Third-World Problems (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

Did you see the CBS News report from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences last week? Reporter David Begnaud interviewed a 24-year-old woman who had resisted getting the COVID-19 vaccination, as did her husband. Then she got the virus, which was depriving her and her unborn daughter of oxygen. She was intubated and her daughter was delivered by caesarean section 10 weeks early.

Thanks to modern medicine, mother and daughter are doing well. And dad has done a 180 in his attitude toward vaccination.

As grateful as I am that this family is intact, I still want to beat my head on my desk. For reasons that I cannot grasp, a depressing majority of Arkansans over age 16 — two out of three — are still not fully vaccinated against the disease that has killed almost 6,000 of our neighbors. And the number of cases was rising last week at an alarming rate, almost entirely among people who have not been vaccinated. But those of us who have been vaccinated are also at a slight risk, especially as the virus continues to mutate as it spreads in places ripe for infection.

Last Wednesday, when the number of cases in Arkansas (population 3 million) spiked by almost 700, only 400 new cases were reported in Los Angeles County (population 10 million). Far more people but significantly fewer new cases, and it can’t be a coincidence that L.A. has a much higher rate of vaccination (59% fully vaccinated last week) than Arkansas (34%).

If there is a common lesson to be learned from various recent disasters, it’s this: Ignoring threats is not an effective strategy.

At this writing, 18 bodies have been recovered and 145 people are still unaccounted for in Surfside, Florida, the Miami suburb where a high-rise condominium building collapsed in the middle of the night on June 24. Structural issues had been identified as early as 2018 but weren’t addressed before it was too late. Or maybe those issues weren’t the same ones that led to the tragedy, the horror of which is almost incomprehensible. We’ve been warned for years that coastal development is at risk from the slow rise in sea level.

Extreme weather, the ever more common evidence of our changing climate, led to hundreds of deaths in Texas in February, and scores of deaths in the Pacific Northwest last week were suspected of being related to the kind of heat even we Arkansans aren’t equipped to handle. We’ve been warned about that for a long time, too. Texas was very specifically warned 10 years ago that its electrical grid was vulnerable.

Another thing we’ve been warned about: Our country’s failing infrastructure. That we weren’t warned specifically about a crack developing in the Interstate 40 bridge at Memphis was a dereliction of duty that led to an inspector losing his job and a referral to the FBI for investigation. Whether President Biden can get a meaningful infrastructure bill through Congress is the kind of prediction I don’t make because I’m almost always wrong, but if he can’t, it will be evidence that Congress is even more broken than the I-40 bridge.

People dying of a disease for which there is a free and readily available vaccine. People dying because the building where they lived collapsed. People dying because they didn’t have heat or power for their medical equipment. People dying because they can’t escape a record heat wave. A government so ineffective that it can’t deliver fundamental services that virtually everyone wants. Folks, these sound like news stories that should be coming from developing countries on the other side of the globe, not from the United States of America. And yet here we are, acting shocked that everything we have been warned about is coming to pass.

It reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit in Portland, Oregon, last Monday, which broke the all-time record of 112 set the previous day. It was a bit hotter (118) in Lytton, British Columbia, which is 400 miles farther north.

I remember the black vinyl seats of the 1974 Plymouth Valiant my dad let me drive in the summer of 1980, and I truly am sympathetic toward people who are experiencing extraordinary heat where they are neither accustomed to nor equipped for it. I hope they will remember this when tempted to make fun of how we react to snow and ice.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.