It's getting a bit frustrating in Maryland. Everything was headed in the right direction but we seem to have stalled. The 7 day positive rate has settled into fluctuating around 4.5% and hospitalizations have flattened out at around 400 after declining steadily for 2 months. I'm not sure why we can't stamp down the last little bit after doing well for so long.
Probably people from other states coming in.
We're at the phase where we buy plants. I'm thinking of getting a ficus and something called a snake plant.
Probably people from other states coming in.
Damn Texans.
D.C. proximity plus barely adequate beaches.
And here I was thinking it was probably our fault in Virginia. Because after being nicely stalled for a while, cases and hospitalizations are now going up again, mostly in places that didn't get hit badly the first time. And that can't be good for our neighbors either.
I had a colleague who contacted me who was saying she's increasingly worried about the fall. "It's one thing when I'm just around [SadTown]," she said, "But in the fall, I could have a student over here from New York, another from California...who knows!"
She's generally right-thinking, but a little elderly. I did point out to her how the NY and Cali students have more to fear from us than we have from them.
MA seems statistically.... OK, though maybe not improving. A lot of people are worried about the number calculated by rt.live going above 1.0, but I do not have much faith in that calculation.
The city is running a day camp thing at a local stadium - fully outdoors, some large tents to do a few things in the shade, everyone (including kids) 100% masked and trying to remain distant. We put our son into it, though there is a sense that it feels like cheating and/or losing to have done so. But it may be the only chance for outdoor/physical activity for a long time.
A downside of being all outdoors is that they shut down when there is any rain, like yesterday, or just now. Of course, by the time they notice the weather and can get the word out to us to come get the kid, the rain has passed, but the decision's already been made.
Still haven't been inside a store. I am now wondering about what will convince me that it's OK to do so. I didn't stop going into stores because of a sophisticated analysis of risks and metrics, so one of those probably isn't going to make me start, either.
(And that's not even thinking about schools.)
Just back from a family get-together in a remote-ish location (no cell signal unless you go up on a bluff and wait until the wind is in the right quarter). One relative drove 10 hours to join us because flying is so problematic. Wore masks, stayed apart, had fun.
If my mom's nursing home opens, I'm driving fifteen hours to visit.
I'll probably stop along the way and camp/sleep in the car.
We're driving 30 hours to Montana next week. But that has nothing to do with Covid.
We drove 22 hours over the weekend from Gainesville, FL, to the in-laws' in St Paul. Stayed in isolated AirBnBs in Tennessee and Illinois because the 4-year-old can take only so much car time and it's awfully hot to camp. We brought a folding toilet but never actually pulled the trigger on using it. Plenty of woods to pee in, turns out.
Legally, all of Iowa is a public restroom.
I mean, all of it that is outdoors.
It's odd to share this in an online forum where I've posted only a handful of times in the last fifteen years and don't really know anyone, but this post is explicitly for imaginary friends, so why not?
So, my 73-year-old father was just diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Prognosis is unclear but he's going to proceed with surgery, probably next week. He's in Chicago and I'm a couple thousand miles away on the west coast. So I have to figure out whether to travel there; if I do travel there, whether to fly or to drive (presumably straight through if I drive); whether to bring my two kids (9 and 12 years old) or not, and how that affects the choice of flying vs driving; whether I'd need to quarantine when I arrive, and/or when I return; how that quarantine decision affects bringing the kids or not; and at what COVID risk I'd potentially be placing myself, my kids, my parents in Chicago, and my family at home on the west coast.
And pretty much, when I try to combine all those factors and come to a decision on a path forward, my brain breaks. Too many different variables, with the health and emotional stakes extremely high.
So yeah, that's how my week is going. If anyone has insight, I'll take it, but mostly I'm just sharing. (Or if anyone has easy answers, I'm all ears!)
Oh ft, I'm so sorry. I would say definitely go but don't take your kids unless they want to go. Ask them and if they really want to go then you absolutely must take them (personal painful and traumatic experience of wanting to say goodbye to my grandfather at 15 when he was dying of cancer because my father thought it was more important to go to school, that day I was offered and took 4 hits of mescaline, the day he died. I still carry it 4 decades later.)
