When COVID-19 surged through a North Dakota community, a battle with the pandemic became a battle among its residents.
Every day seems to bring another test of whether our democracy can succeed in managing the problems of a country as big, varied, and individualistic as ours. In Minot, a city of forty-eight thousand people in Ward County, North Dakota, the twice-monthly city-council meeting was into its fourth hour when an alderwoman named Carrie Evans put forward an unexpected motion: she wanted Minot to adopt a mandatory-mask policy. It was Monday, October 19th, two weeks before the Presidential election. In the wood-panelled council chambers of city hall, Evans and the five other alderpersons who, with the mayor, make up the council, sat on a dais, in padded chairs, behind brass nameplates and stemmed microphones. Mayor Shaun Sipma, a baritone-voiced former anchor for the local CBS television station, presided in the middle, while a scattering of people in attendance, including the police chief, followed the proceedings with shifting degrees of attention. The council had worked through nineteen items—including a viaduct improvement and a new Internet contract for the fire department that would save Minot $220.80 per year. Then, under an agenda item labelled “Miscellaneous,” the Mayor had called upon Lisa Clute, the executive director of the First District Health Unit, to give a local update on the coronavirus pandemic.
The story was grim. North Dakota had more new cases and deaths per capita than any other state. Half of its hospitals were facing critical staff shortages. Ward County had the highest rate of new cases of any county there, with a record five hundred and twenty active positive cases, and almost forty per cent of them had been diagnosed in the past two weeks. The volume of positive coronavirus tests had overwhelmed her contact-tracing team. Surging numbers of pandemic victims forced Minot’s Trinity Hospital to expand its covid-19 wing.
When the Mayor opened the floor to discussion, Evans—fifty years old, cardigan-clad, red hair tucked behind each ear—pushed herself upright in her seat and cleared her throat. “This is where we’re headed anyway,” she said. “I would like to put a motion forward.”
That afternoon, the mayor of Fargo, two hundred and sixty miles away, had used his emergency powers to issue a citywide mask mandate. It was a cautious order—there would be no penalty for violating it—but this was the first one in North Dakota, where there was widespread opposition to state mask requirements and other public-health restrictions. Evans spoke clearly and carefully: “I would like to make a motion to ask the Mayor to create a mayoral mask mandate modelled after Fargo’s.”
She looked over at the Mayor for his reaction, ducking as if he might throw something at her. Sipma was speechless. He stared at her for a long moment. “That is a motion,” he said.
“I will second that,” Alderman Stephan Podrygula, a shaggy-white-haired psychologist, called out.
Normally, the Mayor has a good handle on the votes for a proposal. But not this one. Trying to buy time, he called on the chief of police. “Can you give me an overview right now?” he prompted. The “compliance issue,” he said, was “really at the heart of a lot of concern for a mandate without any kind of teeth.”
Chief John Klug, his shaved head gleaming, walked up to a microphone. “I know there’s a lot of people that are on both sides of this issue,” he began. Still, his police officers and dispatchers had started falling ill, and he required masking and distancing from members of the force. Soon, he said, “it became more normal, and more compliance was there.” A citywide mandate, he said, would send the right message.
Although Podrygula had seconded the proposal, he had concerns. “This is something that gets people riled up,” he said, turning to Evans. “And we have enough friction, we have enough polarization and enough conflict in our society.”
Alderman Paul Pitner—at thirty-one, the youngest council member, and the owner of Pitner Rain Gutters—wore a mask himself but had doubts about telling anyone else what to do. This was, to his mind, “a slippery slope.”
“I don’t know what the silver bullet is on this one,” Mayor Sipma said.
“There is no silver bullet,” Evans declared, making a visible effort to remain composed as she looked around the dais. “If there was, we would have been over this pandemic in this country, in this world, a long time ago. This is leadership. This is moral leadership.” She was gesticulating now. “It is embarrassing, as an elected official, to be sitting and not doing anything about this.” She pulled up Fargo’s mandate on her computer and read from it. It allowed for various exceptions—religious, medical, even athletic—but ordered people in the city to wear a face covering in settings where they would be “exposed to non-household members, and where social distancing of six feet or more cannot be assured.” Evans concluded, “I simply propose swapping in ‘Minot’ every time it says ‘Fargo,’ and I think it is a great, short, succinct, but impactful, mandate.”
Alderman Tom Ross disagreed. “Obviously, since I’m the only one up on the dais without a face mask, I’m going to speak to the other side,” he said.
Ross is fifty-six, square-faced with square reading glasses, a neatly trimmed white beard, and a maroon golf shirt. He works at a farm-equipment dealership. “We’re living in fear—we’re instilling that fear—fear for a virus that has a cumulative survival rate of over ninety-nine per cent,” he declared. He had recently spoken to a friend from high school, now a pathologist, who operates a laboratory that handles coronavirus tests in Amarillo,Texas. “I said, ‘Give me your best medical advice when it comes to masks,’ ” Ross recounted. “He said, ‘Tom, the only place you need to wear a mask is more than likely in an airplane, or if a place is extremely crowded.’ ”
He had another point. “What’s the goal of this? I hear it time and time again—to slow the spread, to slow the spread. So we want to extend this until when? If we’re going to slow the spread, we’re going to slow it, we’re going to affect businesses, we’re going to affect revenue, we’re going to affect so much.”
His voice was rising. “We don’t need to slow the spread. We need to have health organizations throw spaghetti noodles at the wall for a cure and a treatment until one sticks.” He returned to his friend in Amarillo: “This man, who’s a physician, a doctor, told me, ‘Tom, if you get covid, God forbid, take two hundred and twenty milligrams of zinc and drink a gallon of diet tonic water for two days. That’ll clear it up.’ . . . I’ve got to believe my classmate. He wouldn’t steer me wrong.”
