Thursday, September 17, 2020

The View from the Hermitage, Day 186

The local university had announced plans to test wastewater from dorms with positive results meaning that someone in the dorm had covid-19. That plan paid off pretty quickly. The wastewater from one of the first-year dorms came back positive. They put the entire dorm on lockdown and were going to test everyone last night. It sounds as if they already knew of five students who had it. Yesterday, it was taking an average of 25 hours to get results back, so I'm not expecting to see any real increase in cases today. Tomorrow, though, I expect there will be an increase. 

I no longer have a friend with children of K-12 age, so I haven't really heard how the virtual school year is going. Actually, right now it's a virtual school grading period. The school boards and superintendents are supposed to announce in early October whether the second nine-week grading period will remain all virtual or if they'll be offering a hybrid option along with the all-virtual. It's not clear to me how a teacher, especially at the elementary level, would do both at the same time. It could be, I guess, that the teacher would broadcast live what he or she is going over with the kids in the classroom.

The US Attorney General compared locking down locations to slow the spread of covid-19 to slavery. Really? Slavery? I would suggest that a prison sentence is a better comparison point. It's not as if the people experiencing the lock down are made to labor during the time. They are, however, supposed to restrict their travel outside their homes. Definitely sounds more like prison than slavery.

I know that absentee ballots with be postage-paid and have tracking numbers, but I think I'll play it safe and use the ballot drop-off box that is in front of the county office building in which the registrar's office is located. I could walk inside and hand it to one of the clerks, but that would mean contact with another person or persons. Dropping it off seems easier. Heck, I could even see if older son minded dropping it off for me.

Hurricane Sally has been downgraded at the same time that Teddy has become a major hurricane. There's also a storm in the Gulf of Mexico that has a 90 percent chance of becoming a cyclone within 48 hours. And let's not forget the storm off the coast of Africa that has a 40 percent chance of becoming a cyclone in 48 hours. I don't know who or what pissed off Mother Nature, but she's paying us back with a vengeance. I seem to remember hearing this morning that they'd named a storm Wilfred, which would mean that the next one they would name would be Alpha.

The bread is out of the oven, so it's time to go upstairs and work on getting the master bedroom and bathroom inhabitable. I'm fortified by the test slice of hot bread and ready to get to it!

1 comment:

Caroline M said...

I managed to get my bread into the freezer without eating a test roll. I opened a sack (35lb) of flour and idly wondered how many more I'll need to buy before we are through this.

The mass testing is an effective way of doing it, it's been talked about here, spit testing a school year group on a regular basis but I don't think we're doing it. I could insert a long rant about what we are actually doing or maybe it would be a short rant because I'm not sure anyone knows. Just let me add a racing stripe to my handbasket..