18: Sorry to hear about your dad, ft. The unavailability of quick testing makes gaming out travel so much harder. We three, all without symptoms, got tested last Thursday and felt lucky for being able to do so. The idea was that, with 3 days isolation in the car, we'd arrive in MN and be able to enter the local family bubble here pretty quickly. The boy came back negative yesterday, but my wife and I are still waiting, wearing masks around her parents and generally walking on eggshells. Except that we don't mask around the boy and he's now frolicking maskless with his grandparents. Gah.
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NMM to Bari Weiss's awful column in the NYT. She flounced. Oh happy day!
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I usually feel like I'm up-to-date on politics and the internet, but I'd never actually heard of Bari Weiss. People seem real excited about it though.
18: I'm very sorry to hear that. I don't have any insight, except that with so many unknowns, it's good to remember not to be hard on yourself trying to a perfect solution.
People who read the New York Times apparently know who she is and have been complaining about her for ages. Me, I sprung for the WaPo paywall instead of the Times, so I'm vaguely aware that she's terrible, but I am unclear as to why.
18 just sucks. What a shitty situation.
Yes, 18 is miserable. It's just so rotten right now that there's no actual rules and guidelines so the decisions are all forced on individuals. That kind of decision fatigue sucks when it's minor decisions, but is really cruel when it's for major decisions like yours.
24: I also subscribe to WaPo instead of NYTimes, but also *I never read the op-eds*. They're like the YouTube comments of newspapers, why would you read them?
Oh ft, I'm so sorry. What a super shitty compounding of an awful situation.
Lot of new cases in Lake County, Montana, which has now overtaken Missoula County in the number of active cases. Lake's population is less than a third of Missoula's. Much of Lake is within the CSKT Nation, but only 22% or so of the population of the county is Native.
She was a prime example of my categories 2 & 6 from the cancel-culture thread. Despite having made her entire career by being a college pro-Israel activist who tried to get pro-Palestinian professors fired, one of her main hobbyhorses is how campus woke culture is the greatest extant threat to free speech (#6, recycled anti-political-correctness); in practice, a lot of what's going on is her not being very happy about how much of the internet sees her as, not just a holder of wrong beliefs, but worse, a boring and mediocre expounded of those beliefs (#2).
Still doing fine here, although the local case counts just keep going up. We'll see what happens.
Oh god Andrew Sullivan just announced he's leaving his job and will have an exciting announcement on Friday. How many shitty writers convinced of their own superiority are going to be getting together to scold the world about how They Will Not Be Canceled?
With any luck they'll all come together to start their own unreadable and unprofitable media outlet that everyone else can ignore until it inevitably fails.
18: Sorry, freight train. Good luck. If one bit of data helps, we traveled from DC to California and back within the past month. The airline advertised direct flights but a few days before our flight out, changed both of them to flights with connections. (At first they changed one flight to a connecting flight with a four-hour layover. It took a phone call to get that down to 90 minutes.) On the phone the customer service person said they were doing that for basically all flights because there wasn't enough demand for the direct flights. Alaska Airlines, FWIW. So don't plan on a direct flight just because they advertise them and don't expect flights to be less than half full.
33: If there's a pool, I'll take six.
Add Ben Shapiro to the list, announced he's leaving as EIC of whatever shit organization put him in charge. This is like a fantasy football league in the ninth circle of hell.
Can I change my answer to '3' then?
Are they all going to join the Lincoln Project?
I guess they'd argue the sixth circle since they're self-described heretics.
39: Nah, probably going to set up a rival pro-Trump effort named after Jefferson Davis.
Still alive and well in Fresno. Much refreshed after last week's days off and Yosemite hike. I'll look into taking another day or two off next month; it's been good to get out into nature.
18: FT, that's a terrible position to be in. I'd be sure to talk with the hospital; if they're not going to allow you inside, so you're forced to call in all your comfort, it might tip the balance of the decision. (Similarly, if with the worst outcome they won't let you attend a funeral.)
We're driving 30 hours to Montana next week
We were up there all last week. Anaconda in particular is not a mask wearing town.
You have to put buns on the mask.
Apparently the local free testing clinic is using cheek swabs instead of nasal swabs. Is this a real thing, or did the town drunk make it yp?