He turned to Lisa Clute. “Lisa, to have you tell me that I have to believe in your science because it works? Why don’t you believe in the science of all the other studies that say masks don’t work? I’m a believer. I’m a firm believer in personal responsibility. If you’re sick, stay home. If you don’t feel safe, stay home. It’s all on yourselves. Putting together a mandate without a consequence? What a waste of time.”
Clute started to try responding to each point. But ultimately she just said, “Our intent has never been to create fear. Our intent is to provide you the facts.”
Iwanted to learn about Minot because it was exceptional: it was in the worst-performing county in the worst-performing state in the worst-performing country in the world. But I also wanted to learn about it because it didn’t seem unusual at all: the city was divided over what to do about the pandemic, and even what to think about it. I wanted to understand what made it so difficult for people to come together and address a deadly crisis.
Minot was founded in 1886 on a broad floodplain fifty miles from the Canadian border, along the northernmost section of the transcontinental railroad. The Souris River snakes east to west through the center of town, creating a valley with low hills on either side. The city reminds me of my Ohio home town, with its small historic center of brick buildings filled with restaurants, jewellers, and opticians, but most of the town and its day-to-day life takes place along a few long roads. Gas stations, churches, fast-food places, and offices are separated by parking lots, although the neighborhoods are scattered with pine, oak, and linden trees. Beyond the lanes of highway and communication towers, you can see miles of horizon in every direction.
Much of that land is farms. Agriculture is a big part of the local economy. An Air Force base, just to the north, is another major source of local income. Then, there’s the nearby Parshall Oil Field, discovered in 2006, which boosted Minot’s population by a third, and made North Dakota the nation’s second-largest oil producer after Texas. The city started 2020 with an unemployment rate below three per cent, a median income of sixty-four thousand dollars, and income inequality in the bottom quintile of the nation. Minot is overwhelmingly conservative, sending only Republicans to the state legislature and to Congress. In this, it’s similar to the rest of North Dakota. But because North Dakota, unlike many red states, took advantage of Obama’s Affordable Care Act to expand Medicaid, it has one of the lowest rates of uninsured people in the Midwest. One in three of Ward County’s adult residents is obese, three in five have high blood pressure, and one in six smokes—about average for the country.
Lisa Clute, who is sixty-one, has spent almost a quarter of a century in charge of the First District Health Unit, which is based in Minot and serves seven counties—ninety thousand people altogether. With her husband, Barry, she lives on the two-hundred-acre farm outside town where she grew up. For many years, Clute was a schoolteacher, which led her to take a job in children’s services with the state. “From there, I was recruited into this position in public health, and I have loved it ever since,” she told me on a video call.
Like most public-health officers who lead city and county departments, she is not a clinician, but she oversees a team of sixty clinical officers and other personnel. When I asked Clute to tell me about some of the issues her department had to contend with before the pandemic struck, she mentioned binge drinking, alcoholism, lead poisoning, and above-average rates of sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia. Minot had the worst recent outbreak of hepatitis C in the country, and getting that under control had taken years. The opioid crisis had led Clute and Dr. Casmiar Nwaigwe (pronounced “Wig-wey”), the chief of infectious disease at Trinity Hospital and the health unit’s medical director, to lobby the police and local leaders to let them set up a needle exchange for addicted people, which opened in February of 2019. Clute coördinates preventable-disease tracking, contact tracing, and treatment programs. When a train derailment, in 2002, ruptured five tanker cars and released a huge cloud of poisonous ammonia gas—well, that had been her problem, too.
In short, Clute’s job is to help secure the health of the community by plugging the holes in the health-care system—and to do it with a minuscule budget. In 2019, per-person spending for medical care in the United States was almost twelve thousand dollars; it was just fifty-six dollars for public-health departments.
On March 11th, at 7:30 p.m., Clute got a call from her health unit’s epidemiologist: Minot had North Dakota’s first covid-19 patient. A man in his sixties who had travelled out of state had developed symptoms and tested positive. Two hours later, Governor Douglas Burgum put out the news. That night, the N.B.A. announced that it was suspending its season, after a Utah Jazz player tested positive. It was becoming evident that everyone’s life was about to change.
Clute, Nwaigwe, and Sipma held a press conference the following day. To avoid panic in a crisis, Clute had learned over many years, the key was to make sure people knew the facts, good and bad. An investigation revealed that the patient had immediately isolated upon arrival. But it was clear that there would be more cases. She and Nwaigwe explained about distancing and hygiene, about the symptoms of covid-19, about what to do if you developed any.
The next day, President Trump, who had been downplaying the threat for weeks, changed course and declared a national state of emergency. On March 16th, he announced guidelines for Americans to follow for fifteen days in order to slow the spread of the virus: stopping nonessential travel and shopping; avoiding bars, restaurants, and social gatherings of more than ten people; working from home when possible. Within two weeks, Clute’s health department reported that the virus was spreading within the community. Working with businesses, medical professionals, and local officials, she encountered little resistance to the recommended restrictions. “We were all together then,” she said.
Tom Ross had turned in the three hundred signatures required to run for city council just a few days before the pandemic hit North Dakota. He had never been involved in politics before. He’d grown up in Minot, the fourth of six children. His mother worked at the local hospital for four decades as a registered nurse and, later, as an operating-room supervisor. His father was a heavy-equipment operator for a local construction company. “The skyline of Minot, you really can’t swing a cat in this town and not hit a building my dad didn’t help build,” he told me. “I’m kind of proud of that.”
He had attended college at Minot State and broadcasting school in Minneapolis, returned to Minot, and got a job as a camera operator at the local NBC TV station. During the next fifteen years, he worked his way up to station manager. Then came out-of-town ownership and cutbacks. For the past four years, he has worked in customer relations at an area dealership for large-scale farm machinery, trading in his polo shirts and khakis for a John Deere baseball cap and Wranglers. He travels the state to check on farmers’ equipment needs. Since starting, he’s logged three hundred and eighty thousand miles on his 2014 Ford F-150.
