Greg Jefferson: Learning that what happens in Las Vegas doesn’t always stay there

COVID has upended home life but it’s manageable. The grungy laundry is piling up and we haven’t done much better with the rest of the housework. And while the dogs are as needy as they were before, they seem more demanding. At work, I’m fortunate to have a deputy business editor who’s taken on a lot of my load this week and that I’ve been working from home since the start of the pandemic. So the disruption has been minimal. Workers in an office, store, factory or warehouse — they’re in a bad way if they get infected, especially if they’re out of sick days. Looking over the call log on my phone, I see more than a dozen calls to and from our three adult daughters in the first couple of days of our illness. We exchanged many more group text messages as we overhauled holiday plans — deciding what to do with the daughter flying home Christmas Eve, how to safely hand off gifts, etc.

The sprawling, never-quite-concluded conversation was also about culpability. The offspring wanted to know: After nearly two years of guarding against the virus, how exactly had we let it into our household? The most likely explanation didn’t reflect well on us. We’d traveled to Las Vegas the week before to watch our youngest daughter (she’s 27, a school social worker) win the silver medal at the U.S. Sumo Federation championship, women’s lightweight division. Normal life stuff. We feasted on Vegas for four days. The Strip’s sidewalks were teeming with people despite the cold temperatures and slashing winds. Many of them were bare-faced and close at hand. At least the casinos were scrupulous about enforcing mask requirements. Looking back, the only encounter we had that wasn’t a COVID-transmission suspect was the eerie Whitney Houston hologram we watched perform at Harrah’s. Everything about Las Vegas Boulevard is thought-out. It’s a perfect system whose sole objective is to keep you focused on satisfying the basics: greed, gluttony and lust. Which is why you’re as unlikely to see Las Vegas cops on patrol there as you are to find a newspaper. True, New York Times and Washington Post headlines occasionally popped up on my phone screen to tell me about omicron’s supercharged spread. But I wasn’t, you know, paying much attention.