has been worse, the execution of the removal of our troops from Afghanistan, or the execution of our southern border. Fact is this president just doesn’t understand.”
Reeves warmed quickly to what sounded like an essential credo: “I don’t always know what the future holds. But I do know who holds the future. And when you are in an elected office, you place your confidence in our Heavenly Father, and you let him provide you the strength to make the hard decisions. And everything else is what it is.”
The governor applies this lesson of faith to the ongoing Covid crisis, which finds Mississippi among the most afflicted states, both in numbers of cases and in the percentage of citizens infected.
“I’m often asked by some of my friends on the other side of the aisle regarding Covid,” Reeves said. “You know, most of them are about Covid. And why does it seem like both in Mississippi and maybe in the Mid-South people are a little less — scared, shall we say. And my response is, when you believe that living on this Earth is but a blip on the screen, you don’t have to be so scared.”
Reeves would add: “Now, God also tells us to take necessary precautions. And we all have opportunities and abilities to do that. And we should all do it. And I encourage everyone to do so.”
After his formal remarks, the Governor would contend that the curve of new Covid cases in Mississippi has held steady for a week, and he reaffirmed his opposition to imposing state mandates for either masks or vaccines.
Photo illustration: Justin Fox Burks;
Prop Styling and Hand Modeling: Aaron Brame
The COVID-19 pandemic is not over. The Johns Hopkins University of Medicine’s Coronavirus Resource Center, which has been tracking the spread of the disease for more than a year, reports that 165 million people have tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 worldwide; 3.4 million people have died from the disease. The United States has both the most cases, with just over 33 million, and the most deaths, with 588,548. In Shelby County, roughly one in 10 people have been infected, and 1,644 people have died.
The development of COVID vaccines and a massive government push to get “shots in arms” has blunted the spread of the disease. In real-world conditions, mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer and Moderna have been found to reduce an individual’s chance of infection by more than 90 percent. A two-shot dose virtually eliminates the possibility of hospitalization and death.
Vaccine development has been a science success story, but we’re not out of the woods yet. It’s unlikely COVID will ever go away entirely. The virus will go from pandemic to endemic, with flu-like regional outbreaks recurring every year. It will take time to vaccinate the world. Early fears about new virus variants able to evade vaccine-generated antibodies have not materialized, but most experts believe it’s just a matter of time before a new mutation makes a vaccine booster shot necessary.
As restrictions ease with the falling case numbers, the country seems to be crawling back to normal. Interviews with Memphians from different fields impacted by the pandemic reveal how this new normal will be different from the old.
Tamra Patterson (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Dining In/Out
Tamra Patterson, owner of Chef Tam’s Underground Cafe in the Edge District, was just getting her business off the ground when the pandemic hit. “In February of 2020, we saw such great success, having just relocated from Cooper-Young,” she says. “We were right in the middle of Black Restaurant Week, and we were expecting for that to catapult us to new heights. As you could imagine, we were kind of sucker-punched in March.”
Instead of managing new growth, Patterson found herself facing no good options. “We had to make the really hard call of do we close, or do we do what we ended up doing, which is strictly going to-go?”
The constantly changing health directives made closing the dining room the logical choice. “I didn’t want the yo-yo: You can open but you can only have six people. You can open but you can only have 20 people. I felt like the inconsistency for a customer would be much more detrimental than what was happening.”
Eric Vernon of The Bar-B-Q Shop agrees that dine-out business was the only play available but says a good restaurant is about more than just the food. “At The Bar-B-Q Shop, you come in, you sit down, you stay overtime, and the staff gets to know you. So a lot of what we did was cut right off the bat. We don’t just sell food, you know. It’s an atmosphere thing. I think we went into a little bit of panic mode. I couldn’t worry about atmosphere; I just had to get the food out. So within a three-week, maybe four-week process, we did what normally takes a year to develop. We had to come up with an online system for people to pick up, and we had to do a delivery system, and we had to figure out how to get all these systems to ring up in our kitchen.”
Huey’s (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Steve Voss faced the same challenge across the nine Huey’s locations. “We hit the streets as quickly as possible to figure out, how are we going to get food out to our guests efficiently and timely while maintaining the quality? So we went straight into curbside.”