18: So sorry to hear. Get on a plane yourself. I assume the plan is for your father to be hospitalized for a few days, then return home, so time your visit for expected discharge (I think most hospitals in Chicago are fine with visitors at the moment, but that may change). I assume you're mostly at home, not at work every day? Your absolute risk is pretty small. Bring hand sanitizer and use it like Howard Hughes. Wear a mask. No food or drink. You'll probably get more details about prognosis after surgery, so you can decide whether to make a second trip with the kids (which I'd do by car if I were you but if you get a whole row on the plane, that's probably not too awful, honestly if your only concern is contagion and not, like, having to rent a car). For your father, being at the hospital is probably the highest risk, since he'll have contact with so many people. Having you visit is not zero risk, but pretty low. You can figure out Round 2 with kids later.
Just got a pretty nice view of NEOWISE on the NNW horizon even though we are not all that dark and there were some very thin clouds. Recommend taking a look if you have any chance of that viewing angle working for you.
Just talked to my Kiwi friends who are in their 2nd or 3rd day of quarantine in a hotel in Auckland after flying there from LA (and having driven Houston to LA). I had not really thought about it but there over a 100 folks form their plane in the hotel with them (and I have no idea what the arrival rate of the planes are). They get a daily menu similar to what you would get in a hospital. Can walk in the parking lot of the hotel. Two week stay, just got tested today and will again at the end. No charge apparently.
My son is getting married early next month. Originally scheduled for Hudson River valley where they now live. First scaled back to immediate familty only, and then to immediate family only and will take place in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina where the bride's family lives (she has some medically-vulnerable family members). We have a cabin booked on the parkway for a long weekend but I cannot excape the fear that we will bring it with us from the nascent hot spot of Western PA. We plan to pretty well isolate for the 2 weeks before but there are various complicating factors that are too tedious to inflict on the commentariat.
The bride's family probably gets the most congratulations because they got to be saving a ton.
freight train - I would not take the children unless they are close/fond of their grandfather - this will be very stressful for you and my experience with kids that age is that you wouldn't get a lot of emotional support from them and unless they are very mature, will not understand how devastating this is.
I took care of my grandmother when she was dying, and for some reason several of my uncles decided this would be a good time for the grandchildren to visit WITHOUT THEM and it was a disaster - my younger cousins wanted to party all night long while Grandma was in pain.
But you know your children and what they can handle. They probably understand that this is a difficult time for you.
Both quarantining in the Blue Ridge mountains and in a NZ hotel with menu service sound pretty good, tbh.
Is it bad to ask coworkers in more enlightened states to mail you some edibles? Like all at once on a Zoom meeting?
Thanks everyone, all the thoughts and advice are much appreciated.
54: Most of our quarantinig will be here in P'burgh. But yes my friends are delighted to be where they are (and not Houston).
I'm sure it was voluntary in Anaconda when you were there. Not any more.
My sister is getting married in NoVa in September. She is planning a wedding with no concessions made to the fact that there's a pandemic. There will be a long church service, and no masks unless the health department mandates them and "they probably won't check so we can do what we want." The guest list is not capped at 20 because 'who knows what will happen by then.' The reception is an indoor buffet. She wants me and spouse the kids there; we decided 'no' on flying the kids across the country during a pandemic and this caused a huge amount of family drama with me as the bad guy. I'm also really not happy about the timing given that the wedding is about a month after classes resume here and I'm seriously worried about the possibility of taking out half my family by being an asymptomatic spreader. Right now I have a three-day stay booked.
How the hell do I manage this? Mask on the plane and in public. Direct flight. COVID test before I go? Online classes for a week when I get back?
Many of life's problems can be solved by pretending to get bad diarrhea immediately before you're supposed to leave for the airport.
Evidently family gatherings are one of the main drivers behind the current surge in cases. I wouldn't go. Easier said than done I realize, but maybe just saying 'no' now and dealing with the fallout would be less awful than spending the next two months wrestling with anxiety and uncertainty. Not to mention the possibility of you or your loved ones spending October in the ICU.
It sounds really stressful. I'm sorry.
59: Don't go.*
*Family crap like this is horrible and can put you in a bind in a way that is too complicated to express in a blog comment, so I wouldn't judge you if you went, taking the precautionary steps you outline. My siblings are roughly split between those who wouldn't ask me to do something like this, and those whose weddings I'd be glad to have an excuse to skip. So that colors my advice as I try to imagine your dilemma. But yeah: Whatever you do, be the bad guy. Be maximally apologetic, express lots of self-loathing for your cowardice, your irrational fears and (if appropriate) your political correctness. But keep your family safe. An event like this is going to select for people who are careless.
