Going Viral

Posted on November 27, 2022 by admin

Now I know what it feels like, or may have felt like. Kind of. Sort of.

I will never experience, in all likelihood, the very worst the COVID-19 virus can inflict on human beings. I was lucky in many ways. First, the virus just never found me as a target until early October of this year. Second, I am very physically fit for my age, and I don’t suffer from any chronic conditions that often expose people to more severe reactions to the virus. Third, by the time COVID-19 found me, I had the two initial shots of the Pfizer vaccine, and later a Moderna booster. My only failing was not having obtained the more recently released Omicron booster, but there is no question that vaccines made my path far easier than was the case for those who suffered earlier in the pandemic.

I spent most of my COVID time not knowing I had it, though there were indications that aroused my suspicions—just a bit. Late Sunday, October 9, I experienced some mild cold symptoms, but I sometimes have sinus problems that become more persistent as Midwest weather changes in the fall. On Monday, I began to experience more of a cold and struggled through online meetings, two about a video project, one preparing for an upcoming online training workshop. In the evening, I was supposed to volunteer with

It’s a lot easier to get a test now than at the height of the pandemic, when tests were as scarce as the places that provided them. Now you just pull up for an appointment, take the kit through the window, tickle your nostrils with a swab, and hand it all back to the pharmacist.

signature collection to help place our incumbent Chicago alderman, Daniel La Spata, on the municipal ballot next spring, but I called it off because I was not feeling well. By the next morning, I took a nasal swab COVID test at Walgreen’s, but the test came back negative the following day. As a result, I assumed I simply had what I called “the ordinary crud” of a normal cold. Just deal with it for a few days, I thought, and get over it.

I made no real changes to my plans and tried to maintain my normal pace. The previous week, curiously, had included my participation as a consulting expert in two online symposiums, both lasting two and three-quarter hours, on Tuesday and Thursday for a project at Johns Hopkins University addressing pandemic community recovery. I moderated the final panel on Thursday, dealing with the use of metrics, which are essentially statistical targets, for tracking the many variables concerning social equity and public health factors that would guide such recovery. In other words, COVID-19 already had my intellectual attention. I had no reason to suspect It would seize my medical attention as well.

But I was wrong on that count. By that Tuesday, some of the infamous COVID-19 fatigue was settling in, and the cold was tightening its grip. I had planned to attend a program of the Society of Midland Authors at Cliff Dwellers in downtown Chicago that evening. As on Monday night, I never made it. It seemed wiser to stay home. It was becoming a pattern.

Nonetheless, I spent Wednesday morning at a dealership service department. While in the waiting room, I met online with two planned guest speakers for my online University of Iowa class, which meets in the fall semester on Thursday evenings. I was very much looking forward to letting Linda Langston and Kehla West take over the class a week later because, in my opinion, both are impressive members of the natural hazards professional community and could share valuable insights. “Planning for Disaster Mitigation and Recovery” offers graduate planning and public affairs students serious comprehension of the natural-hazard threats facing our communities. Linda is a former county supervisor of Linn County, Iowa, who had helped lead her community through the 2008 floods that overwhelmed Cedar Rapids and into the recovery that followed. She later worked nationally on resilience issues with the National Association of Counties before returning to Cedar Rapids as a consultant. Kehla works with Region 5 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Chicago. Although she was doing me a favor by sharing her federal government experience, she regarded it as a great honor to be asked to speak to a class in which she was once a student. I was enthusiastic about sharing my virtual stage with them for two hours. The meeting was a breeze.

All right, this is a simulation of what I may have looked like, but it’s probably close. I found myself waking up in a seated position on the couch more than two hours after falling asleep early in the afternoon.

But most days that week, with increasing frequency, the afternoon was not. I no longer even remember which day was which, but I know that on several occasions, I would hit a wall of fatigue by late morning or early afternoon, and work would grind to a halt. One day, this happened around 1 p.m., and to regain some energy, I went downstairs from my home office to sit on the living room couch. I simply disappeared into deep slumber, with no recollection of anything. Sometime well after 3 p.m., I woke up, looked at the clock, and wondered where my day had gone. For someone very conscious of pending deadlines and obligations, it was deeply frustrating. At the end of the day, I like to know what I have accomplished. I did not want to find that I had lost a major chunk of my day to exhaustion. It became hard to believe that a mere cold had done this, but I kept thinking about that negative test. It was not COVID. I was just worn out fighting a cold. But day after day, I watched in growing alarm as the number of tasks falling behind schedule kept growing. The will power and drive that sufficed in normal circumstances to overcome such deficits never materialized, and the gap widened instead. The spirit was willing, but the flesh fell asleep, day after day.

That Thursday evening, I taught my class as usual. But it was not so usual. It became patently obvious that I was struggling with my voice, with sinus difficulties, with watery eyes, with fatigue, but I plugged away for two hours. By Saturday, in a phone conversation with someone about a potential film grant proposal, I struggled again in the conversation because my voice was weak, but I pushed ahead because the call was important, and the proposal deadline was at the end of the month, just two weeks away.

And so it went. If a meeting was on the telephone or online, I could make it work even if I was exhausted after it was over. If it was in person, I would cancel. Fortunately, most meetings, including a debrief with Johns Hopkins about the symposium two weeks earlier, a HUD guidebook review panel, and a Midland Authors board meeting, were online, usually via Zoom. I had contacted my doctor over the weekend of October 15-16 through a patient portal, and he asked me to come in, which I did by Wednesday, October 19. He made some suggestions but accepted the negative COVID test result. Following his advice, I began using a Neti pot to control the sinus congestion—and it works, by the way. In combination with Flonase (after the Neti pot), it has been effective. The fatigue, however, took its own good time to fade away.

The next day, Thursday, I had class in the evening, the one at which Linda and Kehla would speak in tag-team fashion about local and federal perspectives on planning for disaster recovery. That afternoon, Jean tested positive, much to her surprise. In our pre-class banter on Zoom, I mentioned that to Linda, who repeated it to Kehla when she logged on: “Jim’s wife tested positive for COVID.” Kehla immediately expressed her regrets. They taught the class, I offered occasional commentary, and for the most part, I got to rest my voice and conserve my energy.

But I had also decided at that point that getting another test the next morning was imperative. By mid-day Saturday, a Walgreen’s e-mail informed me that I had tested positive. I discussed it with an emergency room doctor, and later my primary physician, who said the symptoms we discussed just a few days before sounded a lot like COVID to him at the time. The ER doctor stated that, based on our discussion of what led me to get tested again, I had probably had COVID all along and may unwittingly have infected Jean. The verdict of these two men made sense to me, but of course, it was now after the fact. I was actually near the end of my COVID experience before I ever knew for certain that I had it.

Alex, to right of candle, after baptism service, with me at far right, Pastor Nancy Goede, Pastor Matt Stuhlmuller, Alex, sponsor Kornelius, and members of my family, including Jean, far left. I later wondered about any unintended exposure I may have cause through unawareness that I even had COVID at that point.

If there was one situation that brought some regret–it seems not to have produced any adverse consequences that I am aware of–it was that, not believing I had COVID, I joined others at our church for our grandson Alex’s baptism on October 16. Mass spreader events were at one time rather scary propositions. But there I was, unaware, part of a ritual and celebration that was a happy event but could have infected others. The following Sunday, I stayed home because by then, I knew I had contracted COVID.

Although I am certain that skeptics of the vaccines (and I know some) would say this was just one man’s opinion, the ER doctor stated that the vaccines had surely helped make my case milder (and Jean’s was milder still), and that the vast majority of those now being hospitalized or dying from the virus are unvaccinated. The statistics I have seen on the subject seem strongly to suggest as much. But people love to argue from anecdotes, which are easier to understand than statistical data, and the resistance will surely continue. The COVID-19 pandemic seems closer to having run its course after nearly three years. All pandemics eventually lose steam.

COVID is no longer half as scary as the ghost lady and her companion on Halloween. Okay, just kidding. But that guy is freaky.

By the following week, with minor help from a cough suppressant the ER doctor prescribed, I was able to regain energy and focus on the tasks that I had neglected for almost two weeks. They were too important to me to do otherwise. One was completing a grant proposal for a film project I am leading under the auspices of the Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division of the American Planning Association. The deadline was October 31, and with significant money at stake, I was not about to blow it. We had been laying the groundwork for weeks, but I needed to write some powerful explanations of our project and submit all the necessary documentation, which I did by that morning. I was able to walk our grandson through the neighborhood for Halloween and pass out candy afterwards, while triggering the spooky voice of our alabaster “ghost lady” without being noticed. She impressed only the very young, drawing only amused yawns from tweens and teenagers.

But that was just the beginning of a list of tasks and projects needing my urgent attention. I had promised to create a case study of Hurricane Michael recovery to present to my students on November 10. I finally completed it just an hour before class. On Saturday, November 12, I hosted with Amanda Torres, formerly the city planner for Rockport, Texas, an all-day training workshop on hazard mitigation and disaster recovery, offered as part of my teaching commitment with the University of Iowa School of Planning and Public Affairs. I had two documents I had promised to review, for which I sought and received additional time.

