Face coverings can spare lives as COVID ramps up
Dr. Clay Marsh and Don Knotts might seem like an unlikely pairing at first glance.
Gov. Jim Justice, though, cast the duo into the narrative during his coronavirus briefing with reporters Friday afternoon.
After all, Marsh is a physician and WVU healthcare dean currently serving as the Mountain State’s COVID-19 czar.
And Knotts is the late comic actor from Morgantown who won multiple Emmys for his role as Barney Fife, the bumbling, but by-the-book deputy on “The Andy Griffith Show.”
From the COVID-19 czar, he received inspiration for a catchphrase that he hopes will become a new call to awareness for life in the pandemic times of West Virginia.
Masks equal vaccine.
That was in response to Marsh’s pandemic math and the societal assumption that a workable vaccine still may be months out from the market.
However, if West Virginians and everyone else were all to start wearing face coverings — regularly and without complaint, Marsh said — as many as 100,000 lives could be spared by the end of the year.
The next 10 to 12 weeks, Marsh said, are going to be the “worst part of the virus” — as influenza gears up and colder weather moves more people indoors.
With the holidays approaching, he added, that means more gatherings with family and friends.
And that, in turn, means more avenues of transmission, he said, if social distancing, handwashing all the other preventive measures aren’t employed.
The Knotts reference came in when the governor said he could call someone out for not wearing a mask — without resorting to the histrionics employed by a certain TV deputy.
“We don’t need to be a bunch of Barney Fifes,” he said, “but we’ve gotta get back to right and wrong.”
Now, he said, it’s a matter of doing what one can do now to keep positive cases on the other end of the ledger.
Justice opened his remarks Friday with a grim accounting: Nine more people have died in the state from coronavirus complications, bringing the total death count in the state to 422.
The youngest of the victims was 73, which led him to remind reporters that West Virginia is beset with a predominantly elderly population particularly vulnerable to the virus.
And the virus, he said, was particularly active over the past 24 hours, with 335 positive diagnoses charted.
Marsh, the inspiration of Justice’s catchphrase, came up with one of his own, in his reiteration of the current coronavirus state of affairs in West Virginia.
In lieu of a vaccine, he said, people can at least curtail the virus, somewhat, by doing all the aforementioned safeguards, including getting tested for COVID-19.
“We have the power,” he said.
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