The latest disease is ‘COVID Fatigue’

Anyone else tired of the Covid-19 deal yet?

I am…big time.

It’s not the disease itself. That, like all diseases, is a bad thing. But it too shall pass, if I may paraphrase the greatest book ever written.

No, what sticks in my craw, chaps my shorts and wrankles my hankles is the whole things with these masks.

A little background if I may. For more than 40 years I worked in the medical field as a technologist trained and certified in X-ray, Cat Scan, MRI and other forms of radiation to produce diagnostic images.

For the overwhelming majority of that time, I worked in mostly large trauma centers in the Seattle and Portland area. I worked through such epidemics and pandemics as AIDS and the Swine flu.

Twice a year at many of the places I worked, we were marched into the employee health departments and fitted for a mask, the N-95 mask, that would be ours personally throughout the year if needed.

Now this was not just like in the military where you passed through a line to get a few pair of underwear in as close as possible to the size you needed. No, this N-95 fitting was quite the process.

First, the mask was carefully fitted and formed to our individual faces. Beards were a problem because they could not be completely properly formed around a face. It was a problem for a lot of men too! Hey, it was Seattle and Portland.

Once the mask was in place, a big plastic hood was placed over my head. The hood had a valve at the top through which a variety of things that emitted an odor or taste where sprayed in mist form.

If you could smell or taste the mist, the mask had to be refitted. I always thought a good way to do that would have been to blow in marijuana smoke, wait for it to clear and if the dude or dudette was smiling and hungry that would mean a bad fit.

That idea, like my suggestion to name the newsletter at one hospital “The Gall Blabber” went nowhere.

My point is, as well meaning as they may be, the vast majority of masks now being sold anywhere and everywhere are pretty much worthless. Colorful but useless.

The way they are worn just adds to the ineffectiveness. For example, why wear a mask around your pie hole if you don’t also cover the snot biscuit, i.e., the nose. I had a lot of anatomy and physiology classes in my days and I’m pretty sure most people breathe at least some air through the beak! Unless you have “bats in the cave,” also known as boogers, in which case you should do a little nose mining, air is coming up your nose.

As we’ve all been warned ad nauseum, this naughty virus like to surf in the open air.

But there’s more concerning these air dams which bother me. Some folks, well at least a few including a certain basement-dwelling presidential candidate, have been seen unhooking the masks while they attempt to put together a coherent sentence while leaving the mask dangling from one ear.

They have also become face-born posters for protesters and the like who march the streets next to all kinds of mask-free folks screaming all kinds of things. Screaming, we are told, causes more viruses to spew into the air.

They can also be kind of unnerving too. The other day while I was refreshing myself at a local adult beverage establishment, I guy wearing dark clothing, sunglasses, a ball cap and mask walked in the back door and went directly behind the counter.

Damn, I thought, this is a robbery about to happen and I don’t have my 9mm with me. Turns out he was the beer distributor.

But one of the worst things and one I just can’t understand is why, in this masked world, can we not visit the National Bison Range?

Social distancing shouldn’t be a problem…it’s at least six feet from the start of your average trunk (even more with truck bed), and across the engine and hood of the next car in line, even if they are tailgating bumper to bumper.

You drive through the Range in your own vehicle and are required to stay in that vehicle least one of those cows on steroids stomp you into dust. Avoid the visitors center if you don’t want to wait in a six-foot spacing line and there should be no problem, right?

Ah, but then it dawned on me. They either can’t find masks big enough for the bison or they have run out of employees or volunteers willing to put a mask on a bison.

At last, something that makes sense with the whole mask thing.

Chuck Kvelve Bandel is a reporter for the Mineral Independent and Clark Fork Valley Press. Look for his “Kvelve’s Comments” column weekly.