I asked him what he did with all that time in the truck. “I’m almost embarrassed to admit this, but, most of the time, nothing,” he said. “You’re kind of deep in thought.”
“About what?”
“I’m still coming off my dad’s death”—his father died of Alzheimer’s in 2019—“so you’re deep into thinking about that,” he told me. “You’re deep in thought about the next farm you’re pulling into—what kind of issues are you going to discuss with this guy? You’re also deep in thought about campaigning.”
Ross had been a volunteer and a booster for much of his life, working on various local boards (and even serving as president of the Minot Curling Club, though golf and fishing were more his thing now). And he had spent a lot of time watching the city council as a reporter. “When my dad died, it hit me then that life is short,” he told me. After he learned that three seats had opened up in the council, he decided to run.
Council elections are nonpartisan, and Ross was glad of that. He hated politics. On his road trips, he used to listen to talk radio eight hours a day, and he’d watch the morning cable shows before heading out, too. He’d voted for Barack Obama twice, and he’d end up voting for Donald Trump twice; he’d switched from MSNBC to Fox, but either way, he said, “I just found myself going to work angry.” In the past couple of years, he’d got fed up with the situation. “I went on Facebook and I said, ‘This is it. I’m not going to change your mind. You’re not going to change my mind. I’m going to use Facebook for things that make me happy.’ ” And he kept to his resolution. “I really put a concerted effort into not listening. I stopped. It’s really helped my attitude.”
At the end of the day, he would often drop by the Lucky Strike Lounge for a Michelob Ultra with friends who had a regular table there. The bar has a bowling alley and a golf simulator through a door on one side, along with such casino games as Pig Wheel, which is similar to roulette but features pigs you can bet on, with names like Bob, Roxy, and Sue. The owner, Greg DeMakis, was always there, at a table with a group next to Ross’s, ready to greet him with a wave. Before launching his campaign, Ross asked DeMakis what he thought of the idea.
“I thought he was crazy, to be honest,” DeMakis told me. “I went, ‘Well, hopefully you got the guts to take it, because you’re going to get some guff.’ ” But DeMakis signed Ross’s petition. “He’ll get up there and say what needs to be said, and our council needs that right now.”
The first time Carrie Evans met Tom Ross was at the Lucky Strike. She lives a few blocks away and would go there with a cousin who loved to play bar bingo. She had decided to jump into the race in March, too. But, unlike Ross, she actually liked politics. She thought it was the best way to address injustices and move communities forward.
Evans graduated from high school in Minot and got a degree in sociology from Minot State, but then she left North Dakota. “Like many young progressive people of my generation, you could hear our wheels squeal out of the state,” she said. She earned a law degree and spent most of her career involved in L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy in the Baltimore-Washington area. In 2012, Evans helped lead the campaign that made Maryland one of the first states to legalize same-sex marriage through popular vote. By then, she’d already married her longtime partner in Canada. In 2017, after eighteen years together, they divorced.
“My family was still here, and I said, ‘Hey, I’m just going to go back to Minot and lick my wounds,’ ” she recalled. Back home, Evans developed increasingly frightening symptoms—numbness along the left side of her face, vision problems, difficulty walking. Eventually, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Medication to suppress her immune system brought the disease under control. She hadn’t intended to return permanently, but now she has a house, a dog, a cat, and a circle of family and friends, along with steady work consulting for human-rights organizations across the country.
“It was a different city than the one I had left,” she said. “There were more progressive folks. And I said, ‘You know what, I think I might stay.’ ” During the Democratic primaries, she supported Elizabeth Warren. After Warren withdrew from the race, Evans spent a few days grieving the loss, and then decided to run for office herself. She collected the first hundred of the required three hundred signatures at a drag show, then another five hundred from people waiting in line to vote in the Democratic primary. “I like to exceed expectations,” she said.
The next night, her phone blew up with text messages about the first covid-19 case in the county. She was alarmed but didn’t know what it really meant for her. A few nights later, she went to a Noël Coward play at the community theatre. It was the last event of its kind that she attended in 2020.
Sheltering in place wasn’t a major adjustment for her. She already worked from home. As for her campaign, she switched from going door to door to making phone calls. Tom Ross, though, was still racking up the miles; because farming was an essential business, he continued visiting his clients to deal with their machinery needs. But there were other changes. He and his friends hosted Zoom happy hours, where they played Pictionary or the like; for a while, it was a tolerable substitute for the Lucky Strike, which had shut its doors for six weeks. “The novelty of it was kind of nice,” Ross said. “Though that wore off fast.”
In early April, Trump announced that the C.D.C. was recommending that people wear face masks in public, but emphasized that the guidelines were voluntary. “I don’t think I’ll be doing it,” Trump said. In Minot, Lisa Clute fielded a brigade of mask-makers, including her mother, using material donated from a local craft store. Thousands were distributed. “My mom—I can’t imagine how many of those masks she made,” Clute said.
In May, as restrictions relaxed, Ross and other city-council candidates resumed door-to-door campaigning, but Evans did not. She recalled, “People started ridiculing those of us wearing masks, or saying, ‘Why are you still isolating? That’s so stupid.’ ” Still, when it was announced that the state fair, held annually in Minot, was going to be cancelled, the public mood was one of disappointment, not fury. “Even I was thinking, We have a very small number of cases,” Evans told me. “Are we being too dramatic here?”
North Dakota recorded about a thousand cases that April—nothing like the hundreds of thousands of cases on the coasts—and on May 1st began its “Smart Restart” plan. “Probably about every two weeks we would move into the next phase,” Clute explained. “We knew all along that the Governor’s goal was, by June, he was going to be fully open.” The pace was quick, but North Dakota had developed one of the most comprehensive testing-and-tracing programs in the country. Tests skyrocketed, and businesses reopened, but cases remained low. In Ward County, nearly six thousand people—almost fifteen per cent of the adult population—were tested for the coronavirus in June, and just twenty-three were positive.
