Thursday, March 12, 2020

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.




12 comments:

  1. Seriously. And I'm being way more concerned than I probably should be. Lily and her family are planning on going to Disney on Monday and I'm tempted to tell them that I'll see them two weeks after they get back. Disney? Now? But not only am I worried about all the illness and deaths, I'm worried about the entire structure of the country. Our leaders are obviously clueless and ineffectual. Every day I realize more situations where people are being directly affected. Soon it will be every one of us. Indirectly, we already are.
    Y'all take care.

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    1. Disneyland closed out here, so I imagine it will close in Orlando, too.

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  2. Besides all the things Americans have to worry about with that guy at the head of things, there is the bald fact for every country that even though it may only be a mild illness for most, the ones who get really sick need breathing support (ventilators) and there are only so many of those to go around. In Italy they are having to choose who lives and who dies, due to lack of ventilators. And this is regular flu season in the northern hemisphere, so ventilators are already being used for those cases.

    Infectious diseases experts are now looking to "flatten the curve" rather than contain the spread; i.e., instead of having a sharp peak of critical cases, everyone - including the young and healthy - doing their best to avoid catching this thing for as long as possible, so as to spread serious cases out over a longer period and in that way have enough resources to help as many as possible.

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  3. Three of my grandkids were already home for spring break when they were told their schools would close and go to online courses for the rest of the year and that they need to come back to campus and get their stuff out of their rooms in the next two weeks. That means they have to be driven back or fly back, stash their stuff somewhere and come back home. If planes are flying.

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  4. We were supposed to be on the road and driving 700 miles south now for my nephew's wedding on Saturday. We cancelled. We're heartbroken about it, but we're not going. It's such a crazy time. Something we never considered... a global pandemic in our lifetime. It is hard to fully grasp the dangers of it and how to cope, and to have the most incompetent person in the White House trying to bluster his way through it. It's a nightmare. I hope things calm down soon for all of us. Stay healthy there and take care.

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  5. Over here in western WA we just got notice that multiple counties are shutting down their public schools for the next 6 weeks. As a substitute it's a bit of a pro/con: job loss/outta the trenches. I had no idea about the campus housing, that sounds so stressful for those kids.

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  6. Cornell is cancelling physical classes and the profs are supposed to convert the rest of the semester to on-line in the next 2 weeks before our spring break--so my husband is scrambling and me with him to figure out how. At least they're giving the students and staff this time to figure it out, but it's a royal mess. Where will all our Asian and European students go, to say nothing of the burden on the not-rich students who thought they had housing for the term. And of course with no testing we have no idea if the county actually has 0 cases or hundreds.

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  7. It is generally cold and damp and miserable up here in the dark north , I am not sure we would even know we had the virus or not. It might just be another day in the life, However, that has not stopped everything from shutting down, everyone staying in, kids out of school, shelves in grocery sparse. Loading up on sleep and vitamins just in case. That was thoughtful of your friends to stay away. Trying to control this virus with all sorts of mother's wisdom might send it packing, but I do think that testing might be better...and that is not going to happen, Thank you Mr. Orange Gas! Anyway, YOU stay well. No broadway shows for you, for the next while.

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  8. I'm imagining that both NYC and LA will be under lockdown or something within the next couple of weeks. I just hope the health care system can handle it. Stay well and tell your husband to stay home and stop riding the subway.

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  9. Edmonton is shutting down venues as well. Our hospital has staff at all entrances screening people.

    Stay healthy. Wash your hands. Avoid crowds. It will pass.

    As for tRump, maybe the world will get lucky:)

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  10. It's all so surreal, isn't it? I've stopped riding the tube here -- I can walk to work, though, so that may be easier for me than for your husband. (Not sure how far away you live....?) Anyway, work may be cancelled for us now too, for the foreseeable future. We'll learn more this weekend, I suppose.

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  11. our small town of less than 9000 is closing the public schools for a week (already been closed one week for spring break) and there is no evidence that the virus is here. not sure what the Jr. College is doing. it does seem surreal as Steve puts it because besides the news reports, most people aren't sick and don't know anybody who is sick and here we are taking all these extreme measures. but as one tweeter posted, "Here's the thing about flattening the curve, it only works if we take necessary measures before they seem necessary. And if it works, people will think we over-reacted. We have to be willing to look like we over-reacted."

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