Customers liked picking up food to eat at home, but the learning curve was steep, says Vernon. “We went from people placing orders for ribs and a couple of sandwiches to-go to doing full family orders. People don’t get that it takes longer for us to bag up an order for a family than it does to get it to the table. We had never done to-go orders for seven or eight people, every other time the phone rang. We had people calling to say they’re outside. Well, we’ve got a front door and a back door, so we’re running out to the front, they’re not there, so then we’re running out back!”
Restaurateurs got a crash course in the delivery business. “We’ve had people approach us in the past, wanting us to venture into that area,” Voss says. “We’ve developed some systems with DoorDash and ChowNow, and now it is a tremendous part of our business, but it’s really hard to execute well. It’s like having a whole other department in the building.”
Crosstown Brewing Company (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Take-out wasn’t just for restaurants. “We had to shut down the taproom, which was a major source of revenue for our business,” says Crosstown Brewing Company owner Will Goodwin. “But people kept coming, and we made beers available in six-packs. I remember having a stack of beer sitting in the middle of the taproom, and we had a skeleton crew taking pre-orders and running beer out the door to people in cars.”
Goodwin says pandemic-era liquor law changes saved his business. “Beer is kind of hung up in this antiquated, three-tier system where there’s a manufacturer, there’s a distributor, and there’s a retailer.”
The pandemic proved direct sales from brewery to customer is “a new business model that could be sustained. We’re still doing deliveries on Mondays and Tuesdays from the brewery. I’ve got one guy that orders a mixed case of beer every Monday. He’s done it for a year and a half.”
Vernon says his dining room is filling back up, and the take-out business is bustling. After having to cut his staff in half, re-hiring is proving difficult. “Drive down Madison, and there’s a help wanted sign in every restaurant.”
The new normal will likely include both curbside service and increased delivery options, says Voss. “We’ve been very fortunate to have great managers and tremendous support from the community and our wage employees to navigate all this. It’s been a heck of a ride, and we’re still battling every day.”
Out of the Office
For millions of office workers, 2020 meant taking meetings in your Zoom shirt and sweatpants. Kirk Johnston is the founder and executive partner of Vaco, a consulting and staffing firm specializing in technology, finance, accounting, supply chain, and logistics. He says many businesses who were dipping their toes in remote-work technology found themselves shoved into the deep end. “I think a lot of them were just slow to adapt, but now that it’s been proven that people can work remotely and be very effective, companies have been forced to say, ‘Gosh, this does work, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t be more flexible because it makes people more productive when they can do the things they need to do for their family and also get their job done and done well.’”
Just before the pandemic, Memphian Audra Watt started a new job as vice president of a medical device company based in Lebanon, Tennessee. “I lead a marketing organization of individuals all over the country, and we’re a global organization, so we interact with people all over the world,” she says. “We have a lot of folks that already worked remotely. I’d never really worked with remote employees. I’d always been with people, who reported to me and my bosses, in the office. So I was like, this is going to be weird. I had no idea it was going to be the new normal. A month into my new job, everybody started working from home. I was shocked at how productive everybody was! It was like, well, we don’t actually need to all be together. Our productivity just skyrocketed to the point where I was telling people, ‘Hey, you don’t need to work nights and weekends.’”
The experience was an eye-opener. “I don’t see a reason to go back to the office in the full-time capacity we had in the past,” she says.
As vaccinations decrease the danger of an office outbreak, a new hybrid model is likely to take hold. “There’s a very hands-on element to what I do, with product development and product management,” says Watt. “Being able to touch and feel, and look at prototypes, and talk to people on the line is super critical. But I don’t do that every day. If I look back at my time in the office, a lot of it was spent on the phone. … I think one of the most compelling things I realized is how much time I spent traveling to get to in-person meetings, which probably could have been accomplished virtually.”
Like most teachers, John Rash, assistant professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, spent the last year and a half teaching remotely. “I would say it went pretty well for certain areas,” he says. “There were definitely some areas where it was not as good as in person, but there’re some areas that actually worked better. … I have one class I teach nearly every semester with a hundred students in it. It’s just not possible to address their questions and individual concerns during class time. A lot of those things that might take two or three back-and-forth emails, now, we can jump on Zoom and get it settled in four or five minutes. I feel like I’ve had a lot more contact with students over the past year than I did previously, just because of that accessibility that’s available through Zoom.”
