The View from the Hermitage, Day 45

I used Zoom last night to chat with a friend I haven't seen in too long. Zoom wasn't too bad, but then I was speaking with just one other person. The husband's department had a faculty meeting this morning using Zoom. That's harder for me to imagine. In Zoom's favor, it was actually very easy to install unlike Skype which I never did get completely installed right before the start of the pandemic.

He Who Shall Not Be Named doesn't want to be unable to get his Big Macs, so meat processing plants have been deemed essential and must be kept open. Never mind that the workers while not dropping like flies are less than safe from the virus there. And now that the plants must be reopened or kept open, employees who choose not to go to work for their own safety will not be able to draw unemployment. Like too many other people right now, they are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I've read reports that polls show most Americans would rather things stay unopened than reopen so quickly. Still, cellphone location data compiled by the Maryland group investigating quarantine fatigue show that last Friday marked the second in a row that people stayed home less than usual. On Friday, April 24, 29 percent of Americans stayed within a mile of their home; on April 6, 35 percent did. Officials in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia say that while the rates of increase have slowed, there has been no downward trend in new cases or hospitalization rates. I haven't seen odds offered on what the numbers or rates will be like in reopening states in a week and a half, when the magic two weeks since reopening mark is reached. Could be interesting.

My alma mater, Radford University (it was Radford College when I attended) in Southwest Virginia has announced that it will reopen August 3, with in-person classes beginning August 24. I wonder if that will put pressure on the other state universities to follow suit. Virginia Commonwealth University would like to go with in-person classes in the fall if you believe their reaction to the Radford news. Virginia Tech is supposed to announce its decision by mid-May. I think that's about the time UVA will announce its plans, too.

The UVA Health System will start furloughing employees; they're losing $3 million each day. I told the husband that if I hadn't started to retire a year ago, I'd likely be laid off this summer. In a previous budget crunch, the university put all non-student wage positions on hold. I spent a short time--several weeks, I think--not putting in any hours. Of course, when things got better and I went back to work, I basically worked longer to catch up on the time missed, so they saved no money on my position.

The whole tenor of the pandemic has changed from health issues to economic ones. The headlines are not about the number of new cases or deaths or recoveries. They are about unemployment or the costs of reopening. The health numbers are now cited in terms of economics. How must the numbers change to make reopening the economy as safe as possible. Feature articles in print media are as likely to concern unemployed workers as they are to concern first responders or health workers. I wonder how much a decreasing emphasis on the health side contributes to the protests to ease mitigation measures and reopen businesses. I would think that daily reminders of just how many people are dying from covid-19 would make someone think twice about protesting the quarantine and social distancing factors, especially if the protest involved being shoulder-to-shoulder in a large crowd. But hey, that's just me.