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By MIKE JACKSON

TURNERS FALLS – It may seem backward for an artist to move to Los Angeles at the point of their career when they decide to not be famous, but that seems to be the path Luke Csehak has taken.
Eight years ago he was the songwriter-singer-guitarist at the nucleus of the Happy Jawbone Family Band, a Brattleboro collective that played earnest, chaotic, jangling pop songs always on the verge of falling apart. Happy Jawbone’s charms were on the cusp of receiving a mass audience, thanks to a proper record-and-marketing deal, when the band itself suddenly fell apart in an irreversible, cable-rock-documentary sort of manner.
Csehak swore – so went local legend – never to play those songs again, hitting the reset button as The Lentils, a project more deliberately focused on his solo work. After releasing a debut, Brattleboro Is Flooding, that captured the apocalyptic feeling of a small-city music scene dealing with deaths, breakups, and natural disaster, Csehak headed west.
All that is ancient history, and this Friday marks the release of the sixth (or so) Lentils LP, Budget Alchemy, on two Greenfield-based labels: Feeding Tube for the vinyl, and Flower Sounds with a small-batch cassette.
The album is intricately multi-tracked, a slew of instruments swirling and pulsing, shrouding what may be Csehak’s strongest batch of songs yet in an uneasy, wistful ambiance. “How come all these gorgeous oceans are churning in my mind?” he sings. “The problem with memory is it can never be touched…”
I caught up with Csehak by phone a couple weeks back after getting an advance listen to the tracks – the weird kind of deal journalists make about music. We had a good long talk, and the transcript has been substantially reordered and edited for clarity.

MR: Every time I turn a recorder on, I say this, but if there’s anything that is off the record, let me know.

LC: Okay, I will let you know. I do like going off the record, just as like a formality. I usually don’t actually mean it. I don’t see myself going off the record too much – my heart’s an open book.

MR: How is it out there? Are you in Los Angeles? Have you been there longer than you were in Brattleboro?

LC: Almost. I was in Brattleboro eight years, so it’s coming up…. I’ve been here for almost seven years now. That will mark something.

MR: I think I was probably at four of the first five shows that were billed as The Lentils, and it was cool to watch what the Lentils sound was kind of cohere. This new record – is this the “big step” record for you?

LC: In a way – it’s sort of the conclusion of processes that I began when I first moved here. They’re songs that I wrote all throughout my time here; it’s not all new. One of them actually is from Brattleboro, it just didn’t make an album. Not because it’s not good – I’d say that these songs didn’t make it onto albums because they were too good for the other albums, they just didn’t fit. I realized they all fit together and made a nice little family, so I finally got around to finishing up that family.

MR: What is the scene out there for you? Do you have a day job?

LC: Yeah! I finally got out of the restaurant biz, and now I’m working as a therapist. I went through my masters, I’ve been out of school for like a year and been working in private practice under a licensed therapist, and hopefully I’ll be licensed next year.

MR: Is that the third school for you or the second? You went to Naropa, right?

LC: Yeah, I went to Naropa for undergrad, I studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and I thought I would never go back to school. But then I met some people who were doing the the music and therapist thing together. Mostly this guy Jonny Kosmo – he’s an LA guy, sort of a real scene-maker but not in that type of way, he’s just a really good friend who gets all of his friends together to do cool things.

MR: An organizer of people.

LC: Yeah, and he’s a therapist…. It dovetails really well with an artistic practice. I feel like a lot of what I was doing musically was preparing me for therapy.

What I’m going for in music is not really [being] the most innovative musician, that’s not really interesting to me. I’m all about exploring the human condition, figuring out what the hell are we doing on this earth in these weird flesh suits? And why do we have all these feelings, what are they good for? What is their nature?

So I’ve been investigating that through music, and then figured out that it’s given me some pretty cool skills for talking about that with other people who are having a lot of trouble figuring that out.

MR: What were you doing in Vermont?

LC: Um. I was exploring the nature of human connection.

MR: You guys were from Connecticut, am I remembering that right?

LC: Yeah, I grew up in Connecticut, but let’s keep that off the record.

That’s one of the times where you can keep that on the record. As long as that doesn’t get you in trouble with other journalists…

MR: Were you in bands before Happy Jawbone?