The city-council election that month, at which Ross and Evans won their seats, was conducted entirely by mail, and voters didn’t mind. They figured that things would soon be back on track. “People began testing the waters,” Evans said. “Eventually, they were filling the bars up, filling the restaurants back up—testing the limits, and then exploding through them.” By July, indoor dining had resumed; mask-wearing was minimal. “I have friends from Baltimore and D.C. who’d say, ‘Hey, I think we’re going to come to North Dakota for a while to get out of this,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I don’t know what you guys are doing, but you’re doing something.’ I’d tell them, ‘No, we’re not. We are not.’ ”
Ross described that summer as “life as normal,” and saw this as well earned. “Summers are critically important to us here,” he told me. “We’ve only got twelve weekends of summer, so we take advantage of those twelve weekends.”
He wore a mask only when it was required: at the doctor’s office or in stores with strict policies. By August, big chain stores—such as Walmart, Target, and Dollar General—had instituted mask requirements, social distancing, and capacity limits. In fact, these businesses did more than any national institution to get people used to behaving in a way that reduced spread, providing reassurance for many customers and employees. But for others—like Ross and his circle—the measures seemed overblown. People couldn’t be expected to restrict their interactions forever. They needed to return to working, and living, and getting the economy going again.
Greg DeMakis, the Lucky Strike owner, was seventy-one years old and wore a mask when he was out and about. At the request of a nurse who worked behind the bar for extra income, he had the staff wear masks, too, and posted signs encouraging others to do so. But he did not require customers to wear them when bowling or gaming, and he didn’t limit capacity. Business was down at least forty per cent, anyway. Younger customers returned, but, DeMakis said, “there’s a lot of customers of mine that I haven’t seen since the pandemic started.”
Ross saw the same thing, and he had a diagnosis. “There was fear out in the country,” he said. Farmers increasingly preferred to just have him drop off parts or materials at their door. He honored their concerns; he just didn’t share them.
Ward County’s case numbers that summer rose quickly: in July, there were more than a hundred, and in August more than three hundred. In September, test positivity spiked from less than one per cent to more than six per cent. The influx of students had quickly turned Minot State University into a superspreader site: within two weeks, more than ten per cent of the coronavirus tests that students received were coming back positive. Lisa Clute’s team worked with campus administrators to enforce universal mask requirements, a ban on indoor gatherings, and an aggressive testing-and-contact-tracing protocol. “It was amazing how fast we could pull those numbers down,” she said.
But there were too many outbreaks to control. Entire groups of people became infected at crowded bars and restaurants or at weddings where there were hundreds of attendees. By September, North Dakota had the fastest rate of covid-19 spread in the country. Meanwhile, contact tracers found that as many as thirty per cent of residents who tested positive or had been exposed weren’t isolating or quarantining themselves. Nwaigwe, fifty-four years old and soft-spoken, told me about talking to people who, despite living with a household member who had covid-19, refused testing or quarantine: “They felt that they needed to go to work, and they felt that the risk was low. One of them was in construction, for example. He said, ‘I haven’t had symptoms. It’s been more than seven days. I have bills to pay.’ ”
Clute warned the Governor’s Office, and she tried to warn Minot. “We can test, test, test,” she told the city council on September 21st. “But, if people don’t quarantine and isolate, we aren’t mitigating spread. I get it. We’re all sick of covid, and no one wants to stay home fourteen days. But it’s important.”
North Dakota, departing from C.D.C. recommendations, asked only exposed household members to quarantine, not close contacts. At the end of September, when the state health officer tried to bring the state’s policies in line with C.D.C. guidance, there was such an outcry that Governor Burgum promptly rescinded the order. The next day, the state health officer became the third one to resign in four months. (His predecessor had quit in August, after the Governor refused to raise the state’s risk level from green to yellow, which would have imposed a size limit on gatherings.)
Clute and Nwaigwe were frustrated; they didn’t have the tools they needed—and the ones they did have were looking increasingly ineffective. As the medical director of the First District Health Unit, Nwaigwe noted, “I could write an order requiring that somebody be quarantined, if I felt it was a public-health need. I shied away from that. I didn’t want things to be confrontational.”
At the October 5th city-council meeting, Clute again tried to talk about how serious the situation was. In Ward County, there had been seven hundred and five new cases in the past fourteen days—an astonishing eighteen hundred new cases per hundred thousand people, among the highest rates of spread in the world. And the weather hadn’t even turned cold yet.
In an even, unemotional tone, she said, “We will follow the Governor’s guidelines. . . . We have not restricted or endorsed any large group gatherings.” Still, she told the council, personal and collective choices could make a difference. “The Governor has made it clear that it is up to local jurisdictions to determine what policies should be enforced,” Clute said. “There’s a whole host of things that you can do.” She mentioned some of them—reducing seating capacity in bars and restaurants, restricting large group gatherings. “It really boils down to what the communities want to do.” There weren’t many people in the room, and they didn’t respond audibly. But an incendiary dialogue was taking place in the anonymous chat that accompanied the live feed of the meeting on YouTube:
“This bish can put her muzzle back on.”
“Only 277 total have died since the beginning in a state of 667K people.”
“Sorry but grandma’s die and babies are born so goes the cycle of life.”
“277 is not a pandemic.”
“#scamdemic.”
Four days later, Trinity Hospital held a press conference, urging people to wear masks and engage in social distancing. On the Minot Whiners and Complainers Facebook page—which has fourteen thousand members, one for every three residents—the commentary mixed ridicule (“Gotta keep pushing that fear”) and nihilism (“It’ll never get stopped”) with public-health concerns (“What has to happen to change your mind? Refrigerated trucks? Your child passing?”).
