Masked-Up OBcean on Front Cover of the ‘San Diego Reader’

If you get a chance to pick up the Dec. 7 edition of the San Diego Reader, you’ll find OBcean Deanna Polk, all masked up giving the peace sign, on the front cover.

The paper’s frontcover article by Siobhan Braun is all about “How Covid tore San Diego friends and neighbors apart.” Polk is interviewed and spouts a lot of good common sense, but another person interviewed Amy Reichert, a co-founder of the very controversial group ReOpen San Diego, doesn’t. Polk and Reichert are diametrically opposed.

Here is the section on Deanna Polk :

POLKED

“I got into fights,” recalls Deanna Polk. “I got kicked out of stores so many times! It was mostly for telling staff and shoppers to mask up, or for demanding people stand six feet away from me. I didn’t care! This is my life! People would get mad. They would berate me and call me a sheep. They would say I had fallen for propaganda. It was sad, especially to hear those who I agreed with politically berate me. It was coming from both the right and the left. They were in total denial. It was a hard spot to be in when I had the knowledge base and people were not accepting it.”

I am sitting with Polk in her living room in Ocean Beach. On the wall behind me, a Bernie Sanders figurine sits on a tiny folding chair inside a shadow box, sporting a disposable mask and wearing his famed oversized mittens — a miniature representation of the viral Sanders photo taken during Biden’s Inauguration. Polk is wearing a patterned peasant top and white shorts. Her salt and pepper hair falls past her shoulders, traveling midway down her back.

Within the first few minutes of our meeting, Polk lists her qualifications for supporting government shutdowns and mask mandates during the pandemic. “I have a Bachelor of Science in nursing with public health certification, a minor in anthropology, and I have a Master of Science in Homeland Security with a specialization in science and technology. I was the public health coordinator for the first online public disaster drill. I was trained by the CDC during the Ebola crisis for quarantine. So, I went into the [covid] pandemic with a broader understanding than most people. I am still horrified over how it was handled — and mishandled.” She grimaces. “We have a dumbed down society, especially when it comes to public health,” she says, letting out a lengthy sigh.

Throughout the pandemic, Polk was on a mission to counter that dumbing down with education. She voiced her concerns regularly, whenever and wherever she could: on her local Nextdoor app, in Facebook posts, in confrontations with unmasked people in her neighborhood, or via countless phone calls to local leaders. Polk believed that she needed to be vocal in order to contain the virus. In the early days of the pandemic, she was horrified to discover that her local mail carrier did not wear a mask. “I opened my door and saw he did not have a mask on. [Postal carriers] are supposed to be wearing masks! I said, ‘You need to be wearing a mask.’ After that, he started harassing me every time he [delivered my mail]. I had to get the postal manager to pull him off this route because he was threatening me. He would get in my face, and he refused to wear a mask. Some of the Amazon drivers were the same. I got busy reporting these guys because they were like Typhoid Mary. They had no idea what they were doing.”

It got to the point where the country did not look to her like the one in which she had grown up. “I love being an American,” she says. “I don’t like seeing a million Americans die, especially when we had the knowledge base to prevent those deaths, and so many purposely choose to ignore it. In America, we are supposed to be about helping each other. That got twisted around during the pandemic. It became, ‘No, I need mine! I don’t give a fuck about you! I am not wearing a mask! I don’t care if your grandma dies.’” Polk exhales deeply, as if releasing pent up disappointment, before continuing, “Back in the early part of the century, we had to put quarantine signs on houses when people had measles and stuff. But now, people get offended, or don’t want to get categorized or whatever. But it worked!”