Tonight’s an off night before the performances of ‘Opera Unveiled’ this weekend. In the opera world, because of the vocal demands on the soloists, there’s always a day off before a performance so Opera Birmingham usually has tech/dress Sunday to Wednesday, is off Thursday, and then performs Friday evening and Sunday matinee. The chorus doesn’t have a lot to do this concert (but it is nice to be back on stage singing with old friends again – the usual gang hasn’t been on stage together since Tosca in 2019 due to the Pandemic and the need to restrict the size of shows for health and budgetary reasons). Only one of our selections is difficult, the Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore (it’s the big chorus the Marx Brothers destroy in A Night at the Opera if you want context). Verdi pitched the whole thing too high for the basses and there are some very weird counts on a couple of the entrances. There’s only twenty of us singing with the entire Alabama Symphony Orchestra so it also has to be a real sing out Louise moment. The other two numbers we are singing are the Habanera from Carmen (and barking out Prend garde a toi over and over isn’t especially taxing) and the Brindisi Libiamo from La Traviata which is an old chestnut and at least in a key that basses can sing relatively easily. If you’re not doing anything tomorrow evening or Sunday afternoon, come on over to DJD Theater at ASFA – tickets available at the door. The soloists are spectacular.
Rehearsals are beginning for my next theater project, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, this weekend. I’ll have much more to say on that later as it starts to take shape. I saw the Broadway production back in the day. I don’t think the stage show is the greatest thing ever written, but it’s fun and has a stellar cast, some of whom I haven’t worked with in years and am looking forward to getting reacquainted with and some of whom I’ve been in shows with off and on for decades. Virginia Samford Theatre has upped its game this past season and I’m happy to be a small part of that.
I’ve been reading through various health news stories over the last few days and a couple of them have caught my eye. The first came out Monday when the Biden administration finalized new rules for nursing homes regarding minimum staffing. Skilled nursing facilities are supposed to offer 24/7 safety and monitoring for people unable to care for themselves due to various medical conditions and disabilities. Since the Reagan years, they’ve operated under a Reagan era nebulous rule that states that they need to have ‘sufficient staffing’ to offer care without really defining what that means. As of Monday, we now know that this is defined as a minimum of 3.48 hours of direct care per resident from nursing staff (lower than the 4.15 hours suggested by a Medicare report of a few years back).
The trouble is that more than 80% of the nursing homes in the country won’t be able to meet this metric and a lot are way behind it. (I think the average these days is something like 2.1-2.4 hours of direct care per resident). The rules are giving the industry years to catch up (and hire the hundred thousand or so new employees that would be needed to meet these numbers) but the industry lobbying groups are already on the warpath about unfunded mandates and are beginning the assault on congress and public opinion to get these changed.
The pandemic has changed everything about the long term industry. The workforce which provided a steady stream of employees was decimated by a combination of retirements, people moving up into better paying vacated positions, women leaving the workforce for family needs such as child and elder care, and some employees figured out new ways of economic existence that didn’t require back breaking work at just above minimum wage. With the collapse of the workforce, the owners of skilled nursing facilities have been forced to raise wages to attract and retain anyone and salaries are up about 30% since 2020. This is putting a dint in profits (the majority of homes being owned by for profit chains that are often under the control of hedge funds and the like) and requiring even more employees to provide minimal levels of care is going to greatly exacerbate the red ink on the quarterly balance sheets.
Where this is all going to end up, I do not know. But it’s happening at a time when the lead edge of the Baby Boom will hit the age of eighty in eighteen months or so. The chance of needing long term care starts to rise exponentially at that point in the life cycle and many Boomers, especially the women, have fairly weak social safety nets which would allow them to remain at home. The combination of widowhood and divorce means that about half of women over 75 live alone and they have far fewer children to take them in or support them than previous generations. And their children are far more likely to reside at a distance. It’s all headed for a perfect storm (which is one of the myriad reasons I plan on retiring in a couple years. It’s not going to be pretty).
The other story I’m following is that of the H5N1 avian flu. It’s not yet of significant concern but, if it were ever to leap into humans, it could cause major havoc as it has a very high mortality rate. There has only been one human case in Texas in the current outbreak which has spread from birds to dairy cattle in that state but in the 865 cases reported world wide over the last twenty years, the mortality rate was 53%. There doesn’t appear to be much danger of human to human transmission currently and bird to human or cow to human requires significant contact so unless you’re involved in commercial farming, I wouldn’t worry. But there’s always that slim chance. Like when a flu virus jumped into a pig farm in the midwest in March 1918, spreading to military barracks and promptly being shipped off to World War I causing what became known as the Spanish flu. (It was called the Spanish flu because Spain, not being involved in World War I, was reporting accurate casualty totals – most of the rest of the developed world was hiding the true caseloads for purposes of morale and war planning so it looked like Spain was an outlier and the source to the general populace when it had nothing to do with it).
What worries me is the politicization of public health and the gutting of statues by red states in the wake of the pandemic. Should it make the leap to human / human transmission in Texas, I don’t believe for a minute that a political system controlled by the likes of Greg Abbot and Ken Paxton will deal forthrightly with the problem and will almost certainly not allow public health officials to do what would need to be done to stop the spread. And a H5N1 pandemic could possibly bring down our civilization given that it’s about 1000x deadlier than the usual influenza A and B that circulate. But I’m not going to invite trouble. I’m going to think happy thoughts. Or at the very least find something mindless to watch on TV before bed.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 