Essays from the Edge of the World: COVID 19 in Seattle, Part 2 City on the Edge of the World
Seattle is the home of Boeing, Starbucks, Amazon, Microsoft, as well as countless other less obvious, but extremely consequential corporations. Seattle is home to one of the most important public universities in the country. Seattle was the home of two sadly departed left-handed guitarists who were so influential, their names need not be written here. And, without doing too deep of a dive, Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest, in general, has influenced the music you listen to as much as Nashville, New York, or London. You may not even realize that, but it’s true.
If today, you found yourself sipping a latte, and listening to music, while ordering a consumer product online, there is a better than average chance that you were drinking a beverage from Starbucks, and listening to a band who drew significant influence from NW music, while purchasing a consumer product from Amazon, on a Microsoft operating system. And, before that consumer product reached you, it more than likely flew on a Boeing airplane.
The completion of such a routine transaction also relies on dozens of technology platforms you’ve never heard of, which were also built here in the Puget Sound. Microsoft was built on companies and technologies you’ve never heard of, in the same way that Nirvana’s sound was build on decades of homegrown punk, garage, and metal bands.
Suffice it to say, without Seattle, your world would be a very different place. Nonetheless, as far as most people are concerned, Seattle is nothing more than a dark gloomy rainforest in the back pocket of the country. The place where the west ends. The place where you run out of land, before having to confront an ocean that occupies half the globe. The place that Lewis and Clark took one look at, and decided to turn around and go home. The city on the edge of the world.
COVID 19 travelled the inhospitable Pacific Ocean to arrive in the Puget Sound on January 20, 2020, in the form of a Washington man who had recently travelled to Hubei Province, China. By the end of February, Seattle, the city at the edge of the world, became the center of the universe, for all the wrong reasons.
Between January 20th and February 28th, it became fairly routine for Edgar to watch an hour or more of coverage on CNN about the corona virus, and even though the first confirmed case in the United States was here in the Puget Sound, the media focus was still thousands of miles away. Chinese authorities had shut down Wuhan, a city with a population larger than New York City. Travel restrictions were put in place. The first death outside of China was reported. At least two full news cycles focused on little more than the ill-conceived quarantining of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Also, around the middle of the month, the media started calling it COVID 19.
The first death in the United States happened at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, right across Lake Washington from Seattle. Edgar knew that hospital well. In his twenties and early thirties, he’d been an EMT. Edgar had spent about a year working on the Eastside, and Evergreen was the primary receiving facility for 911 calls on the Eastside. What really got Edgar’s attention that day was that a nursing facility, called Life Care, right across the 405 freeway from Evergreen, had two confirmed cases, and fifty people with symptoms. Edgar knew Life Care so well that he could have drawn a map of the facility from memory, despite not having been there in nearly twelve years. Not surprisingly, first responders spend a lot of time responding to 911 calls from nursing homes.
When Edgar saw the first live shots of Life Care on CNN, he yelled over to Audrey in the kitchen, “Ha, Audrey, I used to go to that place all the time when we first got married.” She glanced up from her laptop, and quickly scanned the headline at the bottom of the television screen, and said, “God, I’m glad you’re not an EMT anymore!”
If today, you found yourself sipping a latte, and listening to music, while ordering a consumer product online, there is a better than average chance that you were drinking a beverage from Starbucks, and listening to a band who drew significant influence from NW music, while purchasing a consumer product from Amazon, on a Microsoft operating system. And, before that consumer product reached you, it more than likely flew on a Boeing airplane.
The completion of such a routine transaction also relies on dozens of technology platforms you’ve never heard of, which were also built here in the Puget Sound. Microsoft was built on companies and technologies you’ve never heard of, in the same way that Nirvana’s sound was build on decades of homegrown punk, garage, and metal bands.
Suffice it to say, without Seattle, your world would be a very different place. Nonetheless, as far as most people are concerned, Seattle is nothing more than a dark gloomy rainforest in the back pocket of the country. The place where the west ends. The place where you run out of land, before having to confront an ocean that occupies half the globe. The place that Lewis and Clark took one look at, and decided to turn around and go home. The city on the edge of the world.
COVID 19 travelled the inhospitable Pacific Ocean to arrive in the Puget Sound on January 20, 2020, in the form of a Washington man who had recently travelled to Hubei Province, China. By the end of February, Seattle, the city at the edge of the world, became the center of the universe, for all the wrong reasons.
Between January 20th and February 28th, it became fairly routine for Edgar to watch an hour or more of coverage on CNN about the corona virus, and even though the first confirmed case in the United States was here in the Puget Sound, the media focus was still thousands of miles away. Chinese authorities had shut down Wuhan, a city with a population larger than New York City. Travel restrictions were put in place. The first death outside of China was reported. At least two full news cycles focused on little more than the ill-conceived quarantining of the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Also, around the middle of the month, the media started calling it COVID 19.
The first death in the United States happened at Evergreen Hospital in Kirkland, right across Lake Washington from Seattle. Edgar knew that hospital well. In his twenties and early thirties, he’d been an EMT. Edgar had spent about a year working on the Eastside, and Evergreen was the primary receiving facility for 911 calls on the Eastside. What really got Edgar’s attention that day was that a nursing facility, called Life Care, right across the 405 freeway from Evergreen, had two confirmed cases, and fifty people with symptoms. Edgar knew Life Care so well that he could have drawn a map of the facility from memory, despite not having been there in nearly twelve years. Not surprisingly, first responders spend a lot of time responding to 911 calls from nursing homes.
When Edgar saw the first live shots of Life Care on CNN, he yelled over to Audrey in the kitchen, “Ha, Audrey, I used to go to that place all the time when we first got married.” She glanced up from her laptop, and quickly scanned the headline at the bottom of the television screen, and said, “God, I’m glad you’re not an EMT anymore!”
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