Why an Idaho ski destination has one of the highest Covid-19 infection rates in the nation.
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On Friday, March 6th, DJ Jazzy Jeff was spinning records for a packed house at Whiskey Jacques bar, in Ketchum, Idaho. The party capped a week of festivities in Ketchum and the neighboring Sun Valley for the annual Black Summit of the National Brotherhood of Skiers (N.B.S.), the largest African-American ski and snowboard association in the world. Nearly seven hundred Brotherhood members had made the journey from their homes across the United States, or in some cases from London, for their forty-seventh annual mountain meet-up. The mayor of Sun Valley welcomed the Brotherhood with pomp and ceremony, including keys to the city and a proclamation of March 6th as National Brotherhood of Skiers Day.
By the following week, upward of a hundred and twenty-six members of the Brotherhood had come down with symptoms of the coronavirus. Twenty tested positive for covid-19, and eight were hospitalized, including three in intensive-care units. On March 30th, DJ Jazzy Jeff announced that he was suffering from pneumonia and associated coronavirus symptoms. In the days since, two longtime N.B.S. members, Nathaniel Jackson, of Pasadena, and Charles Jackson, of Los Angeles, who shared a room while in Sun Valley, have died of the illness.
At least twice in March, President Trump invoked Idaho as an example of a certain kind of American place: wide open, capable, impervious to a health-care crisis. “Parts of our country are very lightly affected. Very small numbers,” Trump said, on March 24th. “You look at Nebraska, you look at Idaho, you look at Iowa, you look at many—I could name many countries that are handling it very, very well and that are not affected to the same extent, or, frankly, not even nearly to the extent of New York.” Five days later, Trump ticked off the same triumvirate of “countries.” “I said, ‘How about Nebraska? How about Idaho? How about Iowa?’ And you know what? Those people are so great—the whole Midwest,” he said, missing Idaho on the map by a thousand miles or so.
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Between Trump’s statements, however, the governor of Idaho, Brad Little, issued a statewide stay-at-home order, reflecting a reality not acknowledged in White House briefings: that what might look like blank spaces on the Johns Hopkins covid-19 global map are, in fact, hiding clusters of concentrated sickness. Blaine County, Idaho, for example, which is roughly the size of Delaware, has just three hundred and ninety-nine confirmed cases and two deaths. But, with approximately twenty-two thousand full-time residents, the county’s infection rate is now the highest in the nation—greater even than those of New York’s Westchester and Rockland counties, and possibly on par with earlier pandemic epicenters in northern Italy and Wuhan, China. And, as in Italy, the situation is exacerbated in the aging resort towns of Ketchum and Sun Valley, where the average ages of residents are forty-six and sixty, respectively, and where, on one recent April Fools’ Day, a local group of pranksters stationed walkers on the curbsides of the town’s main intersections.
Idaho’s doctors and nurses face the greatest danger. More than fifty health-care workers have tested positive in the state’s South Central Health District, about forty of whom work for the St. Luke’s hospital system in Blaine County and Twin Falls to the south. Jesse Vanderhoof, a nurse at St. Luke’s hospital, in Ketchum, was administering nasal swabs at a drive-up testing site before he became sick. As his condition deteriorated, on March 24th, his wife dropped him back at the E.R.; hours later, she received a call saying that her previously healthy, thirty-nine-year-old husband had suffered a seizure and was boarded onto a life flight bound for Boise. He was put on a ventilator for several days before regaining the strength to breathe on his own.
Brent Russell, one of two E.R. physicians at St. Luke’s in Ketchum who tested positive, battled a hundred-and-four-degree fever with shaking chills; he would awaken in the middle of the night, unable to catch his breath. Russell wrote a letter to the local Idaho Mountain Express pleading with a community that, in his view, was either unable or unwilling to adapt to the new rules of the pandemic. “People were not taking this seriously,” he told me. “I would look out the windows of my house and see groups of people talking and congregating in the street.” As his wife, son, niece, and nephew all came down with symptoms of covid-19, Russell applauded Governor Little’s abrupt stay-at-home order, a decision that caught many by surprise in a state known as a refuge for anti-government individualists. “We need a heavy hand right now,” Russell said. “We need all forces thrown at stopping this thing.”
What bothered Russell the most over the past two weeks, however, was how quickly some members of his community turned to find someone to blame. Local finger-pointing began with a March 20th article, in the Idaho Mountain Express, which alleged that a National Brotherhood of Skiers après-ski dance party at Sun Valley’s River Run Lodge on March 6th, a few hours before DJ Jazzy Jeff took the stage uptown, could have been the source of the outbreak. (I worked for several years as a reporter for the Idaho Mountain Express.) The article cited several anonymous sources who fell ill following the party and assumed that the black ski club was the source of the virus. “I would think that they would want to track this,” the paper quoted one local woman saying, of the Brotherhood.
The N.B.S. president, Henri Rivers, told me that the Mountain Express posted its story online before giving him or his organization a chance to respond. (The Mountain Express claims that it contacted multiple N.B.S. representatives for comment.) “I was livid. They implied that we tried to harm the town,” he said, noting that his nearly seven hundred skiers spent more than a million dollars during their week in central Idaho, and that dozens returned home gravely ill. A week after the story was published, the mayors of Ketchum and Sun Valley signed a joint letter condemning the allegations as “baseless and unmerited.”
