The statistics are staggering.

Mr. COVID is back on the move with the Delta variant hammering us and the next generation is on the horizon.

It is deja vu all over again.

After 22 months of this pandemic, we all are fed up with the whole scene. The latest numbers tell us this fourth wave brought more cases to our state than any other time. Most of those cases occurred in folks who were not vaccinated. Our governor asked the National Guard to send troopers to help out our overflowing hospitals.

What is the solution?

Well, first our national leaders urged us to ignore the ailment. They said it was like the common cold. Then when the number of cases and deaths started piling up, they said it was just fake news. How did that work? Then they suggested we treat it with unusual potions, like bleach or the one used to treat worms in horses. That didn’t work either.

When Big Pharma came up with vaccines, they attacked the scientists and invented all kinds of reasons to avoid getting vaccinated.

When officials mandated vaccines as a condition of employment, it honked off lots of folks. Others tried other mandates and threats, but that just honked lots of other folks off and turned our attention from preventing an ailment to an attack on our individual rights.

Now, we are reading stories about leaders in the anti-COVID vaccine movement getting sick, with some losing loved ones, as hospital officials say most new cases are not vaccinated.

As the Delta variant races through our communities, we are told another variant on the horizon is even more transmissible. Swell. Hospital officials tell us this new variant is especially bad for young people. Now, hospitals and medical professionals tell us they are almost out of beds and are treating patients in the hallways.

I guess some folks will say that is fake news, too.

Don Fry RIP

Let me take a minute to pen a personal note to honor the memory of a longtime friend and newspaper mentor.

Don Fry, the nation’s top teacher of newspaper writing, an expert who helped kickstart the Boothbay Register/Wiscasset Newspaper into the 21st century, died last week.

A proud Navy veteran and a distinguished scholar of early literature, he gave up a tenured professorship to help professional writers and editors.

When A.R. Tandy asked me to be the executive editor of the Boothbay and Wiscasset papers, he said he wanted to make the paper better, so I immediately thought about Don Fry.

Years ago, Fry had worked with the staff of my big-city paper. One day, he preached that reporters should always approach a story from a different angle. The next day I wrote a story about a herd of deer running through downtown neighborhoods. An alert photographer took a photo of a cop holding a deer by the neck.

When I sat down to write the story, I thought of Fry’s suggestion and wrote the story from the deer’s point of view. It went something like: I am not a crook. I was just breakfasting in a garden when the police came roaring up and I ran….”

When I called Fry and asked for his help with the Boothbay Register and Wiscasset Newspaper, I told him he probably didn’t remember me, but I was the guy who wrote the story about the deer.

He laughed and said for years, he had used that as an example to show what he meant by approaching a story from a different angle.

He said he had a summer cabin in Edgecomb and would be glad to help. With his guidance, our staff moved from paste-up dummies and X-Acto knives to a computer operation with live websites and video capability.

Over the years, my bride and I became good friends with Don and his lovely wife, Joan. We spent many lovely evenings wandering through the local shops and enjoying the warm summer sunsets peppered with tales of newspaper successes and failures. Some of them were even true.

Don helped the editors and reporters of the Boothbay Register and Wiscasset Newspaper to be better writers, to be curious, and to try to relate to the readers, not just to be stenographers at government meetings.

When Don urged us to use large photos to celebrate our sense of place, we asked super photographer Bob Mitchell to become a regular contributor. He said local papers focusing on their communities have the best chance to survive in the internet age, and he believed our papers and those of our neighbor, The Lincoln County News, are the most local papers in the nation.

I couldn’t agree more.

RIP, old pal.