Beth Renae was among the concerned. “My perfectly healthy active-duty husband with no underlying conditions is in one of those hospital beds unable to breathe on his own while I’m at home in quarantine with our small kids for at least another couple of weeks,” she wrote on the page. “This is absolutely real.” Although she and her husband wore masks outside the home, she still got infected and transmitted the virus to him. “I can’t give my two year old a bath without feeling so breathless I’m going to pass out.” One user replied, “Thanks for confirming [masks] don’t work.”
Roscoe Streyle, a forty-one-year-old local banker who had spent two terms in the state legislature and lost a run for city council, was an outspoken skeptic. In his Twitter feed, masks were “BS,” “Fauci is an idiot,” experts were “clowns” and “frauds.” Clute, he told me, was a “not so smart lady” who led a team of “unelected bureaucrats.” In an October Facebook post, he wrote, “The worse run health district in the State of North Dakota is First District Health in Minot, an embarrassment and a laughing stock.”
In Clute’s twenty-four years in public health, she had experienced nothing like this response. “Pretty much everything that we ever talked about when I went through training on how to manage pandemics and bioterrorism has played out in this,” she said. “With the exception that nobody ever talked about what to do if we weren’t able to convince the public that this was serious.”
Since March, she had routinely worked twelve hours or more a day, with hardly a day off. Once, when we spoke, she was dealing both with another mass outbreak and with problems at an area-wide testing site, while providing updates to hospital leaders, funeral-home directors, the city’s emergency-operations team, and ordinary people looking for help or information. Salted through it all were calls and e-mails that brought her up short. “You’re a fearmonger,” she was told. “This disease is no worse than a flu.” Some were vicious. “I would get calls at home—people just yelling into the phone.” She tried talking through the issues with the less belligerent, but it proved impossibly time-consuming. She added, “I started locking my doors when I was home by myself.”
The obituaries helped convince Carrie Evans that she had to try to get the city council to do something. One of the tasks she has taken on is updating the database of regional Democrats. “So that means updating deaths,” she explained. “I do it in the mornings when I read the paper. It’d normally be two, maybe three people—boom, boom, done. But I have not seen the obituaries be less than two pages since September. And it was not just ninety-five-year-olds. Every day, I was just, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
When she arrived at the October 19th city-council meeting, she still didn’t have a clear plan. Then, while Clute was speaking to the group, Evans got a text with news about Fargo’s mask mandate. She told me, “I texted the city attorney, saying, ‘Hey, Kelly, do you have a copy of that?’ ” She knew that proposing the same for Minot was a gamble; the council was wary of anything that might provoke a backlash.
Evans herself wasn’t afraid of confrontation, though. At a council meeting a month earlier, she had listened to local people lining up at the microphone to berate Mayor Sipma for having flown a rainbow flag at city hall for twenty-four hours in support of a gay-pride festival. It had been, he explained, “a call for kindness,” much like the Juneteenth flag that had been flown earlier in the summer and the P.O.W./M.I.A. flag that would be flown in a few weeks. One outraged man described being “embarrassed” and “ashamed” by the display; others complained that the rainbow flag “identifies Satan,” or “is taking my freedom away.”
When one man singled out Evans for her negative “body language,” she’d finally had enough. “If you’re not aware,” she said, “I am proudly the first openly elected lesbian in North Dakota. So that is why I am not paying any heed to your crap.” Her gaze was intent. “This city is big enough for all of us,” she went on. “Me having a flag flying doesn’t take away anything from your rights and freedoms. But you know what it does for me? It shows me I live in a city that appreciates and embraces me and the people of my community, and that I can live here and feel safe.”
A video clip of her defense went viral. She did not expect to change anyone’s mind that day. But she wanted it to be known that there was a different Minot that was not being heard in that room. Two days later, she wrote in a Facebook post, “What happened at the City Council meeting, while painful and difficult, was a necessary rupture in our community. From this rupture, I have full confidence that our community, our Minot, will become stronger and better.”
A month later, Evans wondered whether the time had come for another necessary rupture. “By that point, I felt like North Dakotans had been given every opportunity to show personal responsibility and get our numbers down and had failed to do so,” she told me. “Unfortunately, that’s when government sometimes has to step in.”
Mayor Sipma is the kind of small-government Republican who respects local expertise and institutions, not the firebrand kind who’d rather burn them all down. He was ready to back Evans’s proposal. “For the folks out there that are talking about abuse or overreach of powers, look at where we’re at,” he said, referring to the surge of covid-19. Besides, he pointed out, “we do actually tell a lot of businesses how they’re going to operate, whether it be liquor licenses, fire codes, safety codes, or other things.”
The debate went on for more than an hour, and the YouTube chat was erupting:
“dont you dare use that unconstitutional emergency order.”
“we have never gone to such tyranical measures.”
“Your asking for mass protests you fools.”
At 9:30 p.m., Mayor Sipma finally called the roll. The vote was five in favor, two against. A penalty-free mask mandate was adopted.
Clute later sent the Mayor a text: “I didn’t see that coming tonight.” He replied, “Neither did I, but it’s a good thing.”
The council moved on to the next item of business—a report from Alderman Podrygula on a meeting of the commission on aging. He noted that they were having difficulty achieving a quorum. A member had died at the age of fifty-one.
Tom Ross had a decision to make on his way in to work the next day. He wasn’t interested in public defiance. But he didn’t see the need to set an example, either. “I had a mask in my pocket, and I was just going to see what the attitude was like,” he told me. “I remember walking into the dealership thinking everybody’s going to wear a mask. But not one person had a mask on.” The new normal was the old normal. “I just never put it on,” he said.
He went to bed that night feeling wiped out and achy, and woke up in the morning with a sore throat and sinus pressure. He scheduled a coronavirus test and called the head of his company’s H.R. department, who instructed him to quarantine at home. He soon realized that he couldn’t taste his coffee and had lost his sense of smell. His test results came back after three days. He was positive. “I voted against the mask mandate and came to find out that, at that meeting, according to the state health department, I was contagious,” he said.
