The View from the Hermitage, Day 265

And so we begin to see the effects of Thanksgiving travel, and they are not good. Yesterday's cases figure here in Virginia was the highest yet, and not by a little unless 620 cases is a smaller than I think it is. The previous record that did not come with a downtime asterisk was  3,173; yesterday we were up to 3,793. Perhaps more troubling is that the percent positivity which is a rolling average of the last seven days is up to 10 percent. And 10 percent was the number we had to drop below before anything could be reopened. I doubt, though,that they will start to close some things down if the percent positivity continues to rise.  I expect that we shall see over 4,000 new cases one day this week, and it may be earlier in the week than we think.

Son #1 said he'd seen the minutes of some of the early White House Task Force meetings in which 240,000 was mentioned as the upper limit on the number of deaths there would be. According to the CDC COVID Tracker, we're at 277,825 deaths so far. I'm thinking we'll hit 300,000 deaths before 2021 rolls around, though I would not be surprised to see us hit that many deaths before Christmas. 

If those numbers are too depressing, ponder what it might mean that of the 249 Congressional Republicans, only 26 acknowledge that Uncle Joe legitimately won the November 3 General Election. I cannot wrap my head around those numbers. I would expect that the other 223 are not stupid; they did, after all, win elections against not-stupid people. How can that many supposedly not-stupid people be sucked into The Lame Duck's maelstrom of lies. How does one person hijack a political party that they did not start? I don't expect The Duck has dirty information (photos?) about all of those Congressional Republicans in which case they would be supporting him out of fear rather than for real.

The direction in which the country is moving scares me, and that statement has nothing to do with the novel coronavirus. I honestly think that we will conquer the coronavirus and covid-19 before we repair the divisions in our fundamental beliefs. I am lucky in that moving north to Canada is a readily available option given The Professor's dual citizenship. Do I want to move north? Not really, but then I don't want to live in a society in which there is but one true god and differences are not celebrated, nor do I want to live in a society in which the haves lord over the have-nots. I want to live in a society that recognizes the existence of the Holocaust. I want to live in a society that respects the scientific method. If we begin to drift too close to the negatives above, I guess I will be outa here then.