Hard Times in the Big Easy

[marmar]

from Vanity Fair:


Hard Times in the Big Easy
Fifteen years ago Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. Now a second storm—COVID-19—has swept in, its death toll eclipsing that of the hurricane, and many in the Crescent City fear the virus could leave untold devastation in its wake.

BY JED HORNE
PHOTOGRAPHY BY STACY KRANITZ

JUNE 11, 2020




By sheer luck, I missed Mardi Gras this year. My wife, Jane, and I, longtime New Orleans–area residents, were in Mexico, which had yet to get the memo about not hugging your friends or eating in crowded restaurants. Some three week later, on March 17, I stepped off a plane, back home, with reason to wonder if I was a walking, talking vector for the coronavirus.

Mardi Gras, which more than triples the population of New Orleans to 1.4 million, is a late-winter blowout. In the weeks leading up to it, Mayor LaToya Cantrell, so I later learned, had been in touch with the Centers for Disease Control about whether to cancel the whole extravaganza, and no one at the CDC had raised a red flag. As the holiday approached, there were no recorded cases of COVID in Louisiana. The national death toll, later amended, still stood officially at zero. President Donald Trump had yet to tweet about a “Chinese virus” that would “miraculously” disappear with sunny weather. He had yet to insinuate that Fake News was crashing the Dow just to hurt his chances for reelection. He had yet to try distracting the nation from his failures of leadership during the pandemic by tweeting reckless fantasies about turning “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on protesters decrying the murder of an unarmed Black man by Minneapolis police. Cantrell was and would remain unpersuaded by the president’s groundless insinuations. In early March she issued orders on crowd size and social distancing.

A week later, gatherings larger than 10 were outlawed and table service at restaurants was suspended, a bold move in a city famous for gourmet dining, a linchpin of the local economy. The overarching message: Shelter in place. A public service announcement from retired Lt. General Russel Honoré, one of the few heroes of the otherwise mismanaged federal response to Hurricane Katrina, ended with a stay-home warning to New Orleans worthy of a pissed-off parent. “Don’t make me come back down there again,” Honoré thundered.

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A red-hot trumpeter all of 25 years old, Glenn Hall was at the Grammys in late January when he got a first inkling about the coronavirus from a news alert on his cell phone. When not playing with his jazz-funk-fusion combo Lil’ Glenn & Backatown, Hall is out front of Rebirth Brass Band, a venerable group founded 12 years before he was born. The COVID warning hadn’t scared up much attention back in New Orleans, and Hall made it home in time to enjoy Mardi Gras to the hilt—the parades, gigging with Rebirth all over the place, and then…boom! The world of a promising young trumpeter—with a music-royalty pedigree (he’s a relative of NOLA’s storied Andrews family)—came to a shuddering halt. So did preparation for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival—the April–May extravaganza at the fairgrounds racetrack. It’s where upstart jazz or blues players earn their chops. Now, in the season of COVID, it was the first and most important casualty of a canceled festival lineup that normally runs all year long.

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Pandemics are caused by invisible pathogens that slip quietly into human populations and stalk their prey. That might seem to make them polar opposites of New Orleans’s more persistent scourge: hurricanes, with their howling winds and trackable routes toward landfall. Not so, says Barry: “Just like with hurricanes, you know there’s always another pandemic on the way; you just don’t know when or how strong it’s going to be.” The challenge in preparing for pandemics, Barry adds, is that doing so “requires investment in something that doesn’t necessarily offer an immediate payoff. Governments don’t like that.” In the same way that local levee boards and the Army Corps of Engineers neglected to properly design and upgrade the flood defense that failed New Orleans, Trump’s pound-foolish dismantling of vital agencies and systems, pre-COVID, left numerous cities in harm’s way, New Orleans among them. ..............(more)

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2020/06/hard-times-in-the-big-easy