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!

The View from the Hermitage, Day 145

It was somewhat shocking to see that there were 2,015 new covid-19 cases in Virginia reported yesterday. That was 400 more than the previous high of 1,615 on May 26. It turned out to be a reporting error; some cases that should have been reported on Wednesday and Thursday instead all got lumped in on Friday. Of course, spreading those cases out over three days instead of one doesn't change the seven-day rolling average of 1,142 new cases. The highest rolling average to date is 1,195, meaning that counts are not going in the "right" direction. As HWSNBN put it, "It is what it is."

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has announced that it is changing its in-person/virtual hybrid model for the first semester to a virtual only one. They are encouraging students with off-campus housing to stay at home and not come back to Baltimore at all. That makes sense on one level, but I would not want to pay several months of rent for an apartment I wasn't occupying. And if you manage to get out of the lease, what if classes are back in-person in the spring semester? There are no easy answers there, I guess. The university is also refunding 10 percent of the fall tuition students have paid. Part of me says that that's not enough of a refund, but then there are other universities that are not refunding anything. I don't think the local university would refund tuition, though they might refund some amounts for room and board.

The lead editorial in yesterday's Washington Post argued that we need to strengthen mitigation measures and stop talking about "going back to school" and other reopening strategies. It ended by noting that we could conceivably hit a year from now with no vaccine and the virus still running amok. If that happened, what would we, in the summer of 2021, wish we had done in the summer of 2020. Whatever we decide that might be, why aren't we doing it now? It's an interesting thought experiment. Of course, my first thought is that if HWSNBN is reelected, we may bottom out long before the summer.

I have seen the question raised online of whether HWSNBN will announce that a vaccine is ready in October 2020. An October surprise to help him wrap up another term? A large number of people say they will not take any vaccine that is developed, meaning that we likely won't progress to herd immunity. Personally, I would not get any vaccine touted by HWSNBN. I'd want the Anthony Fauci Seal of Approval on whatever vaccine I might take. My immediate thought of a vaccine that HWSNBN might put out there was to wonder if it could be a compound of hydroxychloroquine and bleach or hydroxychloroquine and Lysol disinfectant spray. 

The possibility of challenge trials may be increasing as a time-saving alternative or companion to the typical Phase 3 trial. Older son has volunteered to be a subject in such a trial. Were he to be selected, I would be maternally proud of him as well as scared as crap. There's a certain amount of risk in any sort of clinical trials, but that risk increases significantly for challenge trials. If they help get a successful vaccine more quickly, such trials might be worthwhile. Another decision I'm glad I don't have to make.

Yesterday's excitement was a late afternoon tornado warning. We were, as usual, ignoring it. Then the wind picked up in a strange way. I can't really say how it was strange, but it did not seem to be blowing as it usually does. The husband yelled from upstairs to get to the basement storeroom, the farthest away from any glass that might shatter or walls that might be ripped apart. I grabbed the family dog; the husband grabbed the family cat, and for the first time ever, we sheltered in place until the weather alert on my phone showed the coast as being cleared. There was no tornado near us, but other parts of the county did see some. There were plenty of downed trees across roads, not that we drove out to see any.

Another weekend looms. Today is the second anniversary of the family dog's Gotcha Day. The celebration proper will be tomorrow and will include a fresh marrow bone and some new toys from Outward Hound. May a good time be had by all.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 141

As if life were not interesting enough these days, Mother Nature (that bitch!) has decided to throw a tropical storm or hurricane into the mix. Right now, we're sitting in the middle of a yellow area on the rainfall map put out by the National Hurricane Center. Yellow denotes 4 to 6 inches of rain. The rain and its partner the wind should arrive overnight tonight and could hang out all day tomorrow. Our--the husband and I--big worry is trees or large branches coming down and hitting, well, anything that should not be hit. Southern pines do not have a wide root system, meaning that if the soil gets wet enough and the wind gets strong enough, they can just fall over. There are several in positions relative to the house that set them up to do some damage. As I typed those words, the thought occurred to me that we just had the inside of the house repainted and all the hardwood floors refinished. Sounds as if the stage is set for a tree through the roof. I hope I have not just jinxed ourselves.

On the pandemic front, the White House coronavirus advisor, Dr. Birx, yesterday noted that the virus is now pretty much everywhere--urban areas, rural areas, everywhere. She also noted that she, unlike HWSNBN and the CDC, would not support schools opening for in-person instruction. How did HWSNBN take this news? Not at all well. I believe the word he used to describe her words and possibly her as a person was "pathetic." Older son saw a report that suggested one in 70 Americans had suffered from covid-19, symptomatically or not. That means we all should know one or more person(s) who have it or have had it. I know one person, and if we want to play degrees of Kevin Bacon, I'm two degrees from two other people. Of those three, two survived.

