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We’re all too aware of the way COVID-19 has changed our lives in ways that are both annoying and tragic.
Thousands of St. Mary people have been thrown out of work, and the parish wasn’t exactly flush before the pandemic.
Stores have closed. Curfews and limits on store hours, since lifted, were imposed.
Schools closed. Seniors are wondering when they’ll be recognized as high school graduates.
Tests have turned up 205 St Mary people who have been infected with COVID-19.
Twenty-five of them have died.
That’s what’s happening now, and it’s changing as the state and local governments move to reopen the economy gradually.
But what will the world be like in the fall, or the winter, or this time in 2021?
Some changes we may see:
—The disease itself. With no special knowledge of science or medicine, I’m wondering why the Louisiana daily death count remains so high while the spread of the disease, as measured by daily case counts, has been declining for weeks now. Could it be that COVID-19 will turn out to be less common but more lethal in the future?
—Where we work. It’s possible that boss types out there are thinking, “You know, if our nonessential people could work at home all the time, we could get by with a smaller building, less for utilities, less office furniture …”
Or it may be that your boss can’t wait to get you back in the office to make sure you’re not playing Angry Birds all day.
We’ll have to see how productive we’re judged to be during the stay at home time.
—Fracking. By some accounts, at least, the energy industry was already beginning to wonder before the pandemic whether the fracking-fueled oil boom that started about 2010 was really a good idea. It certainly didn’t do people any good in St. Mary, where the energy work we depend on happens offshore.
Now, a combination of a Saudi-Russian price war and depressed demand because of the pandemic has pushed the price of U.S.-benchmark crude below $20 a barrel.
Before COVID-19, the industry was beginning to ask whether it was really making money when oil was $45 or $50 a barrel.
Maybe, in the long run, offshore exploration and production will become more attractive. But not at $16 a barrel.
If there’s an industry watching energy prices even closer than the energy industry is, it’s Louisiana’s petrochemical industry.
A lot of that industry is tied up in making the feedstock from which plastics are made. A wise and kindly chemical flack once explained that Americans make plastic out of ethylene, which comes from natural gas. The Old World uses naphtha as its feedstock. Naphtha comes from oil.
The magic number, explained Mr. Flack, is seven. If the price of oil is at least seven times the price of natural gas, then U.S. ethylene is the better buy.
On Tuesday, contracts for West Texas intermediate crude futures were going for $15.88 per barrel on the NYMEX. Natural gas was going for $1.87.
So the market is still leaning toward U.S. feedstock.
—Health care. The system by which care is delivered is in for some changes, one way or another.
Maybe it will turn to more reliance on the free market. Maybe it’ll go totally Medicare.
Maybe we’ll work out something in between, like Switzerland’s system of heavily regulated insurers being required to offer affordable basic coverage to everyone.
But a system in which 20 million to 30 million people remain uninsured, and in which a majority gets its coverage from jobs that aren’t as secure as they seemed three months ago, is looking like a loser.
The federal deficit was pushing $1 trillion before Uncle Sam started passing out $1,200 checks and paying businesses to keep employees on their payrolls. Picking up the tab for treating the uninsured looks like another huge burden.
Who was that
masked man?
After being told not to wear surgical-type masks in public, we’re now being told to wear masks. To judge by the way people snapped up the masks at giveaways in Morgan City, Patterson, Berwick, Amelia and Bayou Vista, we’re ready to do our part.
But did you know that it can be illegal to wear masks in Louisiana?
That became clear at a trial I covered in 1996.
A Lafayette cable access show called “The Klan in Akadiana” had been causing all kinds of trouble, but no one could get it shut down.
One week, the show had a guest who wore a mask because, it turned out later, he was a local fire department officer.
The NAACP swooped in and filed a complaint under the anti-mask law.
The show survived the trial but finally ended when the media revealed that the host had shared an apartment with an African American woman while he was doing the show.
Don’t worry about getting arrested for wearing the mask you’re supposed to wear.
The law applies only to masks worn to conceal the wearer’s identity.
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.

Submitted Photo
On Wednesday, Pelican Companies of America LLC, Vida Paint and TK Companies LLC donated jambalaya, cookies and drinks to all Ochsner St. Mary employees to show their appreciation for all they do for the community.

Tempie Parker, 94, a native of Verdunville and resident of Patterson, died Saturday, May 2, 2020, at Patterson Healthcare.
Jones Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements, which are incomplete at this time.