It's an utter mess. She didn't speak to me for a month after I declined to bring the kids. I get it. This absolutely sucks, and no one wants to feel like people aren't happy for their wedding. But I really don't want to be patient zero for the sad national story where happy wedding results in ten dead family members.
63: Part of this is also due to long-standing political differences. She's convinced the whole thing is an overreaction because Democrats, etc., and I'm probably a little more cautious than the average American, but you know, we also are sucking at beating the pandemic so I'm pretty sure I'm right. So it turned into a whole mess of me deciding to ruin her day or I never wanted the kids to go to the wedding anyway and this is a convenient excuse or something, but, like, she got engaged after lockdown. Even I can't plan that well.
She got engaged after lockdown and is getting married in September? Don't go solely on the basis of the engagement being too short.
AIMHB my nephew is getting married in September, and changed his plans from a large indoor wedding in Detroit to a smaller outdoor wedding in upstate Michigan. But now I am thinking this is also a bad idea .
66: People get pregnant all the time.
67: Friends had planned a smallish outdoor wedding upstate in October and are trying to decide whether to postpone or shrink the guest list dramatically - I'm imagining a series of wedding deescalations now.
62 and 63 are completely correct, and I'm sorry about the strife. If it makes you feel better, my entire family did not attend my aunt's wedding (for bizarre, pointless, and slightly cruel reasons) when I was a kid, and the formerly strained relationship just continued to be strained, no better and no worse.
This guy says you can safely fly if you're careful (which, subtextually, seems to be saying don't fly with children). Of course, he also says you should demand to the crew that the air circulation get turned back on if it is turned off, so it's possible he's just fucknuts.
Ugh, that is awful.
I'm slightly worried about Jammies' family next week. I don't think any of them are likely to be sufficiently paranoid. I don't think they go out very much, as a baseline, though.
Things are worsening slightly in Ireland since restrictions were eased further, and the government has just decided not to allow ordinary pubs to open (pubs which did a lot of food business were allowed to open when restaurants were, but there have been some worrying incidents). One friend thinks things will be a lot worse by September. I think we are likely to see a second wave but it probably won't kick in until October. Lots of confusion about what schools will actually be doing but there will be some level of re-opening in September.
Lots of worry about tourists coming into the country - especially from Texas and Florida...
We have okayish testing times especially compared to the start of the pandemic so the hope is that clusters could be quickly shut down. But health workers are presumably pretty burnt out at this stage.
I do wonder about health care workers just losing their shit at some point. Case in point: the governor in Georgia just forbid cities from ordering masks, probably because he wants to remind Atlanta that it's at the mercy of suburban assholes. But I'd bet the treatment capacity in the state is mostly in Atlanta.
I'm considering going down to south Florida for a week to see my dad and grandmother, and I can't decide if that's insane (I would either drive or get an Amtrak roomette). I'd get a test first, and only interact with my dad and Grandmother, but I can't tell if this is just a reckless idea.
I think maybe the trains going west have different rooms than the ones that stay on the coast, so maybe but as nice?
My sister got the 15 minute test, got her negative, got in the car and drove straight to visit my bored and lonely mom, no stopping. I think visits are doable, if you have the resources.
I'd do it, J. At some stage the risks - to parents as well -- of being apparently neglected outweigh the risks of travel.
Does it seem reasonable that the Amtrak roomettes are safe? I'd be in my own little cabin for about 24 hours, and wouldn't interact with anyone else. It has a private toilet.
Seems fine to me. Maybe bring wipes for a quick clean. I'm kind of doubting that does about good, but it makes me feel better.
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However, he killed several brothers to maintain his authority, and his own death gave rise to a War of Uncles and Nephews.|>
There can be only one!
Also, how messed up is it that a 15 hour drive is a 23-hour train ride?
Hospitalizations in Maryland started declining again and the positive rate is still fluctuating around 4.5%.
I still think they should just pull the trigger on reclosing the bars. Over 80% of new cases are people under 30, and there's plenty of evidence from other states that younger adults going to bars and clubs is a big driver of new outbreaks.
It's 26 hours from Pittsburgh to Lincoln, a fifteen hour drive. But I guess several hours of that are a layover in Chicago and you can easily leave the station to do stuff.
Slippery slopes are real! I've now talked myself into flying...