LC: No, not really. You couldn’t call them bands, more just like improvisation crews.

MR: When you talk to people in Los Angeles about what was up with Brattleboro during the time that you lived there, how do you try to explain it?

LC: I always say it was a really special place for a few years, where you’d just walk out your door and hang out with the best songwriters working, and just riff, and maybe go to a swim spot and skinny dip with them. It’s pretty cool to just be in the bosom of a group of people who are really working on something and really inspiring each other, and working off of each other.

MR: And some of the best producers, too.

LC: Yeah. But they’re all insane, so it’s not a big surprise that it didn’t last very long.

MR: We were downstream from Brattleboro in Turners, but there was obviously so much heavy stuff going on in that scene during those years.

LC: I see Brattleboro as sort of the north pole of the Western Mass world. There was a lot of shit happening, really parallel, in the different scenes where a lot of shit was coming to the surface.

MR: Do you like any of the Happy Jawbone records?

LC: Oh yeah. The Silk Pistol I think is a really solid album. The Christmas album is also pretty good. It’s hard for me to judge that one, because we had a lot of fun making it, so it’s very nostalgic for me.

MR: When I’m showing that band to someone I usually go with Okay, Midnight.

LC: Yeah, see, people love that. I don’t get it. I think I was trying to do this like punk cosplay thing. I was never really a punk, I just thought it was fun to pretend… It was like that “mer-punk” thing where it’s trying to not actually make punk music, but I was putting a lot of pressure on myself to connect with people.

Sometimes I miss singing like that style, where you’re singing very loud, straining your vocal cords and it resonates in your body in a specific way that feels pseudo-orgasmic. But that’s a big trust fall to lay on an audience. And it was like maybe 10% of the shows people were able and willing to take that trust fall and it was magic, but the vast majority of the shows people were like, who the fuck this guy, why is he trying so hard?

Now I much prefer this quieter music that I make, more low-pressure music. You can come to me, if you like.

MR: You know, I didn’t like that band the first time I saw you. And I think that might have made me like it more in the long run.

LC: I’d love to hear what you hated about that band!

MR: I barely remember. It was at Flywheel and I was there to see another band, and you guys were in the way, and there was a toy piano…

LC: The toy piano! It was pink, too – a very twee move, and people really had a hard time with that. But it did actually sound pretty cool….

I do miss get getting panned. That was a fun thing about Happy Jawbone is that people would really pan it. Now that I’ve self-sabotaged so much nobody bothers to write about my band anymore — that means nobody pans it. There’s this beautiful ego destruction that happens when you read someone just totally shit on your baby that I sort of miss.

MR: Would the band read them out together?

LC: Yeah! We’d process it, and laugh and have a really good time. When someone pans an album, that’s such a narcissistic act for the writer, the critic. “I denounce this in the name of my taste – there is an objective taste, and this album misses the mark.”

The ones that hurt more were the ones that were accurate – like “it’s not horrible, but it’s just not that special.”

MR: Sitting here it kind of looks like you’ve been part of an exodus of musicians from Brattleboro to Los Angeles. Does that feel true, on the other end?

LC: Yeah, there’s still a handful of people from Brattleboro that I still see around. Some of them are still close friends…. But I do end up gravitating towards other people from New England. It’s a funny thing where people from New England in LA sort of find each other. People call it “East Coast retirement.”

MR: Do you go swimming and surfing and things like that?

LC: Yeah, I still haven’t done the surfing thing. I plan to. I’m doing T’ai Chi, though, and I feel like that’s a good preparation for learning how to surf…. I’ve got this class that meets outdoors in the park and it’s great. I love T’ai Chi, it’s been a real lifesaver during the quarantine.

MR: So is this the fifth main Lentils record?

LC: I feel like there’s more. I was trying to count them up the other day and it’s hard because there’s the live album, there’s the Pillow Lava things – do you count that as one album or three, or two? I sort of count that as one double album.

MR: Those tapes were the first time I’d heard you getting deeper instrumental stuff going.

LC: I’ve been doing that all along, but just sort of keeping it secreted away in this Pillow Lava project. A lot of that stuff is from Happy Jawbone days, but it was too weird for Happy Jawbone, and I continued making that stuff and finally put it all together for the Pillow Lava series.