BATON ROUGE — Three blue states–Washington, Oregon and Colorado — conduct all of their elections through mail-in votes, and four red states — Wyoming, Montana, Utah and Alaska — are joining them this year in conducting their presidential primaries entirely through mail ballots.
Since the COVID-19 outbreak began, 28 other states have announced plans to increase access to absentee ballots or take other actions to keep voters from lining up at polling places.
Yet in deciding on Tuesday to delay Louisiana’s presidential primary to July 11, the Legislature insisted that state election officials scale back plans to rely less on in-person voting and more on mail voting to reduce the health risks.
Republican legislators expressed concern that more mail-in ballots could increase the potential for voter fraud. But national election experts say there have been few instances of fraud as other states have expanded voting by mail. And even once the risks from the virus ease, they say, Louisiana could increase voter turnout if it made greater use of alternative voting methods.
Voter turnout in governor’s races in Louisiana declined steadily for several decades, from 54% in 1979 to 31% in 2011 before rebounding to 51% last fall, according to the Louisiana Secretary of State’s office. Turnout in presidential elections in Louisiana has stayed higher, at 55% to 60% of eligible voters, though voting-rights advocates fear it could slip this year if voters do not feel safe.
Voting by mail is “something we’ve thought was important for a while now, but with the current state of the world, we now believe it is not only important, but essential to the democratic process,” Catherine McKinney, the director of the Louisiana Vote-by-Mail initiative, said.
“Now it is not only easier but imperative to keeping our poll workers and our voters safe from a global pandemic,” she said.
Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, a Republican, and Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, had agreed on an emergency election plan that would have made mail-in absentee ballots available in the presidential primary to anyone affected by the coronavirus or who did not want to vote in person for fear of catching it.
Sen. Barry Milligan, R-Shreveport, helped shoot down that plan at a hearing on April 15, saying it was “extremely broad and basically covers everyone in Louisiana.”
“There is not an election cycle that goes through that we wake up to the news that votes are found in somebody’s garage or somebody’s truck,” Milligan said.
Milligan’s comments echoed concerns expressed by President Donald Trump, who claimed recently that “mail ballots are a very dangerous thing for this country, because they’re cheaters.”
He also maintained that if vote-by-mail were expanded, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Numerous studies show, however, that mail-ballot fraud is very rare. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan institute in New York, none of the states that hold their elections by mail have had any voter fraud scandals. In fact, the most significant recent instance of voter fraud was committed by a Republican operative in North Carolina, who illegally collected and filled in absentee ballots.
Under a compromise approved by the Legislature, Louisiana residents who are already allowed to mail in absentee ballots, such as those age 65 and older, will be able to vote by mail in the presidential primary and in state elections in August. Because of the threat from the virus, people with serious medical conditions or those who are quarantined or taking care of someone quarantined also will be able to mail ballots.
But lawmakers blocked other proposals by Ardoin to temporarily allow voting by mail for people between ages 60 and 65 or those caring for a child whose school was closed. They also rejected his plan to extend early voting in person to 13 days from seven. No changes have been considered for the presidential election in November.
Colorado, Oregon and Washington were voting entirely by mail long before the COVID-19 outbreak.
Colorado implemented mail-in ballots in 2013. Its voter turnout rate was 51.7%. in 2010, but in its 2018 gubernatorial election, nearly 62% of eligible voters mailed in ballots.
Voter turnout in Washington is typically around 70% of registered voters with all-mail voting. At least 60% of people in Washington chose the option to vote by mail before the state switched to sending mail-in ballots to all registered voters.
Even though it was at the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, Washington had a 50% turnout rate for its presidential primary in March, thanks to its focus on mail voting. Louisiana’s voter turnout in the 2016 presidential primary was only 28% of registered voters.
Before the pandemic, Louisiana was one of only 16 states that required voters to submit a valid excuse to obtain an absentee. In the 2016 general election, only 1.8% of Louisiana’s registered voters cast absentee ballots.
Ardoin and legislators from both parties say they want to avoid a situation like Wisconsin just went through in its presidential primary on April 7.
Republican leaders there rejected proposals to loosen restrictions on voting because of the virus, and they were backed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Long lines ensued, and 52 Wisconsin voters and poll workers have since been diagnosed with COVID-19, though it is unclear where their exposures occurred.
Given the health risks, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo canceled the state’s Democratic primary altogether. Ohio, a key swing state, was one of the first states to move forward with a last-minute plan to vote by mail. Results of that change were mixed in its primary on Tuesday, with many citizens failing to receive an absentee ballot in time to cast their vote.
Besides vote-by-mail, some states have implemented other alternative voting methods — either before the COVID-19 outbreak or since — to make voting more accessible and increase turnout.
These include same-day registration, in which people can register online or at the polls on election days, and holidays from work for voting. Georgia and Colorado, both states with average turnout rates over 50%, have holidays on election days, while Louisiana does not.
Early, in-person voting has expanded in Louisiana, with 33% of those who cast ballots in the 2019 gubernatorial election voting early.
But “if you want to vote early, you have to go to a central location,” said Dr. Brian Brox, a Tulane University professor specializing in. Other states have implemented early voting that actually incorporates satellite early voting, where they basically have more places in the county, rather than having to go to the courthouse.”
Brox contends that lawmakers in Louisiana have not been interested in removing more of the barriers because the voters who manage to overcome them are the ones who put them in office.
“There needs to be a way to kind of get around the gatekeepers, who are basically the legislators,” he said.
Lawmakers, of course, disagree. “I’m not going to spend the thousand hours of effort to come up with good solutions to these problems,” Rep. Barry Ivey, R-Central, said in an interview on this subject last year. “I do not feel that as a state our voting opportunities in the aggregate are subpar. I believe we’re probably above average in that category.”
But in the congressional election in November 2018, Louisiana ranked 45 out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in the percentage of voters who turned out, according to data compiled by Dr. Michael McDonald at the University of Florida.
Republican strategists fear that expanding the use of mail ballots would increase voter turnout among poorer people who would not vote for them. But greater use of mail ballots also could help Republicans, especially if Louisiana gets a second wave of COVID-19 in the fall and older voters are reluctant to go to the polls.
If the virus ramps up again then, McKinney said, “Under no circumstances should the state of Louisiana put our poll workers or our voters in harm’s way when such a simple solution is available like vote-by-mail.”