Johnston says some form of remote work is here to stay. “The question is going to be, what is the best model for each individual company and each individual person? I think both are going to have to be flexible. Those companies that are just saying, ‘No, we’re going back eight-to-five, five days a week,’ will have a hard time recruiting people. And I think those people who are dogmatic and say, ‘I will only work remotely,’ will not find themselves in the best company or the best position. There’s going to be some kind of a compromise on both sides.”
Amy LaVere (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
The Show Must Go On
Amy LaVere and Will Sexton were touring in support of two new albums when COVID shut the country down. “We had gigs just falling away off the calendar,” LaVere says. “We had one big one left in Brooklyn, and it canceled because they shut the city down.”
On the terrifying drive back to Memphis, they stocked up on rice and beans and prepared to hunker down indefinitely. “What will become of us? Is this the end of mankind?”
LaVere and Sexton were among the first Memphis musicians to try streaming shows as an alternative to live gigs. “We just had to figure out a way to try to make a living, but it didn’t really work,” she says. “For the first couple of months, we were doing one a week, and people were very, very generous and sweet to us. It helped us get back on our feet. But then, it just became so saturated, and there were so many people doing what we were doing, that we really just kept at it to keep our craft up. It was a thing to do every week to just not lose your mind.”
Eventually, LaVere and Sexton started playing private, socially distanced shows in their driveway. “I hated the livestream so much,” she says. “It’s really difficult to perform to nobody.”
Zac Ives says the pandemic accelerated changes at Goner Records. “We were already working on a website and converting everything over to a more functional, online way to sell records. We’ve been living in the ’90s for the majority of our lifetime as a company online, and for a while that was fun and it worked. But we went ahead and launched the site we had been working on about a month before it was ready. That was our lifeline.”
Applying for a PPP loan and emergency grants forced Ives to re-examine long-standing assumptions. “The grants made us pull a bunch of different numbers and look at things differently,” Ives says. “My biggest takeaway from all of this is that it forced everybody to get way more creative, and way more flexible with how their business works.
“We were pushing people online to shop, but we also started thinking, if there are no shows, how can we get these records out when the bands can’t tour with them? How do you put stuff in front of people? Our solution was Goner TV.”
Goner had already been livestreaming their annual Gonerfest weekends, but after participating in a streaming festival over Memorial Day weekend 2020, Ives says they realized the bi-weekly show needed to be more than music. “The idea was sort of like the public-access cable shows we used to pass around on VHS tapes,” he says. “People would do all kinds of crazy stuff.”
Filmed on phones and laptops and streaming on Twitch and YouTube, the typical Goner TV episode includes live performances, music videos, comedy, drag queen tarot card readings, puppet shows, and even cooking and cocktail demonstrations. “We recognized that the power of all of this was that there were all these other talented people around who wanted to try to do stuff together. And it really did kind of bring that community back together. We’d get done with these things and be like, ‘Wow, how’d we pull that off?’”
In August 2020, Gretchen McLennon became the CEO of Ballet Memphis. “I think from a strategic standpoint, it made coming into leadership a little more compelling because all the rules go out the window in a global pandemic,” she says. “Dorothy Gunther Pugh left a wonderful legacy. Ballet is a very traditional art form, but it’s time to pivot, and the world was in the midst of a pivot. We just didn’t know where we were going.”
With grants and a PPP loan keeping dancers on staff, Ballet Memphis started streaming shows as an outreach, including an elaborate holiday production of The Nutcracker. Learning a new medium on the fly was difficult, but rewarding. “We had to be thoughtful about the moment in time we were in,” she says. “We successfully filmed over the course of two weeks, but we had to do daily testing of the crew in our professional company and all the staff that was going to be on set. … We wanted that to be a gift to the city of Memphis.”
Held last October, the 2020 Indie Memphis Film Festival was a hybrid of drive-in screenings and streaming offerings. “It was a huge success, without a doubt,” says Director of Artist Development Joseph Carr. “There was no existing infrastructure because no one was doing this prior to the pandemic. It was actually very frowned upon in the film festival world to have films online. Everybody kind of stepped up and rallied around each other in the community and really created a sense that we can all learn from each other. It brought a lot of the festivals much closer together.”
Carr says the virtual format allowed Indie Memphis to expand its audience. “We had filmmakers from as far away as South Korea and Jerusalem, but also we had audiences from those regions. That is impossible to get in any other way.”