During the illness, I stopped my exercise routine. I currently visit the gym twice weekly with a rotating routine of exercises. After the illness had run its course, I still missed the workouts in favor of catching up on work. Before Christmas, I will turn 73. I find the exercise vital to good health at this stage of life, and I became anxious about the six-week gap that developed before I finally resumed the workouts on November 16. I have taken to them with relish. I simply feel better because of it, and I can finally spare the time again. Two days after Thanksgiving, I ran into a former trainer I worked with at X Sport, Michael Caldwell, who told me about his new work with companies on employee fitness and ergonomics, noting the serious toll on many people of failing to pay attention to such issues. I wished him well in his new enterprise. He seemed pleased that I was returning to form, just as he had always respected my resilience in the past after some injuries and surgeries.

But I also know that I am very fortunate. I find absolutely no evidence that I have developed any long-term COVID symptoms. I never fell victim to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic despite a short-term hospital stay in May 2020 on the only floor with non-COVID patients. I have even discovered the accidental grace of hundreds of presumed strangers who, in successive waves in October and November, registered as new subscribers to this blog at a time when I was seldom posting anything. I wanted to change that but just could not get it done. Their attention to my blog despite several weeks with no new posts encourages me to get back into the ring. I must have offered something in earlier posts that still attracts readers, and I hope to keep it that way for a long time. I hope this humble story adds to the blog’s overall value. I shall certainly try my best.

Jim Schwab

Our Collective COVID Cabin Fever

Posted on February 28, 2021 by admin

I am not a doubter when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccines. All I want to do is sign up and let them put a sharp needle in my arm and inoculate me. Do it twice if the vaccine demands it. Even my experience in early February with the shingles vaccine cannot deter me. On a Tuesday afternoon, a pharmacist at the local Walgreen’s provided a shot that I requested at my doctor’s suggestion. It has been two decades since I experienced my second episode of shingles, but I vividly recollected the piercing pains in my shoulders and arms that made it nearly impossible to exercise my fingers on a keyboard, one of the most basic things I have long done to earn a living. I told the pharmacist that I “noticed it but did not feel it.” He put a bandage over the location on my upper left arm, and I left, thanking him.

It was that evening that I noticed my reaction as muscle aches spread from that left arm across my upper chest. Then the chills set in, and I pulled the covers over me in bed. I repeatedly felt my forehead, testing for a fever. Nothing happening. The next day, the muscle aches diminished, but the chills persisted, and I sat in a leather chair with a blanket pulled over me, doing little but reading a newspaper and then falling asleep. I had slept all night, but it mattered not; the fatigue overpowered me. Late that afternoon, I struggled through two online meetings, and my energy again failed me. I spent the next day feeling slightly more energetic until about 3 p.m., when I fell into a deep sleep, again with blankets covering me as I accomplished nothing. My wife says I turned white, but I wouldn’t know. I lacked the energy to look into the mirror.

By Friday, I at least posed a question to my primary physician on the patient portal: Is this normal? He wrote back to say that about 20 to 25 percent of people getting the shingles virus experience such a reaction, which mostly proved that the vaccine was beneficial. My immune system was relearning how to fight the shingles virus. That was vaguely reassuring, and I knew he knew whereof he spoke, but it took one last development to convince me.

Late that Friday afternoon, with the better part of a week lost to malaise, I suddenly felt the fog lift and the fever break, though it was not really a fever. All within an hour. It just stopped. My immune system had learned what it needed to know, and it ceased fighting what was not there. And I was fine. That’s part of how vaccines work, but I could not recall ever experiencing such a reaction to any previous vaccine.

Our backyard after the Presidents Day blizzard.

Amid this experience, however, the snow piled up in Chicago. First came a snowstorm that covered our yards and streets in blinding whiteness. Often, in Chicago winters, these snows come, sit around for a few days until the sun comes out, and they melt away as the temperatures rise.

But not this time. Until February in this season, we had seen little more than timid flurries of pixie dust that barely covered the ground, with green shoots of grass still poking out from below. Now it came to stay, as temperatures soon plunged to zero and slightly below, solidifying the growing accumulation of snow even as we struggled daily to clear a path down our gangway and along the sidewalk in front of our home. I shoveled in front of a neighbor’s home as well, knowing he had recently had hernia surgery. And the very next day, we had to do it again.

Jean wanted her turn at shoveling as a way to get some exercise. She got her wish.

The three weeks of persistent snow culminated in a 17-inch overnight debauchery on Presidents Day that left us staggering and feeling quarantined by virtue of a simple inability to move a car down the alley, or the challenge of climbing over hip-high snow piles at intersections. During those three weeks, our cumulative snowfall mounted to 40 inches.

Our somewhat metaphorical confinement by way of extensive pandemic restrictions now took on major physical dimensions, leaving us feeling imprisoned. Not only was there nowhere to go because the restaurants were closed, but there was no way to get out, either. In place of my brief fatigue in reaction to a shingles virus, I now felt a very real spiritual and emotional fatigue at the mere thought of needing boots and a heavy coat just to step outside. Staying at home felt more like incarceration than refuge. Even the mail, which provides some tangible connection to the outside world, was no longer arriving. The carrier on our route, and probably on many others, was not braving the snow piles and frigid weather, and the mail piled up at the post office until, one day, I simply walked the mile to get it, standing in line for more than half an hour for a pile of paper surrounded by a rubber band, partly containing bills to pay. The process took long enough that, by the time it was over, I needed to use a bathroom and home was too far away. I opted for the nearby Cozy Corner diner, and showed my gratitude by staying for lunch. It’s a very decent eatery, actually, and I enjoyed my California melt with fries. And then I walked home again, through the very snow piles that had impeded its delivery. Watch where you walk when you cross the street.

After weeks of erratic service, the mail came all at once, and not again so far.

By the following Sunday, temperatures rose and stayed above freezing. The snow began to melt, removing the impediments to delivery. Nonetheless, in the past week, delivery occurred only on Tuesday, when the mailbox was suddenly full, but it was an aberration rather than real change. No mail arrived for the rest of the week. This has been an ongoing problem across Chicago, for systemic rather than purely weather-driven reasons, and even more so in some South Side ZIP codes than ours, which is itself bad enough. The Chicago Tribune ran an article about the Trumpian mess in which U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush expressed his impatience on behalf of his constituents about the staffing excuses, saying there were plenty of unemployed people in the city, so “if you have a job, do it.”

The as yet uncollected recyclables in a bin filled to the brim.

That comment formed an interesting backdrop to the other event the same day all mail arrived. The city recycling pickup occurs on our block on alternate Tuesdays, and our bins were full, if somewhat piled around with snow. The trucks seemed to be very selective, leaving our stuff uncollected, so that we are now storing recyclables in paper bags in the garage. I complained to the city Streets and Sanitation Department in an online forum that left little room for comment, then forwarded the complaint and further explanation to our 1^st Ward alderman, Daniel La Spata. I noted that the previous week, the regular garbage pickup occurred without a problem under worse circumstances. He informed me that a private company had been hired for the recycling, similar problems had emerged elsewhere, and added, “Honestly, that’s the difference between public employees and privatized ones, and why we’re pushing back on the latter.” Some might question that comparison in light of the post office problems, but I would suggest that the U.S. Postal Service, to a significant degree, has been the target of efforts to undermine it as a means of justifying privatization and subverting the integrity of mail ballots. In any case, I still want them to empty those blue recycling bins.

During all this, I nonetheless wanted to access the COVID vaccine so that I could move beyond the sense of limitation that nearly a year of closed stores and restaurants, and mask wearing and social distancing, has instilled in all of us. For compulsive extroverts like me, the compounded effect of long-term pandemic restrictions followed by a month of being buried in frozen precipitation is producing a profound restlessness. Put simply, I want out.

I have not yet mentioned that five grandchildren have been studying remotely in our home since September. We are guardians for one, and the others are here as their mother engineers a major change in her life, and besides, my wife is a retired public schools teacher who can mentor them. Throughout February, the Chicago Teachers Union engaged in a vociferous public debate with the Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Lori Lightfoot about reopening schools, arguing over the adequacy of the preparations for protecting teachers and staff from coronavirus exposure. This took place against the backdrop of the larger national debate over online versus in-person education, but I know what I see. The kids are noticeably glazing over and tuning out, and listening to a teacher on a screen is getting old. Students, particularly students of color (most of our grandchildren) and those with working parents, are falling behind, and the schools will have a major challenge in coming years of reversing the impacts of online education. Students in the early grades need human contact to remain fully engaged. None of this is to deny the necessity that drove the schools to close, but the national failure to manage the pandemic has greatly exacerbated the consequences.

We need to get our national act together, and moving millions of doses of vaccines to sites where people can get some sense of relief is the most important step right now. Instead, I’ve found myself checking online daily, sometimes multiple times daily, only to find no availability for vaccine appointments. But my wife finally got her call for March 2, so I remain hopeful. I have no other choice.

That expression of patience is at the heart of our dilemma. I could live with the snow, however impatiently and with some humor, because I knew that warmer days lay ahead, and snow cannot outlast St. Patrick’s Day in Chicago. Unlike Texas, our infrastructure is designed to handle winter. A slow, steady rise in temperature would allow snow to turn to water at a steady pace without triggering floods. We will be fine.