MR:There were kids from the Putney School playing on one of these, also? How did that come about?

LC: My friend Julia Tadlock was putting on a play at the Putney School – Eurydice – and she asked me to write some music and score it for the kids there. So I wrote some incidental music for wind quartet, and they played it while the play was going. It’s all on the Bandcamp.

Count that as one – Brattleboro is Flooding was the first one, so that’s two, and then Botanical Castings, three, 11 New Flavors…, four, and Ixnay is five so this will be six.

MR: Is your approach to being able to put albums together now different from, or to any extent a reaction to, how that process went in Happy Jawbone?

LC: No, I feel like I was doing that in Happy Jawbone, I just have gotten better at it. Like, with The Silk Pistol I feel like we really hit that – that album has a real nice album form to it that’s pretty similar to what I do with the Lentils now.

That was the second-to-last one, before the last one, which was an interesting failure, the self-titled Happy Jawbone album….

I don’t really love recording in studios. Recording with people who know how to record is sort of frustrating for me – I don’t know, I just have a different ear than most people, I want things to sound a particular way, and it’s almost impossible for me to convey that to an engineer or producer…

I’ve recorded with pro people; I recorded with Justin Pizzoferrato for the last Happy Jawbone album on Mexican Summer. And they’re all like really good at what they did, but it doesn’t it doesn’t sound like what I wanted it to sound like.

But you know, people like those albums. That’s good. I just don’t really care for them myself. Because I have this idea about what those songs sound like, and it sort of sounds like a Shelbyville version what I think the songs are.

MR: Who plays the music that we hear on this new one?

LC: I think it’s the only album that is 100% all me. The last one only had a couple of people here and there. The songs are just sort of that style – it’s more like writing, it’s not really collaborative; it’s like an interior project, where I’m just like alone in my room, exploring my mind…

MR: You said that one of the songs was from before you went to California – did you mean written, or are some of these older recordings as well?

LC: The one that’s old is “Dark Days,” which was going to go on Brattleboro Is Flooding, actually, but it just didn’t fit.

MR: This new album does sound like a lot more work went into it.

LC: It’s a pretty painstaking process for me to make an album like that. I mean, I did it over seven years, I’d just check in with it every now and again: oh, does this new song fit in it? How can I change it to make it fit, or do I bother? Sort of putting the pieces together.

Making these albums is sort of a collage process, figuring out what pieces get along together, sort of like making a family.

MR: So this is stuff you’ve been working on by yourself, and for seven years – the classic “masterwork that the bedroom auteur has been crafting…”

LC: This is very much a maximum bedroom auteur album, sort of the pinnacle of that trajectory for me. I’m happy to be making some other collaborative albums, which hopefully will come out soon. We’ll see. It’s tricky getting people to put out your music, especially when you self-sabotage its sale as much as I do.

MR: Why do you do that?

LC: Well, I think I just don’t like the pressure of having to think about marketing the music. I feel like that really puts a pressure on what is a very fragile and delicate process. Some people are able to do it, I just have a real hard time if there’s any pressure on it, it really makes it come out weird and I don’t like it. So I’ve sort of made myself unsaleable so that I can go deeper.

But I’m trying to get out of that, actually.

Now that I have this other career as a therapist, I don’t have to worry about making money in music at all, so that pressure’s sort of gone, and I can think about like trying to share the music with the wider world without the pressure of having to make it a career….

Honestly, like, I’m not like a huge fan of music, really. I’ll listen to the stuff, but even making it, it feels good, but it’s sort of a mystery why I even do it. People ask me, you’re a musician? And I always sort of cringe when I have to answer yes….

I don’t know what I think about music, and I don’t really care to find out. I guess it’s a way of exploring human connection and that’s what it’s good for, but all the ideas and identity that go along with being a musician I find somatically repulsive – there’s a tightening in my gut and my throat, like a dizzy feeling when it comes up.

MR: Is there a live band version of The Lentils right now?

LC: I’m trying out a new thing for the record release show, which will be just a saxophone quartet, with me singing on top…. Hopefully we do okay. I think we’re only going to be able to practice right before the show. But it’s all music that’s written out now, in a score, and they’re all pro sax players so it should work out okay.