Thinking as I just was of having acquaintances who have had covid-19, I think again of the number of asymptomatic cases. How many more people do each of us know who had it and never knew they had it? Not knowing they had it, they had no way of knowing they were passing it on to other people. That is one of the things I find most frightening about this novel coronavirus. The other would be the degree of damage of unknown duration that it can do to so many different bodily systems. Lungs, heart, kidneys, brain: every day we seem to be learning of some other way in which the virus can ravage our bodies. In the moments in which I feel that I am over-reacting huddled as I am in the hermitage, I remind myself that I might be reacting differently were I to have just one of the avenues of vulnerability rather than three (four, if you want to count my age).

Possibly because of feeling somewhat inferior to others who apparently have no fear of the coronavirus, I have had a strange reaction to the televised advertising for various online universities: Southern New Hampshire, Phoenix, WGU, and the like. The ads all show people striving to achieve, dedicated, serious, aiming for a goal they have set. When one of those ads came on the other night, I told the husband that it made me feel unmotivated, as if I should be trying to achieve something. I never was one of those work colleagues with a ten-year career plan. I've fooled a lot of people into thinking I can plan or organize or lay out a way to accomplish something when I feel that I'm just winging it, being more reactive than proactive. I should probably try to utilize better the extra time to think that the pandemic isolation offers and work on some self-esteem issues.

Another topic I have found myself pondering during that thinking time was the non-personal casualties of the pandemic. It's more of a male thing, but I'm not sure shaking hands will ever return, at least not in many cultures. Then there are the pecks on each cheek that I never really understood during the year we lived in Europe. Which cheek first? Exactly what do those pecks convey? And perhaps the one I will miss the most--the hug. Holding someone tight to say without words how just much they mean to us. I don't mean the casual hug, the kind a man might do as he gives you the perfunctory male peck on one cheek. (This may be a society-type thing given that the only person who has done this to me was an upper class type who I think mistakenly thought I was as upper class as he.) A woman with whom I used to work out asked online if there were a place she could get a rapid covid-19 test or the regular test with extremely short turn-around time on the results. Her father had died, and she wanted to know that she could safely hug her mother when she got home for the funeral. That's the sort of hug I think we don't want to lose. The one that says we care.

The View from the Hermitage, Day 53

How do people stay entertained while staying at home? The husband and I have not had a problem, though since he's been working from home, he has fewer hours to fill. Monday's email brought a message from one of the neighbors (we live in a subdivision of about 17 homes, one of which just became vacant). She said that she would be hiding a bunny figure somewhere in the subdivision. Said bunny would contain small gifts of some sort. Who ever found it should email the neighbor group and announcing "Bunny found!" They should then put new small items into the bunny and re-hide it, emailing "Bunny is back!" There were various "rules," some of which seemed contradictory. Things like hiding it a certain distance from the road but not in an area that would be lawn-mowed. A person could only find the bunny once, but another member of the same family could then find it.

I was not prepared for the reaction to this attempt at subdivision entertainment. The bunny was hidden for the first time and found within an hour, by a nine-year-old girl. One the bunny's second hiding, it was again found very quickly. Both of these first two families have kids, so I was not surprised that they found some fun in it. The third finder, though, surprised me, in that the couple are almost empty nesters--kid is in college--and don't seem at all the type to play. That's at least the impression I get seeing the woman walk the family dog. She's never smiling and barely acknowledges you should you greet her. Finding the bunny, filling it, and hiding it again clearly made her feel happy, so who am I to wonder.

The husband is somewhat blase about the bunny enterprise. Older son and I are in agreement that were we to see the bunny we would not rescue it. Something that's been touched by a number of people with unknown contact experience, filled with similarly previously touched items. I just don't see the fun in that.

Should this seem to be an overreaction, there was a report yesterday that almost a third of the new cases in New York are people who were staying at home. They could not trace how these individuals were exposed. Wider transmission through the air than previously seen? From the surface of something brought in from the outside such as the glossy outside of a junk postcard? I don't want to find out first-hand period full stop. Life is scary enough right now without worrying that playing hermit might not in the long run work.

The pandemic continues and as it does, there has been a plague of locusts moving from Africa into the Middle East and South Asia. There have been a couple of earthquakes, albeit small ones. And now the Northeast and New England are about to be hit with a very unseasonable polar vortex from which some areas might see temperatures colder than at Christmas and, wait for it, 6 to 8 inches of snow. Yes, snow! In early May! I must admit that I find the thought, "Just who pissed the gods off so much that they start the end times early" amusing. No, we certainly did not need this. Now that it is all here, though, we will have to learn to deal with it to make it through to the other side. (Insert ear-worm here.)