Melanie Addington is one of very few people who have led two film festivals during the pandemic. The 2020 Oxford Film Festival was one of the first to go virtual, and by the time 2021 rolled around, the winter wave had subsided enough to allow for some limited in-person and outdoor screenings. “It was, for so many people, literally the first time they’ve been around other people again. And so all those awkward post-vaccine conversations. Like, do we hug? We don’t know what to do with each other anymore when we’re physically in the same space.”
Addington just accepted a new position as director of the Tallgrass Film Festival in Kansas, which means she will be throwing her third pandemic-era festival this fall. “A lot of us have learned there’s a larger market out there who can’t just drop everything for five days and watch a hundred movies. It’s going to allow for a bigger audience.”
McLennon says Ballet Memphis has a full, in-person season planned next year and sees a future for streaming shows. “In our virtual content, we can be more exploratory at low-risk to see, does it resonate? Does it work?”
LaVere sees signs of life in the live music world. “Who knows what the future will hold in the winter, but we’re full steam ahead right now. My calendar is filling up. It seems like every day, the phone is ringing with a new show.”
ArtsMemphis has announced its second round of fiscal year 2021 operating support grants – for a total of $850,000 – benefitting 48 local arts organizations.
Funding evaluation criteria includes: grantee narrative reports surrounding organizations’ COVID-19 responses and commitments to advancing racial equity and inclusion; financials from 2019 and 2020 coupled with 2021 projections; and staffing data, including total artist engagement.
As the Mid-South’s primary arts funder, ArtsMemphis invested $2.8 million in 71 arts groups and 137 artists in 2020. During the COVID pandemic, the organization elevated its role as convener and connector for the arts sector by helping arts organizations maintain or rework business plans, create virtual arts events, and develop reopening protocols.
“We recognize that unrestricted operating support is necessary to shape a dynamic and sustainable arts community,” said ArtsMemphis president & CEO Elizabeth Rouse. “In addition to the COVID-prompted Artist Emergency Fund, we continue to prioritize our cornerstone operating support grant initiative, which is made possible each year by our corporate, foundation, and individual donors.”
Of the 48 awarded organizations, 41 percent are led by a person of color, and 77 percent are serving majority people of color participants.
“We are establishing equitable practices through not only the size, history, or genre of our awarded grantees — we are also covering a higher percentage of smaller organizations’ operating budgets, especially since their access to additional relief funds during COVID, such as PPP, has been limited,” said Rouse. “We felt this financial relief should be an immediate priority.”
Prior to the pandemic, 20 percent of ArtsMemphis’ grantees’ budgets were related to 1,300 staff. Arts organizations have reported an 80 percent reduction in the number of artists engaged in 2020 versus 2019, resulting in 8,570 artist engagements lost. Layoffs or furloughs were reported by 53 percent of arts organizations, impacting 560 positions, or 44 percent of the arts sector workforce.
New virus case numbers rose by 178 over the last 24 hours. The new cases put the total of all positive cases in Shelby County since March 2020 at 88,521.
Total current active cases of the virus — the number of people known to have COVID-19 in the county — are 1,302. The number reached a record high of more than 8,000 in late December and only rose above 2,000 in October. The new active case count represents 1.5 percent of all cases of the virus reported here since March 2020.
As of Friday, March 5th, in Shelby County, 164,472 COVID-19 vaccine doses had been given. As of Friday, 50,679 people had been given two doses for full vaccination, and 113,793 had been given a single dose.
The Shelby County Health Department reported that 3,410 tests have been given in the last 24 hours. So far, 1,032,550 tests have been given here since March 2020. This figure includes multiple tests given to some people.
The latest weekly positivity rate declined. The average number of positive cases for the week of February 21st was 4.9 percent. That’s down from the 7 percent of average cases recorded the week before. It’s all down from the record-high 17.5 percent in late December.
Six new deaths were reported over the last 24 hours. The total death toll now stands at 1,517.
The average age of those who have died in Shelby County is 73, according to the health department. The age of the youngest COVID-19 death was 13. The oldest person to die from the virus was 103.
It’s Saturday afternoon and my wife is making a pie crust, not a particularly regular occurrence, since she’s a busy professional lawyer-type person and I’m a work-at-home schlub who ends up doing most of the cooking these days. I am smart enough, however, not to offer advice on pie-crust-making.
As we chat, Tatine pulls a box of parchment paper out of the drawer where all the stuff in long, rectangular boxes goes: foil, plastic wrap, wax paper. You know. We all have one of those drawers.
“We’re almost out of parchment paper,” she says. “And it looks like we’re also really low on plastic freezer bags.”