MR: Do you notate stuff out when you when you’re enlisting a band to play stuff?

LC: Yeah, I really like writing it out by hand, I have my manuscript paper and I figure it out. There are some songs where people come up with their own stuff.

And then actually, the next album – which is finished, and we’re trying to find a home for it, it’s called Hello Jane Goodall, Are You Listening? – is with a 10-piece setup. We recorded that in the studio, but the way that we play it live.

MR: I fell down a little rabbit hole because of some of those extra lyrics on the Bandcamp page.

LC: I like to do that – a little Easter egg. Because I like to write, but the process of getting people to read your writing is even more arduous and demeaning and dehumanizing than getting people to listen to your music, so I never actually do that. So I’ve found a fun way to get around that is to just put the writing that’s associated with the song in the “lyrics,” after the song lyrics.

It sort of happened by accident, actually – in the last album, Ixnay on the Entilslay, I’d just copied and pasted the lyrics from my notes, and it had all the extra lyrics and writing that had spawned the lyrics. I was like “oh, I might as well just keep it – who the hell reads lyrics anyways?”

MR: Do you have strangers who listen to your music?

LC: Yeah, there are people that I don’t know the listen to my music which confounds me… Randomly people hit me up. Somebody asked me to go to Florida last week and I was like, no. Absolutely not. Let’s see if I can tour to the Bay Area one day. It’s hard for me to even play a show outside of Northeast LA!

MR: Who should folks check out in LA right now? There’s no real use in sending you out as a scout if we’re not gonna be getting the inside dirt…

LC: There’s the heavy hitters like Mega Bog, Chris Cohen, Dear Nora, but the more obscure stuff… hmmm. Jonny Kosmo is a master of the smooth sound, Nehemiah St. Danger, Ben Varian, and the lowered are also doing great work in that strange funk world and no one knows about them.

Erika Bell is someone else no one knows about, which is a crime. Song structures produced to a level of deconstruction that I’ve never heard before. Then there’s bands like Dovestone, Banny Grove, Lina Tullgren, and Belly Belt who are making truly uncategorizable music. There’s some real freak stuff goes down over here.

MR: Have you been back to Vermont?

LC: Yeah, I’ve come back a couple times. Last time I came it was great, it was right when it was like sort of too cold to swim, but you could do it. We went down to Botanical Castings and jumped into the ice cold water and it was really nice. There’s that magical time in early spring when everyone gets out of their introvert cages.

MR: Well, I always wonder whether the New Englanders in California are gonna move back when you all run out of water down there.

LC: Yeah, that is something that I keep in mind. It’s not really sustainable living out here. Real estate is insane. The water…. Somehow it stays afloat, so it will probably stay afloat for a while more, but yeah, I don’t see really like settling down here.

By MIKE JACKSON

GREENFIELD – A man recently employed as a part-time reserve officer with the Buckland and Bernardston police departments was arraigned Tuesday on four counts of child pornography, according to the Northwest District Attorney’s (NWDA) office.

Jacob Wrisley, 40, formerly a Shelburne resident, was arrested by state police at his Millers Falls home on Monday and arraigned in Greenfield district court on Tuesday. According to an NWDA spokesperson, investigators issued a warrant for Wrisley after receiving a tip from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. State police searched his home and car and interviewed him before his arrest.

Wrisley was appointed as a part-time reserve officer in the Buckland Police Department in June 2018 after attending the local police academy and was still serving in that role as recently as last summer, according to public documents reviewed by the Montague Reporter. He was appointed as a part-time reserve officer in the Bernardston Police Department in May 2019.

Buckland police chief James Hicks confirmed on Wednesday that Wrisley worked for his department since 2018, and was suspended on Monday. Hicks said Wrisley worked one to two shifts for the town per month.

“Upon learning of the arrest and charges brought against Jacob Wrisley, I was shocked and saddened,” Bernardston police chief James Palmeri wrote in a public statement Wednesday afternoon. “I have a zero tolerance approach when it involves charges of this nature and some circumstances need immediate action. I have suspended Mr. Wrisley from the Bernardston Police Department and will be seeking his immediate termination from the Town.”

The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children operates a “CyberTipline” for reports of child sexual exploitation online.

