Column

Amy McColm is a family resource coordinator assigned to Lidgerwood Elementary for The Zone Project. She’s also just someone who, when hearing that a family needs food, works whatever angle she can to get it to them.

I don’t normally write a three-dot column – which is newspaper slang for a column that talks about mostly unrelated things separated by a whole bunch of ellipses – but we have a lot of ground to cover today.

The coronavirus is creating a real-time experiment in Spokane jail reform.

When a lieutenant governor retires, as Cyrus Habib has announced he will do after a single term, it sets off a scramble in Washington’s political ponds.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued guidelines. The Washington Department of Labor and Industries has put out posters, checklists and record-keeping forms. Construction workers are accustomed to complying with safety rules governing nearly every action on site, even if they sometimes roll their eyes. They’re ready. And under Gov. Inslee’s order, construction is shut down unless the project serves some activity on the list of essential services. That’s where the debate starts.

In the era of the coronavirus, journalism has never felt more important. That’s what makes what is currently happening to local newspapers across the country, both dailies and weeklies, so cruel.

Many people have been and continue to be dismissive of the coronavirus without bothering to pretend to be smart about it.

The coronavirus pandemic and efforts to thwart it have brought changes large and small, many of which are coming so fast we can’t yet understand them. But it will end at some point – and what then? As the pandemic wrenches our lives out of the ordinary, what long-lasting effects might there be?

As for most people, life for reporters in the state capital has changed a bit in this time of coronavirus.

Forecast a blizzard, and lines predictably appear at the local grocery store. This time the blizzard will last until at least May 4, and it’s hitting the entire country.

Today is the day we’re beginning the virtual version of our Northwest Passages book club and community forums. Though we’re starting with more of the forum part than the book part.

Six degrees of separation is the popular idea that all people are six, or fewer, social connections from each other. The term was first used in 1929 – and popularized in a 1993 movie of the same name – to emphasize how closely connected people are all over the world.

I finally viscerally felt that these eccentric days, which had done such violence to routine, would lurch into another gear: Not normal, but suffused at last with a sense that underneath it all, if we stay healthy, these plague days would hold fast to a resilient core of what matters most.

Coronavirus cooperation doesn’t stop all of the partisan brickbats.

When Laura Fish-Leat saw the images of empty shelves everywhere, she thought of her neighbors. Many of the people in her Chief Garry Park neighborhood are older and have health conditions that make life difficult in the best of times.

A newspaper gets used to the idea that some people – mostly bad people – are afraid of us. But not our readers. And definitely not this time. We were told about a handful who recently canceled their subscriptions out of fear of this virus. Both the WHO and the CDC say it is safe to receive packages, including newspapers, at your home.

The waiters, bartenders, cooks and others who work in restaurants and bars are one group of workers who are taking a monstrous economic blow as a result of coronavirus and the measures taken to try to stop it. That’s more than 17,000 people in the Spokane area, and their lives are being upended by industry closures that threaten to change the nature of their industry dramatically – even after the virus passes. Many food-service workers were already in a precarious position, living on thin margins in an industry notorious for thin margins.

Politics, like so many other aspects of life, changes in the time of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Almost every notice from a campaign or elected official starts with some reference to COVID-19. Some talk about what they’re doing in the city, county, state or nation to fight it. Others talk about what the city, county, state or nation should be doing to fight it, but isn’t.

Parents who played Oregon Trail in the 1990s might want to download the online version for their new adventure in home-schooling. Challenge your kids with properly provisioning a wagon train to make the trek across the unknown. It’s good practice for travel in the age of coronavirus.