What has been less certain has been the ability of our national public health infrastructure, as disheveled as political neglect has allowed it to become, to respond to the pandemic. But I can also feel a steady warming trend since January 20, however halting it has seemed at times. The big snowstorm, which jostled its way through Kentucky and Tennessee and Arkansas all the way down to Texas and Louisiana, slowed distribution of vaccines, but maybe for a week. My wife learned that she got her appointment because PrimeCare, a local health care provider, had just received a big shipment.

Snow recedes to a manageable level as the weather has warmed.

My turn will come, and so will yours if you’re smart enough to get vaccinated. My outlook will change with the warm breezes of spring, and I will start to think about where I can go and what I can do. We will end this year-long cabin fever that has been induced by a tiny virus with protein spikes that latch onto receptor target cells in a microbiological process most of us do not understand.

But it may be a long time before we stop talking about it. Our collective COVID cabin fever does that. Let’s all talk about what we as a nation can do better next time. Do it over beer or coffee or tea, but make it a productive, meaningful conversation. I’m tired of gripes. I prefer solutions.

Jim Schwab

When Narcissism Trumps All

Posted on January 31, 2021 by admin

Within the last week, I finished reading a nearly 800-page biography of Napoleon Bonaparte, which may raise the question of why I took the trouble. I started only after Donald Trump lost the 2020 election but refused to concede and persisted in disseminating the fiction that the election had somehow been stolen. It struck me that there might be some noteworthy parallels in personality traits, or psychology, with one of the great monsters of European history. There are. Not that I am a psychologist or even play one on television. But as voters, we all judge presidential character to one degree or another. It is often a significant factor in the public debate in election years.

In his detailed but highly readable 1998 biography, Napoleon Bonaparte, Alan Schom notes that, in the end, after numerous avoidable wars, Bonaparte, aka Emperor Napoleon, left behind nearly three million dead Europeans. Most were soldiers, but hundreds of thousands of civilians were also killed. Equally large numbers were displaced as hundreds of towns and villages were burned to the ground, amid other rapine and destruction.

I want to note here that, for comparison, I have read several volumes of recent vintage exploring the Trump psyche, family background, and political behavior, including:

Too Much and Never Enough by Mary L. Trump
Crime in Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch
A Very Stable Genius: Donald Trump’s Testing of America by Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff
Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin’s War on America and the Election of Donald Trump by Michael Isikoff and David Corn
The Making of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston

In addition, in comparing Trump with previous U.S. presidents, I am aided by the serendipitous circumstance that, in 1997, I undertook what became a 15-year quest to read at least one biography of every U.S. president, starting sequentially with George Washington. (The sequential aspect ceased as I read second and even third biographies of some presidents, such as Lincoln, Madison, Wilson, and others.) Thus, I do not speak loosely in saying that Trump is decidedly unique in certain respects.

But back to Napoleon.

The destruction I noted above is bad enough, but what became supremely clear to me was how little Napoleon seemed to care. I was reminded of a scene early in Leo Tolstoy’s classic, War and Peace, in which Napoleon, dressed in a Polish peasant soldier’s uniform to escape notice from the Russians, surveys the landscape on the other side of the Niemen River as he prepares for his disastrous invasion of Russia in 1812. As he does so, some cavalry soldiers plunge into the river to demonstrate their courage to the great leader but end up drowning. Tolstoy drily observes that their demise attracted little notice from the emperor.

Not like he really cared, Tolstoy seems to be telling us. Somewhat like Donald Trump slipping away to the White House to view the mayhem on television while his followers, incited by his outlandish rhetoric, ransack the Capitol and some people are killed. Zealots can pay an extraordinarily high price for failing to realize that their self-centered messiah in fact has a heart of stone.

But Napoleon was far worse than that, I learned from Schom. Throughout a decade and a half of senseless wars, in which hundreds of thousands of young French men were conscripted into his army, Napoleon never bothered to authorize a fully operational military medical service to take care of the sick and wounded. Tens of thousands died from appalling field hospital conditions, if they were in any hospital at all. It was just not one of the emperor’s priorities. As Schom notes, “With the same cold, calculating ruthlessness, Napoleon ignored the dead and wounded, and despite the pleas of the army’s chief surgeon, Dr. Dominique Larrey, year after year refused to create a permanent army medical corps.”

Medical supplies tended to be skimpy or nonexistent, and at the Battle of Wagram, Schom notes, “9,000 or so casualties were all but abandoned by Napoleon.” By the time he fled from Russia, having started with an army of more than 600,000, he left behind 400,000 dead soldiers and perhaps 100,000 prisoners in the hands of the Russian empire. Little more than a rump force made it back to Paris with him. His downfall came little more than a year later, leading to his exile in Elba, followed by his return, final defeat, and exile to St. Helena, where he died of arsenic poisoning, most likely at the hands of a trusted associate.

Beware how you choose your champions.

Americans, until recently, have seldom had to confront the consequences of such narcissistic leadership devoid of any capacity for empathy. Presidents of both parties have typically been humbled by the responsibilities they have assumed, and despite mistakes and bad judgment in many cases, have been aware at some level of the cost their decisions have imposed on American soldiers and civilians alike. Remorse has often driven them to seek to remedy the situation. But we have just outlived the experience of a president capable of separating children from their parents at the border without even the most fundamental understanding of the causes of migration from poor nations in Latin America, nor any plan for how someday to reunite them. We have witnessed a presidency in which, as I write, almost 440,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 (exceeding American deaths in World War II) while the nation’s leader ridiculed people for wearing masks and suggested drinking cleaning fluids, all while suppressing the input of capable scientists, but has yet to express any serious regrets for the sorrowful outcome. After all, someone else caused the problem—Obama, the Chinese, Democratic governors, whoever. Yes, Napoleon Bonaparte, from start to finish, is replete with examples of the French leader blaming everyone around him for every catastrophe while failing to accept responsibility. The routine is drearily familiar.

Both men have also exhibited an outsized capacity for surrounding themselves with sycophants and turning at least part of the state apparatus into a family enterprise. We are familiar these days with the coterie of Ivanka Trump, Eric, Donald Jr., and Jared Kushner all playing prominent roles in the White House for which they were profoundly unqualified. Napoleon made kings and princes of his family members, but unlike Trump, often found them incompetent after having installed them. He was also infamous not only for looting the treasure of conquered nations but also of France itself. In his quest to blockade British commerce, he virtually impoverished an entire continent with the “Continental System,” while forcing subordinate states to support the costs of his wars.

The key difference between the two men in this respect is not their cupidity, but their timing. Napoleon rose to power within a nascent French republic that was struggling to establish stable institutions following the insanity of the French Revolution and its wild swings of the political pendulum. He was able to install himself as First Consul through a coup d’etat. He then installed his brother Lucien as Minister of the Interior, a post that put him in charge of the election machinery for a plebiscite to affirm Napoleon’s reorganization of the government. Schom reports that some five million French citizens voted, only 1.5 million for the new constitution, but Lucien remedied the problem by simply stealing the election, reporting more than 3 million positive votes and only 1,562 opposed. Napoleon made this possible by shutting down critical press outlets. He repeated this feat in a later plebiscite that established him as emperor in 1804.

Storming of the Capitol. Image from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol.

If Trump had any serious knowledge of history, he might have envied this Napoleonic sleight of hand, but it is certainly clear that he kept his followers on a short leash of credulity by ranting endlessly about “fake news.” The dangers of this credulity, including the impact of the Q Anon conspiracy phenomenon, became perilously apparent on January 6. Fortunately, the inherent stability of the federal government of the United States after nearly two and a half centuries of tradition and loyalty to democratic principles made the American state far less vulnerable than the French state at the end of the eighteenth century. We were able to move Donald Trump out of the White House, but a cost we have never before experienced with the singular exception of the Civil War.

The single huge difference between the two men is the one that is probably most significant. Napoleon was especially dangerous because, unlike Trump, who was born in the lap of luxury and escaped military service during the Vietnam war because of deferments, he rose from obscurity in Corsica when his father procured a royal scholarship for his education at the Royal Military School, followed by strict military training at the Ecole Militaire in Paris. Napoleon was nothing if not a military leader, sometimes a reckless one, with artillery training and a solid knowledge of mathematics. Trump was largely an indifferent student and one who later lacked an understanding of military culture and operations. Pentagon professionals, aware that their oath prohibited them from following unlawful orders, often took umbrage at Trump’s attempts to override their judgment and concerns. Many retired and former officers spoke out, their numbers growing as time wore on. This standoff between authoritarianism and patriotic tradition may have spared us much further tragedy.

I would prefer not to have found a need to produce this short essay. Trump is at least out of office, though what further mischief he may foment remains to be seen. The critical lesson is for the American people to think much harder about the nature of democratic leadership. We need to become much more discerning of the character traits of the people we elevate as leaders. With many Republicans still clinging to a virulent defense of Trump, and Senators and others clearly prepared to assume his mantle and claim his base for their own, this issue remains volatile. The fate of the world’s most powerful democratic republic hangs in the balance.