According to the NWDA, Wrisley’s bail was set at $2,500 cash by Judge Mark Pasquariello, on the condition that Wrisley “have no unsupervised contact with any child under 18 including by electronic platforms; have no overnight stays where children under 18 are present; not work or volunteer for any organization that serves children under 18; [and] report according to a schedule to the probation department and notify probation if he moves.” A pretrial conference was scheduled for June 17.

Defense attorney Jack Godleski confirmed to the Reporter that he was appointed to represent Mr. Wrisley, but declined to comment about or on behalf of his client on Wednesday.

This article was last updated at 1:51 p.m. on Wednesday, May 19.

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Scott Davidson

An interview with Jessamyn Smith.

By SAMANTHA WOOD

WEST COUNTY – People in Franklin County are coming down with the illness caused by the new coronavirus, COVID-19. While testing is still hard to come by, the virus is spreading in the community and making people sick.

According to Franklin Regional Council of Governments public health nurse Lisa White, the most important thing now is care for people who are ill. “We should assume anyone we come in contact with may be carrying the virus,” White said in an interview this week.

Jessamyn Smyth, a Franklin County hilltown resident who is recovering from COVID-19, says she is at high risk for complications, and did everything she could to avoid catching this virus. She thinks it was likely that she was exposed through her partner, who was working outside the home but has remained asymptomatic.

Smyth, who has a background in public health and teaches communications, granted the Montague Reporter an interview by email because COVID-19 makes her cough. In the last week, she has experienced respiratory distress and has been to the emergency room. She continues to recover at home as of press time, and is still awaiting test results.

This interview has been edited for length.

Montague Reporter: What were the first signs you had of coronavirus? How did you get tested?

Jessamyn Smyth: I had a feeling of intense pain and pressure in my chest. The next morning I woke up with a fever of 100 and a spasmodic cough, full body pain, GI issues, worsening lung pain. That seems like a long time ago now (it’s been a long week and a half or so!).

Because of test shortages, while I was still breathing okay I didn’t meet the criteria for one of the few tests in Western Mass., even though I am in a “medically vulnerable” group. When I started having real breathing difficulty, my primary care doctor referred me to the emergency respiratory clinic set up in Northampton.

The doc there was both extraordinarily kind and realist, diagnosing corona, discussing what that may mean for me in particular, safety planning with me about when to bolt for the ER and how we hope I won’t have to, all of that. The nasopharyngeal swab used in the test is pretty uncomfortable, but she was even very honest with me about that – I appreciate how she treated me with calm, exact kindness, and respectful directness about both the disease and my risks, more than I can say. I’m grateful for all the work healthcare people are doing right now. They are exhausted already.

MR: How do you think you were exposed to the virus?

JS: Knowing that my hereditary primary immune deficiency and allergy to all groups of antibiotics makes me high risk for complications of coronavirus (and difficult to treat if I got it), I took this contagion very seriously far before most folks around me really understood the dangers. I began fully self-isolating on March 10, teaching and working virtually.

My partner began isolating at home with me on March 15, but was exposed to several high risk vectors in the interim. The span the docs here are seeing between exposure and symptoms for those who get sick is four days, so it seems I got it from him during that period. He’s asymptomatic, which, we have learned from recent studies published in Nature, as many as 60% of all carriers are. That’s 6 in 10 people transmitting with no visible symptoms.

[Editors’ note: Franklin County public health nurse Lisa White told us this week that the incubation period may be up to two weeks.]

This is why self-quarantining matters, and we have to get this message out. People think they (and their kids and their kids’ activities and their back and forth to this and that house and etc.) are okay – and they aren’t, so they are putting other people’s lives at risk.

Everyone needs to isolate themselves and their families in place until we get a better handle on this virus, and use technology to maintain social and familial connections. Anything else, at this point, will be lethal.

MR: Have you been told what you might be able to expect during the illness?

JS: COVID-19 is fierce and brutal, and unlike any illness I’ve felt. I’m told my symptoms – high fever for a long time, extremely painful lungs, coughing, GI symptoms, bone, joint, and muscle pain, weakness and exhaustion – are the common constellation. The lung pain is bizarre, and quite scary.

I’m told that if all goes well, I can expect to be seriously sick for 2-3 weeks, that the exhaustion after the virus sticks around for a month or more depending on how much damage was done, and that some people need respiratory therapy to regain normal lung function.

