My Red Mask. My girlhood skills are saving me now.
By Lonce Lamonte - March 31, 2020
Today, the LA Times states that the coronavirus continues to spread rapidly in California.
California Governor Gavin Newsom expressed yesterday he prefers social pressure to actual forcible legal action to convince Californians to stay at home. He would rather educate Californians about the restrictions and urge them to comply, rather than take harsher enforcement actions.
But, he will take those harsher enforcement actions if he absolutely has to take them, however reluctantly. So will Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti, who has said if push comes to shove he will shut off water and power to businesses who don’t comply.
Individuals should only go out to the grocery store and make other absolute necessity trips such as venture to the pharmacy and doctor.
As of right now, Tuesday, March 31, 2020, there have been 149 deaths due to COVID-19, the coronavirus, in California.
Gavin Newsom, California governor 2020, Wikipedia
The California Insurance Commissioner, Ricardo Lara, expressed yesterday that he encourages insurance companies to provide increased telehealth access for patients during this declared COVID-19 state of emergency. Since health insurance companies, which of course include workers’ compensation providers, must continue to provide access to medically necessary care, Californians should be able to gain access without physically visiting their provider in person.
Will workers’ compensation claims increase or decrease during this COVID-19 epidemic? Or remain the same as two months ago? This writer believes they will decrease. This is based upon experience and observation from the past. That includes having lived and worked through the great Recession-Depression of 2008, and also other mini-Recessions like the one in 1980, ‘81, and ‘82. There was also another slow-down in the early to mid-1990s.
Yes, there will be post-termination filings, but not quite so many as in the past. So many of the obviously fraudulent ones will fall flat and go nowhere as in opposition to how they used to get paid in the past.
The legislation passed and implemented against fraudsters within the last few years that disallows lien collection from any provider charged with fraud up until exoneration, plus the disqualification of providers from the workers’ compensation system after being convicted of fraud, is now a powerful deterrent.
The drop in workers’ compensation claims will happen because of high unemployment. California now has one million claims filed for unemployment. When employment goes down, so do claims; setting aside fraud.
I went to four different pharmacies multiple times each during the past approximately 10 days. None of them have had any face masks. All the trips eventually wore me out. So, I gave up and decided to make my own.
I used some left-over red satin that I’d used to repair my bed spread. I cut the elastic off some old and tattered underwear. Sacrificing that pair of old underwear would save me a trip to the fabric store somewhat far-away where I’d have to go to buy the elastic to fit around my head.
When I was a girl during the 1960s and into the 1970s, I was all blown-up on women’s liberation. I resented having to learn to sew, knit, cook, clean, type… Those were all girly things that meant dependence. So, I disparaged them. I wanted a job so I could be independent.
However, now I’m thrilled to have these skills!
A recent housekeeper was amazed that I could sew better than she could. I was even amazed, although I shouldn’t be. Females of my class and culture were educated with a significant bias towards gender in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.
And to think I used to get, sometimes, bent out of shape when learning these skills. I remember vividly that we three sisters had to rotate washing the dinner dishes while my brother was exempt. I remember confronting my mother over Matthew’s exemption from dishwashing.
“Why doesn’t Matthew have to wash dishes?”
“He’s a boy.”
My mother was right out there with her sexism. She even harshly scolded me at age 16 for pumping gas at a near-by gas station.
“You were seen in broad daylight pumping gas! A lady does not pump gas.”
However, I found the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in my parents’ library and I secretly wrested it off the shelf and read it with a flashlight under the covers of my bed. Years later when she was in her 70s, I confronted my mother with all this information and she got embarrassed.
She’d become quite liberated by then. She came to pump her own gas and I caught her one day fixing the spring on her garage door.
In college, I did some studies on the Middle Ages. I was fascinated by feudal society plus the terrifying tragedy of the bubonic plague.
The plague killed one-third of Europe, meaning 25 million people. That could happen to us today with the coronavirus, although people are very reluctant to believe it.
In my lifetime, we in our greater society have never experienced anything like a pandemic and a plague. The Middle Ages has seemed so long ago; so way far in the past. Primitive.
I thought of it as almost the Stone Ages, something we moderns with our advanced technology and powerful field of medicine could never be touched by.
But it’s here. We could be wiped out. We could die. We are mere mortals; even today in the year of our Lord 2020.
The plague was eradicated in the fourteenth century as a pandemic through quarantining. Boundaries were drawn, and people inside a quarantine did not step outside the lines and vice versa. Outsiders brought food and goods to the boundaries and coins were placed generally on rocks as payment.
We are using these same strategies today. So, get your mask on. Shelter in place. Work hard from home. Exercise social distancing. And pray.
Lonce Lamonte, lonce@adjustercom.com, journalist and editor; copyright with all rights reserved by adjustercom and Lonce Lamonte
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