Jim Schwab

Plotting Post-Pandemic Recovery

Posted on July 20, 2020 by admin

Photo by Carolyn Torma

In recent years, the development of local or regional recovery plans following major natural disasters has become increasingly common. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has long encouraged such planning, and I led the production of two major FEMA-funded reports from the American Planning Association on the topic—Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction (PAS 483/484, 1998) and Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery: Next Generation (PAS 576, 2014). I’ve spoken repeatedly on the topic, trained planners, and valued the collective knowledge of the two teams we assembled to make those projects happen. The underlying idea is to help a community assess its losses, reassess its goals, and find the silver lining in the dark cloud of the disaster that will allow it to rebuild better and stronger than before. This is the central concept of community resilience: the capacity to learn from such events, adapt to the changes they require, and move forward.

The idea of natural disasters has generally encompassed those caused primarily by meteorological and geological disturbances, such as storms and earthquakes, though it includes impacts exacerbated by human mistakes in building and planning. Disasters necessarily involve the collision of natural forces with the human and built environment, which has caused some people to question the very use of the word “natural” in connection with disasters. Personally, I am comfortable with the term “natural disaster” so long as we understand that no disaster exists without this interaction.

But there are those disasters where damage to the built environment is a secondary consideration, and the loss of lives is primary. Drought is somewhere in the middle. Damage to structures can occur, but only as the result of the slow, nagging loss of moisture in the air and soil. Heat waves can take hundreds of lives without affecting a single structure, though they can put enormous stress on energy and transportation infrastructure.

Pandemics, however, fall into another category entirely as biological disasters. They occur when bacteria or viruses emerge in the environment and attack humans before we have developed any effective immunity or vaccines. The current COVID-19 crisis fits this mold precisely. It can be far more devastating than a natural disaster simply because it can roam far more freely across the planet, as did the 1918 influenza pandemic, striking down hundreds of thousands if not millions of people. Before the era of modern medicine, pandemics like the bubonic plague in the Middle Ages could kill half of the affected population. Even without vaccines, we at least have the huge advantage of understanding how such microbial threats spread. Our disadvantage in the U.S. has been national leadership, starting with the President, that has been psychologically allergic to scientific advice. The result has been needless loss of life on a colossal scale.

It was a matter of time before some community, even without such federal leadership, applied many of the principles of recovery planning to the coronavirus pandemic. One critical question related to recovery is identifying the point at which the crisis is over, or at least waning. In natural disasters, drought being again the exception, this point becomes clear within a matter of days, or even hours in the case of tornadoes, as the storm passes. However, weather systems such as that which produced the 1993 Midwest floods, can last for weeks or even an entire summer. But at some point, it becomes clear that the emergency is over, and planning for long-term recovery can begin. In the absence of a vaccine, however, it is less clear when we can use the “all clear” signal for a pandemic. Right now, in the U.S., it is painfully clear that the rush to reopen is producing unconscionable and shocking consequences across the South and Southwest, and in a few other locations as well. It is incredibly hard, perhaps even impossible, to plan meaningfully for recovery when you are still stoking the fire by facilitating the spread of the virus.

Nonetheless, some states, notably including New York, much of New England, and Illinois, have fought hard against the odds to bring down infection rates, which are now a fraction of what they were in April or May. Their victory remains tenuous, considering the larger national crisis that remains a growing threat to public health, but Chicago under Mayor Lori Lightfoot has announced a list of states whose residents must quarantine for 14 days upon arrival, notably including Florida, Arizona, and Texas. Later, Iowa was added. By July 17, the Cook County Department of Public Health expanded that quarantine area to include all of suburban Cook County except a handful of suburbs that maintain their own health departments, and 17 states are on the list with new case rates exceeding 15 per 100,000 people per day. While it is nearly impossible to monitor all arrivals, the message is clear: We don’t want to re-create the problems we so recently overcame.

That is the context in which a large Recovery Task Force the city assembled released a recent report, Forward Together: Building a Stronger Chicago, which examines how Chicago could build a vibrant recovery from the coronavirus experience. Because such reports, especially those involving dozens of contributors and participants, are never crafted overnight, it is worth noting that the effort was launched on April 23, at a time when the outcome was far from clear. Neither the city nor the state could be certain then how long the problem would last or whether the stay-at-home orders and other measures would succeed at all in the near term. As of July 18, Illinois had dramatically increased its testing rate and brought its positivity rate for coronavirus tests down to 2.9 percent, well below most rates elsewhere, although it remains higher in Chicago at 5.4 percent.

So far, the strict measures announced in March have produced measured success, and the task force used that time to look farther down the road to the kind of city that might emerge from this ordeal. Forward Together is, to be clear, not a true recovery plan; it is billed as an “advisory report.” But it is the closest thing to a recovery plan that I have seen so far, and merits scrutiny and consideration for what it offers. (New York Mayor Bill de Blasio promised his own “road map to recovery” on April 26.)

The task force itself was broadly based. Lightfoot co-chaired it with Samuel Skinner, a businessman, lawyer, and political operative who served as both Secretary of Transportation and White House Chief of Staff under President George H.W. Bush. He has a long track record in public affairs. Committee chairs and members included elected officials, among them Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, who was Lightfoot’s run-off opponent in the 2019 mayor election, labor and community representatives, business leaders, academicians, and civic leaders, including some prominent activists. The task force was broadly inclusive, which bodes well for public buy-in on the resulting recommendations. Moreover, the report shows significant evidence of wide community outreach, including a youth forum that tapped the ideas of teens and young adults.

Like all big cities, Chicago has witnessed significant disparities in impacts of the pandemic on specific disadvantaged groups, including the elderly, but also Blacks and Latinx residents. While these two groups each comprise 28 percent of Chicago’s population, they respectively comprise 30 and 48 percent of the cases of coronavirus and 44 and 32 percent of the resulting deaths. This is an important backdrop to the discussion of goals in the report.

The report discusses four specific initiatives to move the city forward and address many of the inequities and vulnerabilities exposed by the coronavirus. Invest South/West aims to bring public and private investment to those neighborhoods in the city that have suffered historic disinvestment, and where COVID-19 rates have generally been highest. Racial and ethnic inequities in coronavirus impact have been notably more severe among both Blacks and Latinx residents, in large part because of lower levels of insurance coverage but also because of differences in job exposures, poverty levels, and living conditions. Solutions Toward Ending Poverty (STEP) is a new program, announced in February by Lightfoot, that is attempting to identify evidence-based metrics that can plot a road map toward reducing urban poverty in Chicago. We Will Chicago—Citywide Plan aims over three years to develop what amounts to a comprehensive plan, something lacking in Chicago until now. The report says We Will Chicago “will encompass all elements of citywide planning.” Finally, Chicago Connected will aim to shrink the digital gap between more affluent and poorer neighborhoods by making broadband more readily available, a need whose urgency has clearly been exposed by the closing of schools and the challenges of assisting children from poorer households with remote learning.

A significant part of the report focuses on the economic development opportunities that Chicago can pursue to restore prosperity as the pandemic recedes. It is clear that certain categories of jobs—food service, retail, administrative, and manufacturing, but also arts and entertainment and personal services—have suffered the brunt of economic displacement from the pandemic. The report notes the opportunity for Chicago, as a result of some economic changes wrought by the pandemic, including shifts to online retail, to focus on transportation, distribution, and logistics (TDL) segments of the economy. These would take advantage of a longstanding Chicago advantage as a transportation hub.

TDL, however, faces its own challenges of inequitable opportunity. Food insecurity represents a serious challenge in “food desert” neighborhoods. Resolving those inequities is the intended purpose of the four initiatives, but it is hardly a challenge that will be resolved overnight. It has taken years of unequal opportunity, to say nothing of deliberate discrimination, to create the current dilemma. Failure to address these problems will slow down or even stagnate Chicago’s recovery from the current crisis.

The report makes what strikes me as an honest effort to address social services gaps that, if anything, grew under the previous administration of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who closed some mental health centers in a bid to reduce budget deficits. The problem is that such reduced access to services only exacerbates problems among those needing such help and may increase other costs as a result. For example, a significant proportion of the inmates at the Cook County Jail (and many others around the nation) suffers from mental illness.

There is an urgent need to restore those services, but more importantly, the report shows that mental health services are far more prevalent on a per-person basis in more affluent, whiter neighborhoods than in poorer areas. For instance, 48 percent of whites with mental illness were receiving services in 2015, but just 31 percent of both Blacks and Latinx with mental illness were doing so. A map toward the end of the report shows differences shows a variation in presence of mental health providers ranging from zero or well below 0.25 per thousand residents in certain poorer areas of the city to well over 2 in predominantly white, middle-class areas and hundreds per thousand in downtown Chicago, a district well-nigh inaccessible to many South Side residents.

This may reflect, among other things, a disproportionate presence of white professionals in mental health and a need to bring more minority psychiatrists and psychologists to those neighborhoods. Reopening clinics in the neediest areas of the city would be a major step forward. As for the connection to coronavirus, the stress induced by greatly increased unemployment, to say nothing of job pressures within health care, can contribute to mental health challenges. Perhaps the most noteworthy proposal in this section of the plan is the recommendation to create a dedicated 211 line whereby residents can access a wide range of social services. It strikes me as essential, also, to reduce pressure on police to respond to personal mental health crises by instead responding to such incidents, to the extent possible, with mental health professionals and social workers.