If all doesn’t go well, bacterial infections take advantage of the virus-weakened lungs, people get bilateral pneumonia and can’t breathe, and they rush to the hospital for respiratory support (ventilator, other forms of life-support – and antibiotics for the bacterial aspect, which are unfortunately life-threatening for me).

I’m a swimmer and cyclist, and so very strong in spite of the immune system issue. I asked the doc who diagnosed me if being fit would help me, hoping it would: she said coronavirus truly doesn’t care. It either complicates or it doesn’t, if I understand correctly, in largest part because of random factors in each person’s immune response and bacterial situations. It can certainly be complicated by existing issues, but life or death with COVID-19 not a moral issue. It’s not a behavioral choice. This is a vicious disease that is extremely communicable and dangerous.

MR: You have written about disability, and now about disability rights in the pandemic. What do you want people in our community to know/think/do about this issue?

JS: What happens when people go into respiratory emergency is when we face what is fast becoming the ethical and legal battle of our time. The inadequate number of ventilators available to cope with the casualties of COVID-19 is causing medical personnel around the world to be having to choose who gets lifesaving treatment and who is left to die.

For people with disabilities, as a result, the word “triage” has begun to inspire terror, because many are willing to talk about this in the language of eugenics and social Darwinism, quickly and easily discarding the value of the lives of our elders and anyone who is “medically complicated,” i.e.: disabled.

Aktion T4, the Nazi program to eradicate people with disabilities, is very much on many advocates’ minds these days as some of the language we hear in current media mirrors that of older genocidal framework. More prosaically, we are feeling the dangerous escalation of the daily assumptions we too often live with: that our work, our art, our community involvement, our contributions to the economy, our bodies, are worth less than those of (temporarily) able-bodied people’s. Italy in particular has been sharing tragic and horrific stories on this “rationing” front, but it has begun happening and being planned for here, too: people are very openly saying that only young, healthy people should be given the ventilators, while our elders and people with disabilities should be left to die rather than “wasting” resources on them when they might be harder to save.

There are currently multiple complaints and budding lawsuits filed with the US Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Civil Rights over “treatment rationing plans” which, in direct violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), discriminate against people with disabilities – including anyone elderly.

All of us can support these, and be in touch with our legislators about this issue.

While I understand the pressures health care systems and doctors face, it is so important for everyone to understand that the difference between a disabled person and a (temporarily) able bodied one is one fraction of a second or an inch in a car crash, one genetic twist, one illness, or, most inevitably and simply, some years. Every single one of us will become disabled to greater or lesser degrees, if nothing else, simply by aging.

We are not in the business of ascribing worth to some lives and not others. The ventilator problem must be solved by making more ventilators.  The personnel issues must be solved by making more personal protective equipment (PPE). And so on.

Everyone can support this, too. Working to improve access to medical supplies across the country will save thousands upon thousands of people’s lives.

People can also speak to their local hospital administrators, and require both transparency and dialogue about how the hospital will be making the transition from ethics driven by individual-centered care (what we do in normal times) to ethics driven by community-centered care (what we have to do in pandemics). They can work with their local hospitals to establish exactly what is needed to care for people in a just way, and how we as a community can make that happen, even imperfectly.

Disability Discrimination Complaint Filed over COVID-19 Treatment Rationing Plan in Washington State

Second Complaint Regarding Illegal Disability Discrimination in Treatment Rationing During COVID-19 Pandemic

MR: Have local public health officials been checking in with you? Do you know if they have charted your recent contacts?

JS: They would have had to track my asymptomatic partner and the (also probably largely asymptomatic) vector-networks through which he got it. The docs are as certain as they can be that I quarantined before getting the virus, and infected no one as a result.

[When reached this week by the Montague Reporter, the chair of the local board of health in Smyth’s town said there are currently no known cases of COVID-19 in their town. When presented with this story, they clarified, saying that the only data they have to work with is the daily update in the state system, which is based only on positive test results. Clinical diagnoses – when, absent a test result, a medical professional assesses a patient and comes to the conclusion that all the symptoms point to COVID-19 – are not entered into the state system. These cases are not being tracked.]