Bruce VanWyngarden
“Okay.”
I pull out my phone and tap it a few times.
“It’ll get here Monday,” I say.
The transaction happens almost without thinking. A year ago, I would have added “freezer bags” and “parchment paper” to the standing grocery list on my phone. Five years ago, I would have added the items to a grocery list stuck on the fridge with a magnet. No more. After 11 months of COVID-19, I just order that crap instantly. I’ve got priorities, after all. I’m not gonna shower and put on hard pants and real shoes and mask up and get in my car and risk my life for a roll of parchment paper. No sir, buddy.
On Monday, a package will appear on my porch, and it’s likely I’ll have no idea what it is until I open it and discover — whee! — parchment paper and freezer bags! Or it might be fire starters for the fireplace or three new black T-shirts or a cool new meat thermometer that I convinced myself I needed late one night. Who knows? Santa comes all year now!
Sometimes change happens and it takes us awhile to realize it. Now, while we all jockey for position and wait and hope for a vaccine dose, it might be a good exercise to consider just how much the pandemic has changed us, and how much of that change might linger after COVID is just a bad memory that arises when you find a mask in a coat pocket a year from now.
I look forward to wandering through a bookstore, lingering in a coffee shop, sitting in a restaurant over a good meal, going to a concert, strolling through a museum, flying on an airplane, drinking a cold local brew at a bar where everybody knows my name. I might even miss going to the office. Sort of. Those things will come back into my life and I will welcome them.
But I think many of us, including me, will continue to order the mundane stuff we used to drive around and pick up. Not fun shopping, mind you, but yeah, parchment paper, plastic bags, vitamins — that stuff? Just drop it off on the porch, please. Thanks.
Have COVID and Amazon and Uber Eats and other delivery services transformed our urban way of shopping in a manner similar to how Walmart transformed rural America’s way of shopping? I don’t know. I read an essay this week called “Rural Doom,” by Evan Charles Wolf. I recommend it to you. It is the best analysis I’ve seen yet on the country’s now-massive rural/urban divide. Wolf acknowledges how Walmart (and globalization) deconstructed the economies of rural and small-town America, but takes it a step further, into the political ramifications.
As the factories left and small businesses died and the towns shrunk, our cities and suburbs absorbed more people — and gained more votes and more power. Joe Biden took the presidency handily in 2020 — in the popular vote and Electoral College — and yet won majorities in only 16 percent of the nation’s counties! Population density was the single most important factor in determining who won the election. The lesson: Win the cities and suburbs and you win the presidency. Walmart didn’t just transform a way of life; it transformed our electoral politics.
Will COVID leave a similar mark? Time will tell.
• Readers of the print edition of the Flyer will no doubt have noticed that the paper is a different shape — slightly wider and a bit shorter. That’s because the printer we’ve used for many years was recently shut down. We’ve found a new printer, but it was necessary to conform to a new shape. Same Flyer, same content, just a new package. We think it’s pretty snazzy.
Spring, Summer, Fall at the Brooks Museum by Wheeler Williams
Most museums are temporarily closing their doors due to recent COVID restrictions. This list will be updated as needed.
Memphis Brooks Museum of Art will remain closed until Wednesday, January 6th. This includes all public programming.
The National Civil Rights Museum is temporarily closed until further notice.
The Pink Palace Museum closes December 24th at 2 p.m. through January 23rd.
The Metal Museum buildings and grounds will remain closed through the New Year and will reopen to the public on Friday, January 8th.
Stax Museum will be closed from December 24th through January 4th.
The Dixon Gallery and Gardens will continue to be open except for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day. It has a strict capacity limit and requires guests to wear masks and social distance during their visit.
The Memphis Restaurant Association has issued a statement in response to the new health directive announced on Monday.
Restaurants are, in fact, among the safest places to be due to social distancing, mask requirements, and numerous other regulations ensuring the safety of our staff and guests. Local, state, and national data (see links below) bear out the truth that restaurants are not a significant source of transmission, yet our local officials continue to unreasonably single out the restaurant industry. We are disappointed with the Health Department’s decisions and continued lack of communication and are asking for the support of our membership, employees, and community by contacting community leaders to push back against this injustice. Shutting restaurants down drives the public to higher-risk, unregulated, private gatherings.
Bruce VanWyngarden 
Jon W. Sparks 
Memphis Restaurant Association