Ross figured that he had contracted covid-19 the weekend before the council meeting, while taking his camper to a storage facility. “I knew the owner had covid. I thought he might have somebody else there to put my camper in storage, but he was there,” he said. They spent nearly an hour together. Tom wasn’t wearing a mask; the owner had one on, though Tom couldn’t recall whether he’d been wearing it properly—to cover his nose as well as his mouth. (Studies show that multilayer cloth masks block between fifty and seventy per cent of droplets that carry the virus, but fit matters, and they don’t guarantee protection.)
For ten days, Tom lived in his basement. But he’d already been contagious for days. His entire family—his girlfriend and his two sons, ages eighteen and twenty-one—got infected.
Ross followed the advice of his pathologist friend in Texas: he took zinc and drank a gallon of diet tonic water for two days. He also found a telemedicine clinic in New Mexico that prescribed him hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, despite medical guidelines rejecting their use; after some two hundred trials, there was little evidence of benefit.
He was fatigued, but most of all he was frightened. He had a pulse oximeter that hooked up to his phone and monitored his pulse and his blood-oxygen level. On his first day of isolation, his oxygen level read ninety-five per cent; by the second day, it was eighty-five per cent. “So I’m running into the bathroom every five minutes, looking at my lips to see if they’re blue,” he told me. “There’s so much anxiety. . . . You’re always going, ‘O.K., this is day five. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get over the hump, and I’ll feel better. Maybe the next day, maybe the next day.’ ”
This was not just the flu. A friend of Ross’s who was about his age had been the first person in Minot to die from covid-19. Ross feared dying right there in his basement, or not getting well enough to return to work, which seemed just as bad. It wasn’t a baseless fear: a study of covid-19 survivors in Michigan found that forty per cent of people who’d been sick enough to require hospitalization weren’t working sixty days later, either because they’d lost their jobs or because they were still too sick to do them.
“That absolutely scares the hell out of me, because I’m a guy who should be working toward the end of his career,” Ross said. “All of a sudden, at this age, what do you do? All of a sudden, I failed, I failed, I failed. That could be too much for me.”
Almost twenty-five hundred people in Ward County tested positive in October, quadruple the number reported the previous month. Deaths quadrupled, too. As funeral homes began running out of space, Clute found herself tracking down a refrigerated truck. One day, she got a call from her mother. “She’s the most healthy eighty-one you can imagine,” Clute said. “She lives in a condo. And she had lost three friends the night before to covid.”
Carrie Evans told me, “It’s really scary, because it’s literally everywhere. You feel like it’s this steam. You go to the grocery store and you know there are positive people there. You’re just scared.” She was perfectly aware that, as she said, “people’s behavior doesn’t change because the government tells them they need to do something.” But she was determined to keep up the pressure. The week after the vote, she was scheduled to attend a county planning commission meeting, and she e-mailed members of the group with a personal appeal for mask-wearing. She was taking immune-suppressing medicine for her multiple sclerosis, she explained, and so “even in non-pandemic times my immune system struggles to combat attacks.” At the meeting, most members were not wearing masks. “I was devastated,” Evans said.
Minot was quickly becoming the unmasked face of the coronavirus explosion in North Dakota, a state that the White House coronavirus adviser Deborah Birx described as having the worst mask use she’d seen in the country. Clute decided that it was time for her and Nwaigwe to hold a press conference about the viral surge in Minot. “It was interesting,” she said, in her mild, North Dakota-nice way. “We were going to go out to tell it like it was, and we got quite a bit of flack for contemplating doing that.” Just acknowledging the extent of the problem was seen as a political act. But Clute forged ahead. “I felt very strongly,” she said.
The press conference was held on Election Day, in the city-council chambers, where two weeks earlier Evans’s mask-mandate proposal had been passed. One medical leader after another described the stark realities. “We North Dakotans are in crisis,” Dr. Jeffrey Sather, the chief of staff at Trinity Hospital, said. “Last night at our hospital, we had no more room to admit patients. We had patients stacking up in our E.R. The normal process is we call around to the larger hospitals that have the same capabilities and ask them to accept our patients. We found no other hospitals could take care of our patients.” The entire state had just twelve open I.C.U. beds left.
“North Dakota is currently a hot spot, and we are a hot spot within North Dakota,” Clute said.
Nwaigwe warned people against claims that herd immunity was just around the corner. “Please, please, if anybody’s telling you that, they are lying to you,” he said. “That is fantasy, and that is foolish.”
Ross, for his part, was gradually getting better; he felt his breath relaxing, and after his ten days in the basement he reëmerged. Although he still felt wiped out, he returned to work. “For me, the mental aspect of it had been the worst part,” he said.
He admitted that he had become somewhat more convinced of the value of masks. “I’ve got one in just about every coat pocket, every hoodie sweatshirt,” he said, although he seldom actually wore one. “It’s just uncomfortable for me.”
Finally, ten days after winning a second term on Election Day, Governor Burgum followed the lead of cities like Fargo and Minot and imposed a statewide mask mandate—with a ticketing penalty of up to a thousand dollars for those who did not comply—as well as restrictions on bars, restaurants, and indoor gatherings. North Dakotans began listening. Surveys found that almost eighty per cent of the population thought the mandates, such as a requirement to wear masks, were needed, and mask use reached eighty-nine per cent. Cell-phone mobility data showed reductions in travel outside the home and the workplace. The county’s and the state’s daily case counts peaked and, during the next two months, fell eighty per cent. Deep declines in hospitalizations and deaths soon followed. Lisa Clute told me that she knew the tide had turned when she was able to cancel her daily meeting with funeral-home directors in order to assess their capacity to accept bodies.