At this point, though, here is the important part: we are in “community spread.” This public health term means that the disease can no longer be tracked through that one person who went out of the country or was on that one cruise ship or whatever – it is transmitting widely and invisibly throughout the community, and as more and more tests become available, we will see that it is already everywhere.

Tracking individuals is no longer the strategy. And of course, targeting individuals who are sick, or scapegoating them in any way, is not only stupid but dangerous: it’s here, people have it, they are transmitting it without knowing they have it, vulnerable people are dying, more will die, and “flattening the curve” by staying home in self-quarantine, hard as that is, is the best tool we have to try to keep our hospitals up and running.

The social and public health strategy needs to be community-wide response with information toward prevention for those who haven’t yet gotten it, and a wide array of supports for those who were already exposed. These approaches need to go hand in hand, so as few people as possible get sick and those who already are sick can recover.

People who are saying “there are no cases in…” are kidding themselves at this point: what they can accurately say is “we haven’t had any positive tests reported to us yet in [X town], but everyone should assume that the corona virus is here, a lot of the transmission is invisible, and we need to be taking every precaution we can.”

This is why I have been willing to share some of my experience publicly by talking with you, or sharing my experience or good public health information or advocacy opportunities in my Facebook network of writers and professors who have communication and education platforms of their own: we need to lay aside the misconceptions we cannot afford, and get it right. Now. Lives depend on it as we have never seen.

MR: You told me you have a background in public health education. Can you explain a bit about that, and how that has informed your response/perspective to this situation?

JS: I teach interdisciplinary Humanities at Bard Microcollege in Holyoke, and also do advocacy and public relations for Stavros (a disability advocacy organization) in Amherst. When I started my career in the ‘90s, I worked in HIV counseling and testing, harm reduction, domestic violence and sexual assault crisis response and prevention, and community education for violence prevention and justice. I now integrate that public health work into the teaching of writing and communications, fine arts, and community building.

In this pandemic, we have a perfect storm of vulnerabilities becoming visible: people who are quarantined with their batterers, homeless or incarcerated or undocumented people who cannot get help or escape the virus, medically vulnerable people with disabilities being discussed in mass media as essentially ballast, and a media moment of echo chambers in which people are getting very bad information and little else, which is spreading the virus and preventing smart and coordinated public health response nationally.

Any voice I have, and any understanding I can gain and refine and share, I want to use in service of protecting the most vulnerable among us. Part of that is really listening, learning from, and understanding the experiences of the most vulnerable. Part of that is raising awareness in more privileged people about how they can be using their positions to help rather than make it worse. Part of that is being willing to share my own experience, at times, when that can be appropriate or helpful.

Mostly, right now, I have to focus on getting well, and hope I don’t get the complications so many people have already faced. But while I’m doing that, I can give what information and advocacy I can to my communities. And I have been deeply moved by how much kindness and loving support many of my communities have offered me; it’s really been holding me up through this.

We are at the point of there needing to be one public approach to this: assume that you have been exposed already, and act accordingly to protect the medically vulnerable people around you, who are much more likely to get fatal complications if you infect them. Stay home.

This is what we have now, yes? Each other. It sounds a lot cheesier than I usually am, but it really might just be the big truth.

 

Baystate Health is withholding local statistics from cities and towns.

 

By SAMANTHA WOOD

FRANKLIN COUNTY – For several weeks, the local hospital company Baystate Health has released daily counts on the total number of people it has tested for COVID-19, the illness caused by the new coronavirus. These numbers include positive and negative test results for the entire chain, which includes four hospitals in Hampden County and one in Greenfield. Baystate has refused to release more detailed information about each hospital, and is not granting interviews.

In an interview this week, Franklin Regional Council of Governments public health nurse Lisa White explained asymptomatic spread has led to infection among people who don’t know they are spreading the virus. Some will never become ill, or will have such mild symptoms they won’t seek care.

“We should assume anyone we come in contact with may be carrying” the virus, White said.

Because testing is not widely available, positive test results cannot give an accurate picture of the presence of the virus in the community.

“It is popping,” White said. “People are getting sick.”

When residents experiencing symptoms reach out to a public health nurse or their own clinician, state and federal health authorities advise that they be instructed to stay home as long as possible. Only people who are very sick are advised to go to a hospital, and these are the people most likely to get tested. Then it takes days to get test results.