As I noted, this is framed as an “advisory report.” I strongly suspect, however, given the tenor of the moment, that its recommendations will find widespread support among Chicagoans. What remains to be seen is how well voters and aldermen hold the administration’s feet to the fire to make it all happen. It is not enough to have confidence in a mayor who seems determined to make it happen. Implementation will require broad-based commitment to achieving the goals the report lays out. That includes embedding those goals in the comprehensive planning process that We Will Chicago envisions, and enacting measures to move them forward.

What is important about this effort for the rest of the country is the very idea of mounting such a broad-based effort to produce a forward-looking analysis of how our cities can recover from the coronavirus pandemic. Many may first have to learn how mayors and governors can exert the leadership, and evince the humility to consider the science, necessary to get the virus under control, as many other countries in Europe and Asia have done. These leaders must also be open to hearing from a widely representative cross-section of their citizens in preparing similar reports. Pandemic recovery planning is for all of us an experiment that can build on the foundations of other kinds of recovery plans while recognizing and thoroughly exploring the unique features of this monumental public health challenge. It is no small matter, and should not be treated as such, politics notwithstanding.

Jim Schwab

Community Planning and Pandemics Podcast

Posted on July 16, 2020 by admin

Periodically, I have linked blog readers directly to a new podcast in the Resilience Roundtable series, produced by the American Planning Association and hosted by the APA Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. Last fall, I became the moderator of this series, and the last, pre-pandemic podcast interviewed Florida planning consultant Julie Dennis about her experiences in recovery planning for Hurricanes Irma and Michael.

Earlier this month, however, we shifted gears, and I interviewed Dr. Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and research fellow at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. Our topic was community planning and pandemics, and she shared numerous insights into the public health and community planning aspects of dealing with a pandemic like COVID-19. Most readers already know that I have written repeatedly about some aspects of the pandemic since March, but Monica in this interview sheds light on several other features of our current situation that I had not yet illuminated, in part because I lack her specific technical background.

Therefore, I am happy to provide this link to the new 40-minute podcast.

Jim Schwab

A Taste of Reopening

Posted on June 14, 2020 by admin

People in the Chicago area, and many beyond, some well beyond, are familiar with the city’s decades-old Taste of Chicago, featuring booths in Grant Park from dozens of the city’s iconic restaurants. Wandering the closed streets within the park, you can get pizza, jerk chicken, Indian foods, and a wide variety of other edibles while listening to entertainment and enjoying the sun, as long as the weather holds. The event has spawned numerous imitators throughout the suburbs, such as Taste of Aurora and Taste of Evanston.

Humans? Who cares? But thanks for the post.

But not this year. Big festivals are out, social distancing is in, masks are de rigueur, and the restaurants offer take-out or delivery, if anything. Some are now adapting to offering outside dining when weather permits, but indoor dining must await the next phase of reopening, not only in Chicago but throughout Illinois. Blame coronavirus, but please don’t try to tell us it’s a hoax, or that you can cure it with hydroxychloroquine, or that distancing doesn’t matter. Here in Chicago, we can read the numbers and follow the logic, and we know better. Someone else can drink the Clorox, or the Kool-Aid, or whatever. The vast majority of us prefer to stay safe. And yes, we are aware that the demonstrations for racial justice may produce an uptick in cases. On the other hand, we know that the issue of police reform has been brewing for a long time, and people are impatient. It is not hypocritical to insist that reform is overdue after the death of George Floyd.

Within the past week in Chicago, a few things reopened, cautiously. Navy Pier, which competes with Millennium Park as the city’s leading tourist attraction, now offers outdoor dining but does not yet allow tourists to wander the stores inside the complex. That is okay; caution is in order. We do not need to follow the practice of some states that either never instituted a stay-at-home order (like neighboring Iowa) or reversed one with a highly partisan state Supreme Court decision (Wisconsin, you’re not helping!). Unlike, say, Alabama and Georgia, Illinois’s numbers of COVID cases and deaths have been declining. It would be nice to keep it that way.

My wife and I reached our 35^th anniversary on June 8. Occasionally, we’ve celebrated elsewhere (Honolulu, or Charleston, SC), but usually we’ve eaten out in Chicago, attended the Blues Fest, or done something else that was fun. This year, we had a few too many distractions just before the actual date (like getting the air conditioning fixed), so we chose to wait until Saturday, June 13, for a delayed event. We chose to investigate Navy Pier and enjoy a leisurely outdoor lunch instead, accompanied by two grandsons, Angel, 16, and Alex, 11. The outdoor tables at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville seat four anyway. We decided to get a Taste of Reopening.

Alex alongside the Navy Pier Ferris wheel, closed for now.

Did I mention gusty? Shortly after we were seated and the waiter had brought four large plastic cups of water, the wind caught my wife by surprise and knocked over her water. It spread across the entire table, soaking the paper menus and dripping onto both my lap and Alex’s. We hurriedly sought the waiter’s help and used paper towels to wipe up the mess as fast as possible. Fortunately, we had all chosen our orders, so we could dispose of the menus and laugh at the absurdity of it all. You can’t get angry with the wind. Besides, what is summer for? Roll with the punches.

Restaurants have all struggled with the restrictions, but I must commend the generosity of our hosts. Once the waiter shot photos of us after learning of our anniversary. (He mentioned his own mother celebrated a birthday on June 9). He also ensured that the manager complimented us with a $15 reduction of our bill. When we all ordered key lime pie for dessert, he brought a fifth slice as an anniversary bonus. They were doing all they could to help us celebrate within the limitations of the tentative reopening, and they clearly appreciated our patronage. My order of teriyaki shrimp and chicken, accompanied by broccoli and rice with a slice of teriyaki pineapple, was delicious. My wife and our grandsons made other choices, but no one complained. (Yes, we left a generous tip.)

A sailboat glides past a Lake Michigan lighthouse near Navy Pier.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater at Navy Pier remains closed, but its time will come.

Jean and the boys pose in front of a statute commemorating captains on the Great Lakes.

We walked the length of the pier afterwards and can testify that the lakefront scenery remains as compelling as ever. However cautious the reopening, we appreciate the emphasis on public safety over the more pell-mell rush to reopen occurring elsewhere in the nation. We do not need a resurgence of COVID-19, which has already claimed more than 6,000 lives in Illinois. Let the disease wind down instead of giving it a second wind. We will take our time, just as we did in strolling the sights at Navy Pier. Life is beautiful if you act smart and protect it.

Jim Schwab

Unequal Exposure

Posted on April 11, 2020 by admin

On April 29, I will be moderating “Demanding Equity: Planning for Post-Disaster Recovery,” a 45-minute session in a special three-day virtual conference of the American Planning Association, NPC20 @HOME. The online conference is an attempt to replace the experience of the canceled National Planning Conference, which would have taken place in Houston, April 25-28. For the first time in APA history, the annual event will not go forward as planned. Like numerous other conferences, it was untenable to assemble thousands of participants in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic. But it is possible to provide a decent educational opportunity in its place by broadcasting and recording distance learning and letting participants ask questions remotely.

But why do I mention this one session, when APA is offering two dozen? Because it touches on some issues so central to the social and economic impacts of coronavirus, and speaks so directly to what planners and planning can do as we recover from this experience, that I wanted to highlight the subject in this post. It has been said often that the coronavirus does not discriminate. That may be true, but our society has done so and still does, often in ways people are reluctant to consider or admit. The result is that, as happens with most disasters, minorities and low-income people, those with fewer opportunities in life or greater exposure to danger, are disproportionately affected. And so it will be when the histories of this pandemic are written. The evidence is already stark enough for passionate discussion.

To give credit where it is due, the session was the brainchild of Adrian Freund, a veteran, semi-retired planner in Oregon. Before the NPC was canceled, however, Adrian was hospitalized (not because of coronavirus) and realized he would be unable to go to Houston. He reached out through a former president of APA, David Siegel, also of Oregon, to ask me to take over, and I agreed. We are on the same page on this issue. When APA decided to replace NPC with NPC20 @HOME, this was one of the sessions they felt must be included, and I reassembled the speakers to modify our plans for the new format.

All of them have a ton of wisdom to contribute on the subject. Shannon van Zandt is a professor of urban planning and department head at Texas A&M, and has authored numerous articles and led many projects on subjects related to equity in disaster recovery, particularly in the Texas context in which she works. Marccus Hendricks, an assistant professor of planning at the University of Maryland, is a Texas A&M graduate who has focused on infrastructure issues and environmental justice, writing his doctoral thesis on stormwater management in Houston. Chrishelle Palay is director at the HOME Coalition in Houston. Obviously, the panel has strong Texas roots, but there are few states where one can get better insights into the impacts of environmental inequities.

But it is the screaming headlines of the past week that have brought renewed attention to the issue in the context of coronavirus. In Chicago, we have learned that African Americans are dying from the virus at six times the rate of whites. Gary, a predominantly African American city, is the new coronavirus hot spot in Indiana. It is also where it gets personal for me. A 12-year-old granddaughter lives there and, as of yesterday (April 10), appears to have COVID-19 symptoms. Her mother called and was asked not to bring her to a hospital, but to isolate her at home. She will not be tested because, as everywhere else, this nation has not gotten its act together on testing. Will she even be included in the statistics, then, as a known case? Good question. I have no idea how Indiana is tallying such numbers. But she is in for a rough ride in the immediate future, and Gary and surrounding Lake County are certainly not fully prepared.

