Well, that escalated quickly

Fearing the spread of the corona virus, most colleges and universities are sending students home, with plans to finish out the year though online instruction. Some students being turned out of the dorms have nowhere to go. At the University of Dayton in Ohio last night more than 1,000 students gathered to protest the shut down of campus housing, and police in riot gear lobbed pepper spray into the crowd to get them to disperse. International students across the country are wondering how they will travel home with airports shutting down. At Cornell, my daughter's alma mater, all in-person classes have been cancelled for the rest of the year, and at Ithaca College, my son's and live-in niece's alma mater, spring break has been extended for an extra week or maybe two. They're hoping to have some clarity, I suppose, by the time students are to return. 

All Broadway shows have gone dark, and the NBA cancelled the rest of its season after a Utah Jazz player tested positive for Covid-19. The orange idiot president sniffled and struggled to read the teleprompter in a national address on television, in which he said testing would be free for everyone. If you lose the lottery and come up positive for the virus, however, you're own your own with the insurance companies, as further medical treatment does not appear to be covered. Oh, and actor Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson have tested positive for the virus in Australia, where they are being monitored. We all know that if the Hanks had been stateside, they would be walking around not knowing they had the virus, as they very likely would never have been tested. 

My sister-in-law, a cardiologist, pointed out that experts are saying 70 percent of the world's population will get the virus, but for 83 percent of those people, the effect will be mild and recovery will be total. The U.S. lags behind the entire world in its ability to test people and determine the true scale of the crisis, because our leadership has not only dismantled health protections but has also failed utterly to think ahead. The cluelessness of the president’s men is ludicrous. 

My niece and her husband were supposed to fly in tomorrow night from Dallas to attend a wedding in Long Island. They planned to stay with us overnight, but now have decided to just stay in the hotel for two nights instead, so as not to expose us to possible plane contagion. "We'll probably be okay if we get sick," she told me, "but you guys are in the danger category age wise." Plus my husband has that heart-valve replacement history, and we don't know if that qualifies as an underlying condition. He seems unconcerned. He rides the subway daily and has volunteered, as the one who lives closest to his job, to go in and monitor the Ichthyology department's live fish tanks. When I told him our niece wasn't coming after all, he texted in response, "So date night is back on?" He's what you would call a resilient soul.