There were voluble holdouts, of course. On Twitter, Roscoe Streyle insisted, “Masks have never worked. All BS.” He presented a chart showing that daily case counts in South Dakota, which had no mask mandate, were dropping right along with North Dakota’s. He wasn’t wrong about the numbers. But mask use in South Dakota had also risen—to eighty-two per cent. There is overwhelming evidence that masks are effective, and critical for achieving control of the coronavirus without lockdowns.
What determines whether people go along with mask mandates? Political rhetoric plays a role, but local conditions do, too. At some point, the damage becomes too severe to dismiss. For North Dakota, that point was reached only after ten thousand people became sick, hundreds died, and jobs dried up. Which isn’t to say that North Dakota’s problems have been solved: hospitalizations and deaths have slowed, but they have not stopped.
As the case rates began to fall, I called Streyle. He grew up an hour’s drive away, in Leeds (population five hundred and fifty-eight), went away for school—including a year in Boston, “One of my favorite cities on the planet”—and then returned to work at a regional bank branch in his home town. He was now the senior vice-president of a bigger branch in Minot. During the fall, his whole family had been hit by the coronavirus. “I’ve had it,” he said. “My wife’s had it. My fifteen-year-old’s had it. My other two came back negative, actually, just yesterday.” He went on, “Is it brutal? Yeah, it is, for certain age groups. But for my age group? I had no smell, no taste, and my nose burned. And I stayed in my basement for ten days. That’s literally the only impact.”
Streyle is a numbers guy. He was on the state budget committee as a legislator, and has managed the data network at his bank. Based on his read of the numbers, he remained steadfast that the response to the coronavirus has been disproportionate. People with covid-19 occupied fewer than four hundred of the state’s two thousand beds, he pointed out. How was that a crisis?
The way he saw it, flu deaths were plummeting as coronavirus deaths rose, so everything basically evened out. “Total deaths statewide are down from where they were in that age group year over year,” he claimed. “I just think it’s been done wrong. We should’ve quarantined the people that are vulnerable and let the rest of the world move on.”
I wanted to argue the data with him. I could have explained how a fifteen- per-cent rise in patients can overwhelm a hospital’s staff and resources. I could have explained that, as Minot discovered, it’s impossible to protect the frail elderly if the virus is running rampant through the population that provides care for them. I could have pointed out that the C.D.C.’s tracking data have shown that deaths in the United States have increased for every age cohort over twenty-five, resulting in a fifteen-per-cent increase in total deaths from 2019; daily deaths for the coronavirus now exceed heart-disease and cancer deaths, making it our No. 1 killer; and American life expectancy for 2020 appears to have dropped as much as three full years, which is the worst setback since 1918.
And I did start to lay out some of the arguments. But the effort seemed beside the point. It wasn’t just that he was unlikely to be persuaded (if he didn’t believe the local experts, why would he believe me?); it was also that the data debate didn’t get at the heart of the divide. Even if I managed to convince him that the public-health disaster was bigger than he had made it out to be, the public-health response to it was still going to trouble him more.
“The cure can’t be worse than the disease, and at this point I think it is,” Streyle said. “I don’t mean to diminish anybody who has lost people. I really don’t.” He’d seen friends struggle. But, he continued, “to me the impact on mental health, the impact on the kids, the suicide rates, the drug use, the alcohol use—all of that stuff is not going in the right direction. It just isn’t.”
He had a point. In the course of the pandemic, opioid and alcohol problems have only worsened. (The effect on suicide rates is still unknown.) Domestic abuse has increased. A generation of children have lost a year of essential schooling and social experiences. And compounding this is the economic damage related to people’s desire to protect themselves from the virus. The vast majority of the jobs lost during the pandemic involve face-to-face contact with the public. Even without restrictions, the airline, hospitality, entertainment, child-care, and health-care industries have lost an immense amount of business. Streyle has watched this loss of livelihood alongside the loss of life. “I had a friend in the restaurant business just lay off seventy people the other day,” he told me.
This was ultimately the reason that he didn’t trust what Clute or Nwaigwe or the Trinity Hospital leaders had to say. “They’re only concerned about the health side of it,” he said. “They don’t know what’s going on.”
Tom Ross was friends with Streyle, but he was open to doubts about things that Streyle asserted with certainty—that experts are frauds or clowns, that masks don’t work, that we could easily cordon off high-risk groups like the elderly from the rest of society, or, for that matter, that the Presidential election had been stolen. (“I think there was enough evidence in there that should have had more of an investigation,” Ross says.) But he agrees with Streyle that what public-health officials are asking people to give up is more than what people stand to gain. They were being told that lives were saved, but they were being asked to live in fear. Fear kept people from seeing friends, going to school, shopping, travelling—from living normally. Masks, for Ross, both represented and communicated that fear.
“I don’t want people to think the people who are pro-freedom don’t think death is tragic,” Ross told me. “I mean, this community is small enough where you know just about everybody who’s died. . . . But, at the same time, we’ve got a lot of mom-and-pops in Minot, North Dakota, a lot of mom-and-pop shops. That’s their life. If they’re not able to pay their bills? That mental-health issue, that anxiety, that feeling of failure—I just think that’s going unanswered.”
The discussion had begun to sound like an economic debate about relative trade-offs. But then we got to talking about our mothers, who had received their first covid-19 vaccination, and about the freedom we hoped they would soon enjoy again—to see family, to get out of confinement, even if they still had to wear masks.
“ ‘Freedom,’ it’s such a simple word,” he said, and then he began to tear up. “I’m sorry about that,” he added, wiping his eyes.
“It’s O.K.,” I said.
“This thing has taken its tentacles and really went through every single aspect of life,” he went on. “I know for a fact, the first thing my mom will do when she gets that freedom, she’ll go to church. That means so much to her. I think there’s just so much anguish. I hesitate using the word ‘destroyed,’ but it’s just destroyed so much.”