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“If we’re going to point the finger at anyone, point it at me, for not closing this town down earlier,” Neil Bradshaw, the mayor of Ketchum, said. “We believe that the virus came in from Seattle, probably a couple of weeks earlier. They probably got the virus from many people here, and for that I feel terrible.”
Aski resort is, in many ways, an ideal breeding ground for an epidemic. Skiing and snowboarding may look from a distance like solitary pursuits; the helmets, goggles, and neck warmers may be assumed to function like alpine hazmat suits. But, at major resorts, stretches of brisk, wintry liberation on the slopes are interrupted by long chairlift and gondola rides, during which people sit shoulder to shoulder and knee to knee with a perpetually rotating cast of strangers. The National Brotherhood may not have brought the virus to Idaho, but it did bring the party, and, in ski towns across America and the rest of the world this winter, the two have gone hand in hand. Ski-resort areas in California, Colorado, and elsewhere “show higher infection rates than more densely populated cities nearby,” Adventure Journal noted, including Mono County, California, the home of Mammoth Mountain Ski Area, which now has the highest per-capita rate of covid-19 in the state. In Europe, several governments tracked hundreds of coronavirus cases to one Austrian ski town, with some epidemiological reports identifying beer-pong tables as a potential source of infection. In Mexico, the chairman of the Mexican Stock Exchange tested positive after returning from a ski trip to Colorado’s Vail resort.
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Debbie Bacca, a project manager at a construction company, was one of the après-ski revellers in Sun Valley’s River Run Lodge on March 6th, mingling with hundreds of skiers and boarders under giant timber beams and an Annie Leibovitz portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger, a sometime local, posing on skis in a skintight T-shirt. As Bacca and five of her friends sat down at a lodge table, one of them said, “We should wipe this down.” Awareness of the coronavirus was mounting: the next morning, neighboring Washington State confirmed a hundred and two cases and its sixteenth death. But Bacca and the others in her group never did get around to wiping down the table. Within days, five of the six were stricken. The Idaho Department of Health and Welfare considers Bacca to be the first official case of covid-19 in the county.
But she is almost certainly not Patient Zero. A week earlier, in the waning days of February, Bart Lassman, who recently retired after twenty-one years as the chief of the Wood River Fire and Rescue Department, was locking into his ski boots for an early-morning run with his usual group of ski buddies. They discussed whether to take the chairlift or risk getting stuck with a potentially infected tourist on the gondola. They chose the warmth of the gondola, figuring they could keep the cabin to themselves. But then an unfamiliar man hopped aboard. As the steel cable whisked them up Bald Mountain, they made small talk with the visitor, who had just arrived the day before from Seattle. He had a place in Sun Valley but hadn’t been back since Christmas, he said. As the gondola cleared the first ridgeline and Ketchum came into view beneath them, the man took a phone call from his office back in Seattle.
“Shut everything down. Send everybody home. We’re closing down shop,” he said, before hanging up. One of his employees had shown up that day with covid-19 symptoms, he announced to the gondola. Then he asked how the snow had been.
Sun Valley followed the lead of Vail Resorts and closed its mountains on March 15th. But, even as the lifts stopped spinning, the confirmed cases in Blaine County kept rising, and the county sent out a surreal robocall instructing residents not to panic, outsiders kept flowing in. As the pandemic curve climbs toward its unknown apex here, there is a sense among the local population that the same visitors who brought the virus in the first place are now sticking around, lying low but straining the resources, filling the hiking trails, crowding the supermarket aisles, making the takeout orders. St. Luke’s hospital in Ketchum has been sending covid-19-positive patients to affiliated facilities in Twin Falls (seventy-eight miles south) and Boise (a hundred and fifty miles west), by road and by air. A hospital spokesperson said that St. Luke’s has an adequate supply of I.C.U. beds and ventilators, but declined to say how many.
Atkinsons’ Market, the town’s central grocery store, is preparing anywhere from seventy to a hundred delivery or pickup orders a day, some for cars waiting outside, and some for large houses on the outskirts of town. In normal times, ten deliveries in a day would be a lot. Inside the store, new faces keep arriving. “When someone asks you where to find something basic, like eggs, you know they are not from here,” Sharon Pyle, Atkinsons’ specialty-food manager, said. Several restaurant workers in Ketchum told me that, in the past two weeks, about half their takeout orders were from people calling on out-of-state numbers: Washington, California, even Louisiana. “Clearly, that is not an Idaho accent,” one worker said.
Bradshaw said that he and the city staff are discouraging visitors. “There’s really no reason for people to be here,” he said, but he also admitted that there was little he could do to stop it. “If someone has a home here, we can’t stop them from going to their home.” Several locals told me that, walking around some neighborhoods, they noticed that half the parked cars are from out of state. “I just don’t understand why anyone would want to come here,” the restaurant worker said. “Why would you go to a place with a much higher infection rate?”
Tensions between big-spending outsiders and the local workforce that relies on their spending define life in any vacation town. But, in a pandemic, the calculus is changing. In the Idaho Mountain Express classifieds, one local summed up the situation in Biblical terms: “To everyone coming here to ‘ride out the storm,’ please stay in for 2 weeks before you immerse yourself in our town. Please don’t buy a 3-month supply of groceries, leaving little for the rest of us. Don’t be a plague of locusts.”
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