“The priority is for treating people with severe illness,” White said, “regardless of how they were diagnosed.”

As people are quarantined and isolated at home, tracking by public officials is haphazard at best. It appears that no public agency is tracking everyone who is sick with COVID-19 symptoms at home.

The state Department of Public Health tracks positive COVID-19 cases in a database known as the Massachusetts Virtual Epidemiologic Network (MAVEN), but several local officials we spoke with said the state is likely several days behind in updating that data. Meanwhile, the tests themselves may have a 30% false negative rate, according to a recent report in the New York Times, which cited research on the disease in China.

Beyond this tracking system, there is broad agreement that many more people are now sick with COVID-19 in Franklin County than are being tested. The numbers of those who seek treatment in hospitals may provide a broader view of the illness’s scope and spread than do positive test results alone.

A Communication Gap

Emergency management teams in Franklin County are collaborating across town lines to develop plans for adding bed capacity, ramping up staff, and working to find much-need personal protective equipment (PPE), which has been in short supply nationally.

Local leaders are working to pull together all of the data they can to understand what is happening in real time, and plan in anticipation of changing needs. Each community is different, and responses must take into account variations in demographics, level of need, medical risk factors, and geography.

When asked about emergency planning for an expected surge in COVID-19 illness in Franklin County in mid-to-late April, a source in local municipal government told the Montague Reporter that Baystate Health has not been forthcoming with necessary information for local towns. The source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said emergency planners have sought details related to increasing treatment capacity and staffing at Baystate Franklin Medical Center, but have thus far received only a vague response from hospital administrators.

Without this information, the source said, municipal leaders cannot plan effectively in a public health crisis.

No “Hospital-Specific Data”

Baystate Health owns Baystate Franklin Medical Center in Greenfield, Baystate Medical Center and Baystate Children’s Hospital in Springfield, Baystate Noble Hospital in Westfield, and Baystate Wing Hospital in Palmer.

The Reporter reached out to the hospital company on Wednesday with questions about treatment capacity at the Greenfield hospital, and whether the company was coordinating with municipal emergency management teams. In response, Baystate’s media relations office sent a statement from Ronald Bryant, the president of Baystate Franklin Medical Center, saying: “Baystate Health has plans in place throughout the health system to accommodate a surge of patients as needed and we are prioritizing all available resources in support of our efforts to address the public health needs associated with COVID-19.”

Asked more detailed questions Thursday morning – including the number of COVID-19 patients currently being treated at the Greenfield hospital, the capacity that can be treated there, how many ventilators the hospital has, information regarding surge plans, and the number of employees out sick – another Baystate Health spokesperson replied in an email, “We do not have that information.”

On Friday the company issued its daily press release listing what have been the routine, system-wide totals: 1,889 people have been tested, 1,386 have come back negative, 387 have tested positive, and there are 116 pending results.

In addition, the release said, “Currently within BH, we are caring for 139 hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection, 41 of whom are in our critical care units; we are also caring for 65 hospitalized patients who are under investigation for COVID-19 infection. We are not reporting hospital-specific data to ensure patient privacy is maintained, especially in our smaller facilities.”

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, also known as HIPAA, protects patient privacy by preventing hospitals from disclosing information that would individually identify a patient. It does not cover information that does not reveal an individual’s identity.

Greenfield Releasing Numbers

On Thursday, the office of Greenfield Mayor Roxann Wedegartner announced it would begin releasing its own daily updates of local numbers of positive tests on the city website. As of Friday, the city reports that 46 Greenfield residents have tested positive, up from 25 the day before.

The mayor’s office said that as of mid-day Thursday, five Greenfield residents had died of COVID-19. On Friday that count had risen to eight.

While up-to-date figures on countywide cases are not available, the state releases a daily report breaking down positive test results by county. Thursday’s report – which local officials say may be as many as three to five days behind – listed 85 confirmed cases in Franklin County as a whole.

Test results are just one piece of the puzzle as communities respond to the virus. Given the difficulty of getting tested for COVID-19 and the possibility of false negative results, these figures may be less immediately significant in the effort to get a sense of the virus’s community spread than the numbers, currently guarded by Baystate Health, of local people suffering and dying from its disease.