But what is happening in Chicago, as numerous commentators and public health officials have noted in the past week, is not only not unique, but to be expected. Detroit is emerging as a hotspot with major disparities in racial impact. State health data reveal that, while blacks make up 14 percent of Michigan’s population, they account for one-third of the cases and 40 percent of the deaths so far. In Louisiana, with one-third of the population, blacks account for 70 percent of the deaths. New Orleans has clearly emerged as a southern hot spot for coronavirus infections. Across the nation, one can find similar racial disparities.

Beneath those figures, however, are other disparities that weave in and out of racial and ethnic numbers. Age is perhaps the best-known factor, but so are many others. People in low-income service jobs, for instance, to the extent that they are still working, are more dependent on public transit and much less likely to be able to work from home like white-collar professionals. Public transit contributes greatly to mobility in urban centers, but does little for social distancing. It is still unclear just how transit will be affected for the long term, although it remains a vital link to jobs for many of the working poor. But coronavirus is clearly challenging the economic viability of many transit systems, one reason they were the target of assistance in the CARES Act.

It goes without saying that health care workers are significantly more exposed, but they are not just doctors. Their ranks include nurses, nursing assistants, and many others, some with much lower incomes, who nonetheless are risking their lives every day. Some of them work in nursing homes, which have not been the focus of any noticeable attention at the federal level. There are many ways to slice and dice the data to identify patterns of exposure, including those for access to health care, quite possibly the single most important factor driving disparities in this particular disaster. Lack of insurance coverage and inability to afford adequate health care leave many people untouched by the system and untested until it is too late. Poor or nonexistent health insurance coverage, especially for undocumented immigrants, accompanied by food deserts in many inner-city neighborhoods, endemic poverty in many rural areas and small towns, and exposure to job-related ailments, can produce numerous chronic conditions that make exposure to a new virus fatal or disastrous instead of merely survivable.

It remains remarkable, in view of these factors, that the Trump administration can maintain its drumbeat of opposition to the Affordable Care Act, including the recent refusal to allow newly jobless Americans to sign up for coverage. But this is one of many ways in which this nation, through both federal and state policy, continues to resist expanded, let alone universal, health care coverage to shore up health care deficiencies for the most vulnerable among us. There is both a meanness and short-sightedness that underlies much of this resistance. As I noted just two weeks ago, these health care vulnerabilities, with all the racial and socioeconomic inequities they embody, form the weak links in the chain of overall vulnerability for our communities when pandemic strikes.

And that brings me back to the point of the session I will moderate. One essential element of the planner’s skill set should be demographic analysis. The coronavirus pandemic highlights the critical value of addressing public health in comprehensive plans and other efforts to chart the future of cities, counties, and regions. Issues of national health care policy may be well beyond the reach of planners and their communities, but exposing the glaring disparities that have been made evident as the data on coronavirus cases grows is critical to knowing how resilient our communities are or how resilient we can make them. Access to health care is not merely a matter of insurance, as important as that is. It is also affected by the practices of local hospitals, the access to open spaces for densely populated areas, environmental regulations controlling industrial pollutants, public education around personal health, access to healthy food, the quality of our food distribution systems, and a myriad of other considerations that can be addressed to one degree or another through local or regional planning and through policy commitments to social equity.

That is precisely why, as the White House dithers, and federal management of the coronavirus crisis continues to fall short, dozens if not hundreds of mayors and governors and other local and state officials have stepped up to fill the gap. It is sad that there is not better national leadership in this crisis, but we are learning who our real leaders are. Enabling planners and other policy makers to support those officials with essential and meaningful data is an ongoing task, but if we are going to emerge from this disaster in a better place, identifying the inequities that weaken our communities and finding ways to build resilience across those weak links is going to be essential. There is no good alternative.

Jim Schwab

Isolated Adjustments

Posted on March 30, 2020 by admin

I miss my gym already, closed just two weeks ago. There was a profusion of equipment to keep anyone in shape, whether you were working on legs, biceps, core, cardio, some combination, whatever. Here at home, I have small barbells, some ankle weights, and perhaps most importantly, a newly tuned 26-inch bicycle. There are other bicycles in our garage, mostly to accommodate grandchildren but also one my wife uses. We were out briefly yesterday for a ride in the neighborhood before the blustery spring winds brought more rain.

Closed entrance to the 606 Trail at California Ave.

A friend joked a few days ago that, after closing the Lakefront trail, adjacent parks, and beaches, and the 606 Trail plus park district field houses and playgrounds, Mayor Lori Lightfoot may have been praying for rain to enforce the stay-at-home, social distancing restrictions in effect throughout Illinois. If so, she got her wish over the weekend, but the weather is changing already, and Chicagoans are likely to take advantage of it. That’s okay, as long as we use those big park spaces that are still open to maintain social distance and help slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

Alex at a closed entrance to the 606 Trail.

Quite frankly, just one week ago, after picking up my bike from a nearby shop that performed the tuning, I used it to ride a portion of the 606 Trail, feeling the liberation that comes with such a small adventure. That was Monday afternoon, and the closures came on Thursday. I was not surprised. The 606, which is a great community-building amenity in normal times, seemed far too narrow and crowded for public safety in these times. I have not returned. Future rides will be on winding paths in the 700-acre Humboldt Park, where one can move past other human beings without encroaching on personal space. And I can still invigorate my body and spirit with some healthy exercise.

Humboldt Park is open, but the playgrounds are closed.

So, what is this blog post about, exactly? It is about adjustments in the time of COVID-19. But let me be clear. I am sharing the adjustments being made in our three-member household, and everyone else is making their own. Each set of adjustments is unique, yet many of us can learn from one another. I am also painfully aware that we are safer and in a better position financially than many people who have lost jobs or are suffering lost income, or have a sick family member. I can empathize, while knowing their experience will unquestionably be very different. And I wish such people the very best. Our nation is in for one tough slog against a ghastly microbial enemy.

My wife and I are both in our early seventies, but our three-member household includes an 11-year-old grandson, for whom we assumed guardianship two years ago. His mother has long faced mental health challenges. Two weeks ago, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) closed, and as of now, they will remain so until April 20. After that? Who knows? At first, the closure was for two weeks, but that would have ended today. Officials at all levels of government have underestimated the scope and duration of this problem, but the important thing is that they are learning daily and adjusting strategies, as we all are. Universities have suspended semesters and moved classes online. A friend of mine who teaches at an area community college admits to being “dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21^st century” as he learns online teaching skills. I, on the other hand, have already been teaching online for the University of Iowa. My one class each year occurs in the fall, so the question is whether we enroll enough students to move forward by August. The odds seem good, but so much changes so quickly. Again, who knows? I will have to wait for the answer.

I practice what I call “alleged retirement,” which involves a part-time mix of teaching, consulting, public speaking, and writing. At worst, my wife, Jean, a retired teacher, and I can live off our pensions and Social Security. We would have to retrench if I had no outside income, some provided by the university, but we could survive. That makes us feel far more secure than I know is the case for gig workers, restaurant and hospitality workers, travel and tourism workers, and many others affected by shutdowns and restrictions aimed at containing contagion.

Jean in front of Moos School, now closed because of coronavirus.

Meanwhile, precisely because she is a teacher, my wife works with Alex on reading and math, so that lost school days do not translate entirely into lost learning. But that has involved its own learning curve. In the first week, we both noticed Alex’s ability to refocus his time on television and video games. We were busy figuring things out in that week of canceled St. Patrick’s Day events and the Illinois primary, in which Jean was an election judge. But we discussed the situation, and Jean quickly began to insist on specific hours for learning exercises. I am grateful, and hope Alex is, for her knowledge of teaching methods to keep him fresh on everything from multiplication to vocabulary expansion. I can only imagine what single mothers with four children no longer attending school must be doing to cope with the situation. Many in Chicago or rural Illinois or throughout America do not have Internet, or lack personal computers, and lack daily connection with the schools that kept their children busy until just recently. We have a 16-year-old grandson who is a high school sophomore. He is staying with his father, who works long hours in a warehouse to pay the bills. While we provided Angel with a small laptop at Christmas, I have noticed that CPS is not updating information on Aspen, its grade- and assignment-tracking online program, so we have no idea what, if anything, he should be doing in his classes. I used to help him with courses like Spanish, but now I have not a clue what he should be doing. It is as if CPS just vanished into thin air. The only solution from a learning perspective may be to extend the school year in June—but only if we have coronavirus under control by then. Otherwise, you could take his lost opportunities and multiply them by the tens of thousands across the city.

