View Single Post
drewprops
Space Pirate
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Atlanta
 
2020-03-23, 01:14

On Saturday I took my 89 year old mom to visit dad's grave, which isn't far from the house.

I was pretty confident (rightly) that there wouldn't be anybody around, and I set up some camp chairs so we could sit out in the sunshine for a while. A strong breeze chased us away after about 10 minutes of that.

The thing that bothered me was what I saw along the way, namely a lot of small businesses carrying on like normal – an auto shop filled with cars and customers, a car wash doing the same. Chain stores were acting responsibly, but the smaller places are carrying on and their clientele did the same. They don't want to stay locked up.

So, that shit gonna spread, yo.

On the friend front, a young-ish woman in her 30s I know who's been posting open invites on social for her friends to swing by her house for various meals over the past several nights. She's someone I wouldn't think to be so foolish, but there you have it. Foolish as heck.

That shit gonna spread, yo.
Like a fire burning through dry tinder.

Our state hasn't really locked down.
As of tonight we have 620 cases with 25 deaths.
And the testing just got underway last week.
My county alone has 13 confirmed active cases, no deaths recorded yet.
This coming week we'll see a ton more testing and a ton more cases.

How fast will this fire burn through?
How many times will it circle around?

Reports suggest that people who have been infected might remain infectious for a period of 5 weeks, and they'll be out there spreading it.

A lot of people I know are staying calm. A few are jumpy. One went on a diatribe across social media about the Chinese, buying into the the lab-grown theory and turning things into an us versus them scenario, much to my surprise. It's always surprising to see someone break weird, down a strange side path.


Anxiety is unavoidable and not all are able to withstand it unaided, and some of them are resistant to aid – and so I am now concerned about a rise in suicides. Several incidents this weekend among friends and acquaintances have prompted me to be more alert to that.

The efforts of our government have been unavoidably politicized, in large part by the tender ego of our Commander in Chief. Like everyone, I want off-the-shelf medicines to provide us with a cinematic miracle cure, but I know that medicines must run through a gauntlet to make it to market and that miracle is highly unlikely. So unlikely that it doesn't make sense to provide people with a false sense of security because you're only encouraging all those assholes who think this thing is going to be over in a a week and that they might as well go hang at the beach now.

And so I am deeply concerned with nightly pressers that seem designed more to calm the president's followers than to inform the nation.

But there is hope as well that comes from those weird rallies, and even though Captain Ego is at the helm I want us to win our local part in this global war.

Tonight we were told that emergency hospitals have been ordered, Army Corps of Engineers have been activated, and Navy ships will one day (or one week) stage themselves to deliver additional support to the badly affected coastal population centers.

Time will tell if it's enough to accommodate everyone, but you have to have hope mixed in with all that logistical concern or you'll just go crackers.


Anyhow, that's my current perspective.



...

Steve Jobs ate my cat's watermelon.
Captain Drew on Twitter
  quote