Don’t we all? The whole population of the planet has been denied a life, for the most part, for approximately a half-year now.
Good news for me, though, is yesterday morning (Saturday on this side of the IDL), I got notified I’m getting renewed for another year at my current school along with the standard bump in monthly salary.
Other good news is that the neighborhood police stations last week notified different churches about the procedures to re-open. On the tele-conference call for Sacrament Service, our branch president announced that news and stated it is a lenghty process and the branch and district presidencies will ensure we are all informed as this process goes on. My speculation is that we will have something similar to the campus protocols.
Panama announced today that we may now leave the house to take exercise, not just to go to the supermarket or pharmacy. However, we need to stay within one kilometer of our residence.
Unfortunately my two-hour window for leaving the house is during the heat of the day from 11 AM to 1 PM. I normally used to take my daily walk from 6 to 7 PM when things have cooled off. It’s brutal walking around at midday.
And today men got their third shopping day back. Males and females have been restricted to shopping on alternate days, but weekends have been declared a complete quarantine. Since men were allowed to go out Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, that means we lost Saturday. Today was the first time I’ve been able to leave the house on Saturday since early April.
Restricting people from getting exercise is going way too far. It’s actually counterproductive, since exercise helps you keep healthier. Fortunately, they never restricted it here in Oregon[li]. I’ve been cycling everyday the weather allows it throughout the pandemic. [/li]
[*] Oregon never closed down any factories, either, as long as they could maintain social distancing between workers. A number of tham have closed, but mainly because their orders have dried up or their supply streams have been disrupted.
It should be noted that New York updated their numbers again starting from May 11th. There were 88,507 U.S. deaths and 1218 more died, so the death count would have been 89,725. The extra 388 deaths came from NY’s update for the past 5 days.
Assuming it goes well, this makes me feel incredibly hopeful. I was supposed to be leading our Honors College’s study abroad trip to Ireland this summer (we were due to leave Wednesday). Fingers crossed that it’s only postponed for a year. And, honestly, it is so much of a psychological relief to know that I COULD leave the US if I wanted to; the thing that really made me feel despair, back in March, was all the border-closing news.
Right. I’ve been getting what exercise I can by walking around my neighborhood during my two hour shopping window on Tuesdays and Thursdays. However, I wasn’t able to do so for about a month when the quarantine first started, and found myself getting short of breathe when I started again. And while I can lose weight when I can exercise five or six times a week, when it’s just twice a week I find it almost impossible. So if I were to get the virus I’d be in worse shape for combating it than if I had been allowed to exercise like normal for the past couple of months.
I’d like to see the US try something like this. It’s already happening to a certain degree but going forward, states could effectively create zones where they could coordinate reopening plans. Simultaneously, within each of these individual states, there could be smaller zones within zones in which counties coordinate travel, public openings, gatherings, etc.
I think if there’s one possible error - and one with good intentions of course - it’s that it probably wasn’t necessary to lock down every single state to the same degree. But people need to understand that this is a fast-moving situation in which delays in judgment calls equals lives lost.
We still need testing though. A lot more, I’m afraid.
Iceland is the one that’s currently opening to tourists. Ireland, I’m figuring, should be there by next summer (along with most other countries that have the combination of a tourism-dependent economy + sufficient wealth to implement testing and tracking), as long as what Iceland is doing works out.
In Kansas City some of the drive in theaters have opened. They show old movies, charge $20 per car, require everyone to sit inside their car, and have limited concessions. All shows have been selling out. They will be showing the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” Monday night.
This is a very good result for Iceland. Iceland started with one of the highest infection rates in the world, and still has
??? the highest reported infection rate in the world (but that may now be due to perhaps the highest testing rate in the world).
But going from their very high infection rate, they’ve managed to pull it right down – which they attribute to very strong rules and very strong compliance (Iceland is so small, and infection rates were so high, that everybody knew of someone who was infected)
It certainly was unexpected by me - mid March, they looked to be in the same situation as the USA.
Having an extremely low population density, plus no major cities, makes it relatively easy to avoid crowds and other opportunities for interpersonal contact.
Vietnam is another interesting case. Vietnam was where the USS Theodore Roosevelt, with initially more than 100 sailors sick, was thought to have picked up infection. Vietnam is now reporting 320 cases total – in a population of 93 million. They were apparently in nation-wide lockdown for the first two week of April.
The reason Iceland’s case numbers look so high is that they were absolute guns for early testing and tracing. They ACTUALLY had ‘anyone who wants can get a test’, at a time when this was nearly unthinkable in most of the world. Deaths are a much more reliable indicator of how hard they really got hit - not very hard, but they know much more about it than most countries.
