The View from the Hermitage, Day 34

My mother reads this blog (hi, Mom!) and has expressed concern over my mood the last couple of days. She reminds me that whereas I will one day sooner or later go back out into the world, she will never be able to leave her room in an assisted living facility. Talk about being humbled.

Virginia got called out by He Who Shall Not Be Named twice, I think, in one tweet. We supposedly need to be "liberated." We also are endangering the second amendment. As far as the liberation goes, yes, the Virginia stay-at-home "order" extends further than in any other state, until June 10. We also have the only physician-governor, a fact for which I am extremely grateful. It is not clear from the various models just when covid-19 will peak here; one model suggested August. Needless to say, there was an outcry, or at least a letter to the editor, about the possibility that we would still be staying at home then. I am sorely tempted to stay at home until there is a vaccine even though that may be into the next year. Of my usual activities, the only ones that would tempt me to leave the hermitage are to visit my mother when she is allowed to have visitors and to visit my trainer. It is not clear when either of those might be possible. While I could maintain a social distance while meeting with my mother, it would be hard for Josh to spot for me on weights from a social distance.

As for the second amendment, I applaud both the governor and our state legislature. I am not up on current events well enough to be able to list all the new rules and regulations related to firearms, but I can report on my personal favorite. No longer will a person be able to buy more than one handgun per month. I kid you not. For the last several years, a person in Virginia could legally buy a new handgun every day, or weekly throughout the year. Who really needs to have that many handguns? You don't exactly hand them out as party favors or present them as hostess gifts. It's not likely you'll be shooting two at once, one in each hand. One handgun per month actually seems like too many to me, but then no one polled me on that issue before the law was changed.

Returning to the possible liberation of Virginia, those who think we need to drop staying at home or social distancing should pay consider this:

Too many people do not seem to understand this. Would it be helpful to require students to take a basic statistics class in order to graduate from high school? There seems to be a lot about the novel coronavirus (I have added "novel" since that is frequently used in the print media) and its rate of transmission that people do not seem to understand. Is that due to the fact that, as my brother-in-law has reminded me on more than one occasion, the average person has an IQ of 100? Of course, a person does not need to understand the left side of the above equality if he or she understands the right side. We're in a somewhat perilous situation here. Reinstating social distancing and staying at home is going to be exponentially more difficult than setting them in place the first time was.

Realistically, what will happen will happen. My opinion matters not to the virus deity(ies). For now, I am trusting our physician-governor to base his decisions on science and not the tweets of He Who Shall Not Be Named.