Then there is the drumbeat of coronavirus news to which people can subject themselves if they sit in front of the television all day long. I choose not to do that because I find that one hour of news tells me 90 percent of what I need to know, barring some breaking announcement, and the rest is repetition. I read the Chicago Tribune thoroughly each morning. My wife knows counselors and others who suggest limiting exposure to such news to reduce anxiety. She has taken to using some online meditation one of them has provided, and it works for her. I don’t share the anxiety because I am a different sort of person. My professional experience in the urban planning field is heavy on planning for disasters and disaster recovery. I read the news with an analytical eye, looking for clues to what we, as a society or region or city, can do better, and often turning that into commentary on this blog, but also applying it in various planning tasks. Since I retired from the American Planning Association (APA), many of those tasks have been pro bono activities, such as serving on policy guide task forces and chairing APA’s Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Recovery Planning Division. There is no shortage of opportunities, and I am grateful every day for the chance to contribute something through all those channels. It’s not all about earning money. Just helping makes our lives richer; how we do it depends on our skill set and interests.

But clearly, the precautions we are all observing can be frustrating and lead to adjustments. Travel, in most cases, is a non-starter for the near future. Little more than a month ago, I was in Rockport, Texas, assisting the APA Texas chapter with a Hurricane Harvey recovery event that allowed Texas planners to interact with planners from New York and New Jersey who could share perspectives from Sandy recovery. Two weeks later, after a quick recovery from a mild case of the flu, I was in Kearney, Nebraska, speaking at the annual conference of the Nebraska Planning & Zoning Association, sharing knowledge and ideas with colleagues there. The first hints of a truly serious public health catastrophe were becoming clear, and that became my last trip so far this year. By March 18, APA had canceled its annual National Planning Conference in Houston, an event that has typically drawn about 5,000 people. Not this year. As a division leader, I am involved in many of the leadership discussions about what comes next in taking many meetings and sessions and other events online, and moving forward. This is happening across the board to numerous organizations of widely varying sizes, with huge impacts on the hotel, airline, and convention industries not only nationwide but across the world. Caught in the maws of this economic and public health earthquake are millions of workers.

Yet, as obvious as this seems to me, with my laser focus on news that matters, I have learned that not everyone is fully aware of its consequences. Alex’s mother invited us to visit her apartment, and Jean declined because we have no way of judging how safe it is. Then, two other people visiting her apartment suggested coming to our house to visit Alex. Again, Jean said that would have to wait, but they seemed only marginally aware of developments like restaurant closures and social distancing. Meanwhile, my mother, whose resilience at an advanced age has been stunning, was released last week from a hospital in suburban Cleveland after a brief non-COVID illness to a rehab facility, where she is confined to her room for 14 days because she had been in a hospital. Visitors are not permitted, as they also will not be when she finally returns to her retirement home. In short, although I have two siblings who live near her, I could not visit even if I chose to drive there.

But that brings me to a closing note. I can stay home not only because I am “allegedly retired,” but because I am not a health care worker. Their adjustments have been the reverse of those of most of us, involving thorough engagement, exposure to life-threatening infection, and long hours of treating growing numbers of patients. And not just in urban areas. As of today, for example, Illinois has 4,596 reported cases, resulting in 65 deaths, spread across 40 of 102 counties. Small towns and rural areas will not be immune. I just heard New York Gov. Cuomo note that COVID-19 has spread to all but one county in his state.

Amidst all our concerns, the ducks in the lagoon at Humboldt Park are blissfully oblivious to human problems with the novel coronavirus.

We’re all making adjustments, most of us in our homes, but our public health workers, doctors, and nurses are making theirs at the front lines. We owe them a huge debt of gratitude and everything we can do to support them, especially those who have voluntarily returned to work from retirement, or serve in the National Guard, and didn’t have to take those risks. God bless them all, every last courageous one of them.

Jim Schwab

Weak Links in the Chain

Posted on March 25, 2020 by admin

Resilience has become almost a buzzword with regard to how communities handle adversity and disasters, albeit a very useful buzzword. It focuses our attention on how we can better prepare for and cope with such events. The question of the moment is how the concept of resilience applies to our response to coronavirus.

One of many hospitals in Chicago, all of which have visitor restrictions in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.

I am not and never have been a public health expert, though, as an urban planner and adjunct planning professor, I have often worked with such people. I say this because I want to be clear about the prism through which I am viewing the coronavirus pandemic as a public health disaster. What I bring to the task is decades of work, particularly as a research manager, in the subfield of hazards planning. I am known for deep expertise in hazard mitigation and planning for post-disaster recovery. In this article, I am reaching into that toolbox to help identify what we need to learn from the current crisis.

Specifically, part of what has become the standard approach to hazard mitigation planning is vulnerability analysis, the process of identifying what in plain English are weak links in the chain of community capabilities and capacities to manage and recover from a disaster. Every community, every nation has strengths and weaknesses built into its systems, which are really an ecosystem of economic, social, institutional, environmental, governmental, and other elements of the community that comprise the way the community functions in both sunny times and days of turmoil and dysfunction. How well can that community or nation restore itself, rebuild, adapt, and learn from its experiences? One of the most fundamental elements of success, for example, is trust in government and community leadership, something that is being tested right now in the U.S. That leadership can either greatly enable and empower or greatly hinder the capacity for effective response to, and planning for recovery from, a given disaster.

But my focus here is on what a vulnerability analysis of our response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, might include. I say “might” because I do not pretend that what follows is comprehensive. It is merely suggestive. A more comprehensive list would best emerge from a summit of leaders and experts when it is time to decide on the lessons learned from this disaster. For now, leaders are rightly focused on using existing authorities and capacities to control the spread of the disease.

The main point of a vulnerability assessment is to identify potential points of failure relative to the hazard under consideration. For instance, with hurricanes or floods, we would want to know what roads or bridges would collapse or become impassable. We would also want to know the locations of substandard housing that might suffer damage or destruction or endanger its occupants. There are dozens of other examples of potential points of failure that I could list here, but presumably, you get the idea.

With the novel coronavirus, we are dealing with an invisible hazard that inflicts suffering and death on people, not buildings or structures, and—most importantly—for which there is not yet an identified cure or vaccine. Most people do not die, and many suffer only mild symptoms, but the spread of the disease is of radical concern in part through the slow rollout of testing kits in the U.S., which exacerbates an existing inability to know precisely who is infected, especially since many people test positive who are asymptomatic, that is, not exhibiting clear symptoms of the disease. Vulnerability depends on various factors, most notably, but not exclusively, age. Respiratory and other existing conditions can elevate that vulnerability, while some older people may be tough enough physically to weather the assault. Thus, identifying and classifying real and potential victims is a business fraught with uncertainty.

Given all that, where are the weak links in our communities? Many can be readily identified from the more routine aspects of vulnerability assessments, starting with governmental capacity:

To what extent has the city, state, or the federal government prepared and established capacity for anticipating the problem and quickly enabling the appropriate responses? It is perfectly logical to expect that greater capacity should exist at higher levels of government that have greater resources at their disposal.
What is the level of political maturity among the electorate, and the political will for undertaking and enforcing difficult but necessary decisions in a crisis?

The biggest questions surrounding coronavirus seem to relate to institutional capacity, some of which can obviously be enhanced or supported through governmental capacity, for example, in procuring and distributing the personal protective equipment, ventilators, and temporary hospital beds needed by the regional “hot spots” for virus outbreaks, which at the moment include New York, but also a frightening spike in confirmed cases and deaths in the last few days in Louisiana, possibly tied to the huge crowds attending Mardi Gras in New Orleans. These have led to Gov. Jon Bel Edwards issuing a stay-in-place order similar to those in effect in California, Illinois, and New York. Among obvious questions in a vulnerability assessment going forward:

What hospital capacity exists for treating large increases in numbers of patients in a future pandemic? This includes emergency room capacity, intensive care units, and other essential elements of the treatment process, as well as the ability to expand access to protective gear. It also involves the adequacy of skilled professionals to work with this increased patient load.
What capacity exists to monitor, work with, and even thin the population of crowded jails and prisons, where social distancing is effectively an oxymoron, and the potential for rapid spread of disease can amount to a death sentence for those confined behind bars?
What are the sanitary and patient care conditions in local nursing homes, and how effectively are they regulated? Nursing homes and similar facilities for elderly medical care have in some cases become virtual incubators for the spread of coronavirus, leading to situations where relatives can no longer visit.

Many of these questions also lead us to questions of economic vulnerability, which also pertain to social equity. Restaurants in states that have instituted closures of public places where people normally congregate in large numbers have laid off thousands, possibly millions of workers—the numbers change by the day—who often work for hourly wages and need every hour to pay the rent. Workers in the gig economy, the tourist economy, and the travel industry are all similarly vulnerable in varying ways. One result, even under normal circumstances, is that many of these workers, some of whom are also undocumented immigrants, are reluctant to take sick days because they have no paid sick leave. Often, they also have no paid health insurance, or cannot afford it.

That, in itself, needs eventually to be recognized by the United States as a source of pandemic at worst, or a threat to public health, at best. Take, for example, the story of a McDonald’s worker who shared the news that he went to work ill, vomited when he ran to the restroom, but was afraid to call in sick because a missed paycheck was a threat to his economic security. How often does that happen, and how reassuring can it possibly be to customers who even think about the potential consequences? Is anyone attempting to gather data on this problem? A worker rights organization, Arise Chicago, has been fighting for better protection for workers on this front for several years, and won passage of a Cook County ordinance in 2016, but the battle continues. At the moment, these workers either are laid off because of restaurant closures, or are adapting to the temporary new world in which their employers can sell takeout, drive-out through, or delivery.