The night before, Ross had attended a high-school basketball game in which his son was playing. Only two tickets for family members were allowed, and few people were in the stands. Masks were mandatory except when eating or drinking.
“To be perfectly honest with you, I bought a box of popcorn and a bottle of water and I slowly ate my popcorn one kernel at a time for pretty much the first half and kept my mask off,” he said. Partly, he did it because he was confident that he wasn’t infectious. (The C.D.C. considers people likely immune to reinfection for three months after a positive test.) But he also did it because the mask muffled his cheers, and he wanted his son to hear him.
“My son’s a senior. This is his last lap, and, since he’s my youngest, it’s the last lap for me. But his last games are empty gyms. He’s playing for twenty-five, thirty people. There’s no big crowds. There’s no cheering.” It wasn’t fair, he thought. “That age group is so healthy, and the death rates are minuscule, from what I understand.” But they were the ones paying the price, and the public-health people didn’t seem to care. So Ross was going to keep nibbling his popcorn and cheering for his son as loudly as he could.
In medicine, when patients face a difficult decision whether to seek aggressive treatment, they are often asked what they are and are not willing to sacrifice. When patients cannot speak for themselves, someone else has to answer for them. This task can tear families apart; there is, for instance, the well-recognized seagull syndrome—in which the family member who lives farthest away from the patient flies into town and craps all over the plan. Designating a decision-maker helps insure that choices will be guided by the patient’s priorities, not anyone else’s.
When an entire community must decide how to tackle a serious problem—must choose what it is and is not willing to sacrifice—matters get more complicated. In business, the decision-maker is generally clear, and, if you don’t like the decision, too bad. The boss can insist on obedience. But that’s not how democracy works. We designate decision-makers, but the community has to live with dissent. This is why businesspeople so often make terrible government leaders. They’ve never had to manage civic conflict and endure unending battles over priorities and limits.
Conflict is also why so many people say they hate politics. We want consensus—badly enough that we convince ourselves that it can be created if we only try hard enough. “Peace is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it,” Mahatma Gandhi said, getting closer to the truth. (Even Ronald Reagan repeated the sentiment.) Among the questions we now face is that of how our frayed democracy can cope with the conflict required to navigate the global pandemic.
As a country, we still face a long, potholed road. We will soon exceed half a million deaths from covid-19. It’s not inconceivable that we will reach three-quarters of a million or even a million deaths this year; the magnitude of certain dangers is difficult to predict. The world’s uncontrolled circulation of the virus has already bred mutant strains that are markedly more infectious than existing ones. Some have developed the ability to at least partially evade current vaccines, and further mutations may develop that more fully evade the vaccines, requiring updated formulations. Or—as has been our repeated pattern when public-health measures have succeeded in slowing the spread of the virus—we could simply take our foot off the brakes too soon.
On Friday, January 15th, Governor Burgum announced that he was letting North Dakota’s mask mandate expire; capacity limits on bars, restaurants, and event venues would no longer be required, merely recommended. He cited the decline in the number of active covid-19 cases in the past three months, from 10,224 to 1,675. He asked residents “to continue to exercise personal responsibility,” just as he had through much of the fall. After the announcement, Tom Ross told me that, at the upcoming city-council meeting, he would propose rescinding Minot’s mayoral mask order. That weekend, however, the Mayor announced that he planned to keep it in force, and would call for a vote to affirm his decision.
At 5:30 p.m., on January 19th, Mayor Shaun Sipma called the meeting to order. Outside, the sky was clear, and the above-freezing evening was almost balmy for a Minot winter. A dozen people sat in the audience in distanced chairs, only three of them not wearing a mask. On the dais, the councillors all wore masks, even Tom Ross. After the Pledge of Allegiance and an update from Lisa Clute on covid-19 vaccinations—the efforts of units like hers had given North Dakota one of the highest vaccination rates in the country—the agenda turned to the mask order.
We were “on the brink,” Sipma said. There was no reason, he argued, to start edging closer to it again.
Carrie Evans pointed out that Minot Air Force Base was banning airmen from Minot businesses because counts were not yet low enough to allow them to circulate in the community without jeopardizing the base.
Ross, in a button-down shirt and a navy sweater, sat with a bottle of hand sanitizer next to his bottle of water. When he spoke, he didn’t argue against the efficacy of the masks; he argued against what extending the mandate represented. He spoke about autonomy, and about the importance of protecting Main Street.
“Let’s put it in the hands of the people,” he implored. “Let’s respect the small businesses that have their own mask mandate.” If we lived in fear, he said, we could stay at home and stick to online shopping, but at what cost to the community? “Businesses are riding on the edge of a knife right now,” he said. As he began to describe all the ways in which we’d allowed the virus to disrupt our lives, he choked up.
“Man, we just gotta get things back to normal,” he added softly. That was one hope everyone could share.
The Minot city council voted five to two, as before, in favor of the mask mandate, but it survived for only another week. In the state capitol, legislators prepared bills that would strip municipalities of the ability to adopt mask mandates when the state hadn’t done so, and the Governor had declared the state to be in the low-risk category. Mayor Sipma announced that the city’s mandate would be lifted.
At the council’s February 1st meeting, Sipma said that he would have “preferred to see this mask mandate continue,” at least until the vaccinations were further along, but he was mindful of what was happening in the state legislature—and worried about losing the power to act if things worsened again.
The question arose whether to preserve a mask mandate for city buildings and city employees. Evans didn’t see why city workers should get protections that were being denied to many retail workers. But Pitner thought it set a good example without getting in anyone’s way, and the others agreed with him.
“Let’s take care of our house,” he argued. “And not worry about anybody else’s.”
That approach made sense to Ross, although he was rueful when we spoke afterward.“The debate never comes to conclusion,” he said. “It just never does.” ♦
No comments:
Post a Comment