Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I should ring Mrs. NC into this thread and let her tell war stories. When I met her she was working for Southern Living magazine doing copy editing, typesetting and QC on books and magazines. Copy that's off by a couple of picas offends her eye. She was working on a Mergenthaler that took up most of a computer room and was kept at 68 degrees. You name the typesetting software she's probably been on it. She's been the person from the office who was sent to the Quark trainers (or whoever) to learn it and teach it to the others. She can run on PC but she's an Apple girl at heart. What a surprise.

Got a great print shop story. She's working at the UAB print shop when the university finally gets it wired for internet. We're talking about a huge old school printing operation, did everything from business cards to the gazillion forms for the university and hospital to cancer center magazines, books, you name it. She goes to her supervisor and says "Hey, we can quit sending John the courier around to deliver proofs. We can just email the files for approval." "Nah. Not how we do it. That's not what our customers expect from us."

Two years plus before they began doing that. She sat at her desk working (and occasionally stewing in her own juices), knowing how completely idiotic her direct supervisor and the print shop manager were for two years. Finally the VP over that area moved up and the new guy came in. One of the first things he noticed was the courier. "Why aren't you just emailing that stuff?"

 

goin' great!

 

bury me in my positive pants

 

If my math is right, Arkansas is hitting 15 percent positivity rates now. The Governor said months ago if we had a bad run of positive cases, he’d impose more restrictions. We’ve had three consecutive days over 1K. He shrugged off doing more than suggesting masks and social distancing. Bars are still open and full. Casinos too. Deer and duck season are coming up. Lots of people from different households (and out of state) mingling in close quarters at the lodge or cabin after the hunt.

And this ...

 

We're at peak emotional fatigue with the entire thing at the exact same time it actually reaches its worst point *and* just before we enter the time of year where we're all most susceptible.

 

ESPN doesn't even have Bama-LSU postponement on the homepage. Craven assholes.

 

We're looking at a double holiday whammy. People will be at millions of superspreader Thanksgiving gatherings, then the virus will marinate for a month and get another superspreader boost at Christmas. By Inauguration Day we could be at 250K-plus new infections per day or higher. It's scary to even think about.

 

Gotta protect the business partner. Can't admit that the mighty SEC is falling by the wayside.

 

I know people have been trained to react to the mere concept of h*** i****** with frothing at the mouth, but here's the math truth:

At the rate Americans are picking up infections, this thing will have burned itself through the entire country by inauguration day. Call it h*** i*******, call it endemic equilibrium, call it population resistance. But when you get sick, your body mounts defenses that make you less vulnerable to get sick again in the future, and we're going to have so many people sick that it won't be able to spread to pandemic levels anymore. This is not a good thing, it represents a complete and total failure.

125k per day and growing, knowing that true infections are way higher than confirmed cases because we're not doing a good job of testing and most cases are asymptomatic, the math just spits out that this can't last until Inauguration Day one way or another. It grows out of control really, really fast from here. Might we react and stop egging it on? Maybe, but there's no much time.

 

Seriously considering pulling the plug on another vacation. Supposed to leave Friday afternoon for three days at hunting camp in Michigan (deer opener on Sunday).

Local public schools shut down today effective this weekend through mid-December. No better where I'm going. Mask-wearing here is above-average but there's just not much you can do outside in this part of the world after early October unless you're willing to freeze your ass off.

Hunting camp will be all family, but three of them are 60+, one of whom is primary caregiver both for a son with muscular dystrophy and a mother in her 90s, one of whom is a responsible fundamentalist (he doesn't act irresponsibly but will probably insinuate COVID is a sign of an encroaching secular humanist one-world government). His kids are pretty normal but both are coming from major metros. And then it's me and Dad. We talked about commuting in and out of the woods (my parents' house is about 45-60 minutes from our spot), but I'm nowhere near good enough of a hunter to go for the hunting. We had our first newsroom COVID case over the weekend. Another close friend in town's family has it. Three former colleagues have had it. Two of them were married to each other. He was out for two weeks, she spent a week in the hospital and appears to be an official long-hauler. Of course there's nothing useful I can do for any of them (or the friend whose mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor this fall) other than the whole "thoughts and prayers" routine. Makes a guy feel pretty useless.

Minnesota (or at least our part of it) offers free saliva testing. I went on Sunday, was in and out in 15 minutes and had results in about 36 hours. Negative, of course, because well, I live by myself and the only time I make it out of my one-bedroom news spaceship is to shop for stuff and ineffective exercise walks that don't stand a chance against my midnight stress eating. If I stay home, there's a decent chance I don't escape town until after the snow melts, as I never take Thanksgiving off anyway, and the holidays are probably going to be even worse, and you can't really plan anything for four months here for risk that you'll be driving on the weekend we get another storm. My folks seem allergic to visiting me here in Minnesota, mostly because the Jack Russell Terrorist absolutely refuses to be kenneled (and Mom would spend the whole time criticizing my cleaning skills).

Once again, I probably should have put this in a different thread, but really that's something that is causing a lot of this. So many of the meaningful interactions in life have been lost to this that the assembled FOMO is weighing heavily against the risk. I've taken about 10 vacation days this year. Two days when I was going to watch the NCAA Tournament. Two days that turned out to be abandoning my newsroom the weekend of the George Floyd riots and a week in late September where I mostly killed time at my parents' house.

If it weren't for the loneliness and the need to destress from a major production shift followed immediately by a brutally ugly general election campaign in which we got three of the four majors on the ticket, maybe I'd be thinking clear enough to cancel by now. But we got 6" of snow tonight and this Minnesota winter is just beginning.