But whether it is hotel, restaurant, or transportation workers (such as taxi and Uber drivers), among others, the vulnerability lies in the harsh facts that drive them to show up for work despite illness because of their lack of paid sick leave or medical coverage. Nowhere in America can an honest vulnerability assessment of future pandemics ignore these socioeconomic imperatives. Economic facts drive health impacts, which in turn drive at least some of the questions surrounding health care capacity. In this sense, one can see how identifying all the weak links in the chain of vulnerability means recognizing the interrelationships between the various categories of vulnerability I listed initially.

This description of the process could go on for many more pages, but it may be more important to let the complexity and interdependence of it all inspire further thought. With that in mind, let me offer a few other items for consideration:

Given the inability of some parts of the population to accept the necessity of temporary restrictions, how well prepared are we to control the wayward behavior of the few, even as the majority of our citizens show adequate consideration for others around them? What are we prepared to do about them?
In the event of a lockdown, what are we prepared to do for victims of domestic abuse who are suddenly trapped inside their homes with abusive partners, parents, or relatives? Do we have institutional capacity to remove them to safer quarters and the ability to answer their calls for help? Sheltering in place is hardly likely to make an abuser more sympathetic.
How well are we positioned to assist those suffering from mental illness, for whom isolation may increase propensity for depression and suicide?
In what ways can we respond to the needs of homeless people, for whom the spread of a pandemic disease may increase due to proximity and unhealthy circumstances?

There are some very hopeful signs of creative thinking on these issues in local and state governments, if not in the White House. For example, the City of Chicago has reached agreement with several hotels to use hotel rooms as isolation rooms for victims of COVID-19, with the city paying for the capacity in advance. This relieves hospital capacity, to some degree, but it also provides some employment for hotel workers who would otherwise be idling at home because of the shutdown of the hospitality industry as both leisure travel and conventions grind to a halt. The workers will provide food in the kitchens and undertake other safe duties, while trained public health personnel deal directly with the quarantined patients. The hotels stay open, some workers stay employed, and some strain is removed from medical facilities. Some members of the Chicago City Council are now calling for the use of vacant public housing units for the same purposes.

Likewise, some otherwise closed YMCA facilities will begin accommodating the homeless while providing necessary social distancing. All of these are creative solutions that can emerge from identifying the weak links in the chain, and can provide cornerstones for sound planning for resilience in the face of future public health emergencies.

In short, let’s all keep our thinking caps on. We’re going to need them not just this time, but for the future as well.

Jim Schwab

For the Love of Public Spaces

Posted on March 20, 2020 by admin

If the doctor’s office had not called, I would not even have been here writing. I would perhaps have been on the CTA Blue Line on the way to my appointment, or more likely walking from the train station to his office. But they called less than an hour before the appointment. The urologist merely needs to follow up on a February 26 procedure, so could we just do a telephone consultation? Frankly, I had wondered why they had not offered that option already, so I accepted. The only difference it would make, I noted, was that I had planned to use the opportunity to shoot photos of the empty “el” cars, the empty streets as I moved up Michigan Avenue across the Chicago River, and perhaps the empty Millennium Park downtown, if it was in fact empty. Deprived of the need to go there, I simply walked the neighborhood, shot photos of restaurants open for takeout only, and took two shots of the empty el platform. Then the drizzling rain began, and it was time to come home and await the call, which came late as the doctor scrambled to maintain his schedule.

The Western Avenue Blue Line station platform, early afternoon, March 19. If you are not from Chicago, trust me: You have no idea how unusual it is for this platform to be so empty. This is the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. Ridership is down by more than half.

But at least I got that first paragraph written, before the nurse called, as I thought about a potent issue for urban planners amid the coronavirus pandemic. Under normal circumstances, there are few subjects most planners like to discuss more than the design and use of public spaces. These come in a variety of forms, such as trails, parks, and plazas, which are generally publicly owned, but they also include a wide variety of privately owned spaces that are nonetheless generally accessible to the public, such as restaurants, outdoor cafes, malls, stores, and recreational facilities like the YMCA. The latter category is more frequently available on a paying basis, but those lines can be blurred under specific circumstances, such as the rental of public spaces for private events. The one overriding factor is that planners are very much aware that the public life of cities is very much defined by the activity levels and density of use of these spaces. An urban park visited by almost no one is not a positive sign of urban vitality. A public concert in the park attracting hundreds or thousands of happy people dancing and swaying to the music is a sign of a city in love with life and alive with culture.

Margie’s Candies, a nearly century-old family and teen hangout and source of sandwiches, ice cream, and candy for residents of Chicago’s Humboldt Park, can only offer takeout sweets at this time.

In the midst of pandemic, however, especially in dealing with a disease for which no one has yet developed an effective vaccine, not to mention a disease that disproportionately slays the elderly and those with respiratory vulnerabilities such as asthma, crowded public spaces are an indicator not of prosperity and vibrancy, but of danger. Social distancing to protect ourselves from unidentified carriers of COVID-19 is now an essential element of survival and personal protection. Yes, it’s nice to greet a friend in the park, but only if they keep their distance, and no, I don’t wish to shake your hand. There is a certain weary loneliness about this that is undeniable. Most of us are highly social beings, even the introverts among us. We like to talk, to exchange news, to share ideas. Thank God for the invention of the telephone and the Internet.

Why order online? Because, for the time being, restaurants in Illinois are not permitted to offer dine-in service. Takeout, drive-through, delivery are your only options. Blow up the photo to see the sign on the door more clearly.

But it’s more than that. Public spaces often provide us, to one degree or another, with the opportunity to move, to exercise, to stay physically fit. I got word just two days ago that the X Sport Fitness gym at which I maintain a membership would be closed until further notice. The trainers, I learned, are left scrambling to determine how they could continue to earn a living. They are joining millions of others whose livelihoods are in jeopardy until this scourge passes. If you know someone in Chicago who can benefit from in-home fitness training, let me know. I can hook them up with capable trainers.

Coffee shops and restaurants are no longer public meeting spaces. Just get it and take it home.

I will be looking to find other ways to stay physically active. As noted in posts of years past, I am fortunate to live near the 606 Trail. I need to get my bicycle tuned up for another season, and I can ride for miles. On my stroll yesterday, I could see that joggers were making generous use of the trail, as were walkers and others. Interestingly, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy has posted information quoting medical experts suggesting that people should seek to maintain their exercise routines and use our public parks and trails for just these purposes. There is nothing worse for physical health than being cooped up in one’s house or binge-watching past seasons of whatever. Get out and move around. Just keep your distance.

The joggers, bicyclists, and strollers are still using the 606 Trail. This is near the Western el station shown above and the photo taken less than 20 minutes earlier.

That goes for the kids, too. Playgrounds, for the most part, are still open. If you’re worried about touching the equipment, make the kids wear gloves or use disinfectant wipes on metal and plastic surfaces before letting them ride or play. But, above all, let them run around.

What we are all, I hope, trying to do for the near future is to slow or halt the transmission of this dangerous new coronavirus. That does not mean we become couch potatoes obsessed with watching our favorite 24-hour news source feed us endless details about the latest announcements, as important as they may be. There is still plenty of opportunity for most of us to stay healthy and drink in copious doses of fresh air. But we can also follow the guidance about social distancing and sanitation practices. In short, most of us should be very capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time. Just don’t spit that gum out on the sidewalk, thank you very much. Think about the safety of those around you. Use the trash can.

If we can all learn anything from this disturbing experience, it is perhaps an increased attention to sanitation and cleanliness in public spaces and the need to respect others by maintaining the quality of those spaces. Too many of us have seen public restrooms that are poorly maintained or not cleaned with adequate frequency. Those are obvious examples, but we can discern many others, including coughing and sneezing away from others, using facial tissue or handkerchieves, and simply cleaning up after ourselves, and understanding why some people find it necessary, even critical, to wear face masks or take other precautions. Think about the safety of those who must clean up after us, who often earn low wages and have less access to medical care. Don’t put them in greater jeopardy than necessary. Those of us involved in planning for post-disaster recovery often talk about finding the “silver lining” in each disaster experience. With any luck, that silver lining in the COVID-19 experience is a greater attention to public health, starting with the White House and extending all the way down to our own house or apartment.

The other big lesson for planning is the value of readiness and preparation for disaster. The old saw that “they also serve who only stand and wait” may be far more applicable and relevant than we realize. When President Trump eliminated a White House office that President Obama had created to focus on global pandemics, following the gruesome lessons of the Ebola virus, the assumption seemed to be that those studying and preparing for the next big public health crisis were simply wasting time and money. If that is true, why do we have an army of emergency managers spread across the country, preparing for natural and man-made disasters that, according to that line of logic, “may never happen”? The answer is that we should know all too well that reconstructing such capabilities after a new public health crisis or disaster is already underway wastes weeks and months of valuable time that can never be regained, and in this case, may be costing thousands of lives before it is over. Let us be wise enough as a nation never to repeat that mistake again.

Jim Schwab

Home of the Brave

Book Reviews and Discussion with Jim Schwab

Tag Archives: COVID-19

Going Viral

When Narcissism Trumps All

A Taste of Reopening

Unequal Exposure

Isolated Adjustments

Weak Links in the Chain