81. I'm reading that "fomites" (meaning viruses on surfaces) are less dangerous than originally thought, because they become non-infectious fairly quickly. So if you bring your alcohol wipes and use them in your Amtrak roomette, your risk from them should be low. Airborne viruses are the major things to worry about (droplets and now, aerosols). If Amtrak's HVAC method is to recirculate air in the cars, I'd worry more about that than surfaces. Can you open the window?
87: You just fall and miss the ground.
I did go to a bar the day before yesterday. Sat outside and had two beers with a friend I hadn't seen since February.
OT: How come when a dog alerts a family of a fire, people call the dog a hero without checking that the dog didn't start the fire?
A group of Pittsburgh Giant Eagle customers suing for their right to be shitheads.
O'Hara-based Giant Eagle Inc. issued a legal response to a late May lawsuit by a collection of customers who claim the grocer's requirement that customers wear masks during Covid-19 violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.
There's a guy with a Taser at the door of the one by me. It draws a pretty diverse group that includes a big chunk of the white working class Trump voters in the city. I haven't seen any problems there.
I think anyone suing for the right to wear a mask is going to be
A) not in the working class
B) someone who has been bamboozled by pseudoscientific conspiracy theories about how wearing a mask is going to kill them worse than vaccines will.
Probably, but the white working class seems worse than usual at keeping its nose in the mask.
But the Nextdoor for my area has a couple of Trump people bitching about masks and everything else the governor and mayor do. They're probably retired.
I have new neighbors. They seem nice, based on the very minimal interactions I've had during the shutdown. I'm guessing mid- to late-40s, with two cute kids and two big dogs. They never wear masks, which wouldn't be notable since I only see them in their own yard, but sometimes they have other people over in the yard, also not wearing masks. Also -- and this is the big one -- they hung an American flag on the house.
Are they Republican?
They're Republicans, but donate to Project Lincoln. Their names are Steve and Karen (parents), Madison and Madison 2.0 (Kids), and Clifford and Woofers (dogs). He works in "computers" and under no circumstance should you ask for more detail or you'll be bored to tears. She sells real estate and participates in informal redlining. They need to get new tires on one of their cars but are waiting until it's closer to winter so they have better snow traction.
Went to a little backyard party last night -- people sat 8 plus feet distant, everyone doing it pretty well. One guest is an elementary (K-3) special ed teacher. That's one place where zoom is just a huge failure. And a huge class thing: the school district gave out laptops, but folks in families without didn't always have the necessary knowledge to navigate the thing. Or, often, a parent that could supervise to the extent necessary. On the whole, this sounded pretty bleak.
On the other hand, we saw the comet. I think.
97:
1. I'm guessing they're white?
2. Do you know where they moved from?
Hanging a flag is pretty charged in this environment, unless they just hung it for the 4th and haven't gotten around to taking it down.
Yes, they're white. (If they were immigrants or brown, I would assume the flag was put up in self-defense.) They moved from elsewhere in this very blue city. They have a yard sign that on first glance appeared to be one of those "here we believe/black lives matter/no human is illegal" etc. placards, but on closer inspection it's actually a much more neutral message.
I hadn't thought of the 4th of July thing. That's hopeful!
I would parse the yard sign carefully. I can't think of much that would be neutral enough that it wouldn't shift my opinion of the householders politics one way or the other.
66,68: Ha. Sister isn't pregnant, and has been with the guy for a while now, but they want to have kids, and she's running up a biological clock limit. So.... look, I don't blame her for wanting to get married quickly. But this is not a good year for fanfare! But then I see people traveling for vacation and they're all OK with the risk -- half the people here seem to have travel plans -- soooo ugh wtf.
When I was younger, a classmate's sister was getting married and a foreign exchange student who had accurately read the local sexual norms in the aggregate but missed a little nuance asked when the baby was due.
To be clear, I don't plan to interact with anyone other than my dad and grandmother in Florida. I would definitely not go to a wedding unless it was outdoors and there was a very small guest list!
So, this afternoon is the fourth afternoon in a row that Pokey has fallen asleep. He's asleep right now, with his head on the dinner table. He's also been complaining of a headache all week.
Last Wednesday, we went to the pool, and there was another family there. Pokey and the boys were diving for diving toys together. But not, like, rough-housing. Aside from that, he hasn't had contact with anyone for weeks.
So Jammies took all the kids to get tested yesterday, plus himelf, just to be safe. He just got four emails: Hawaii, Ace, Rascal, and Jammies are all negative. And...that's all.
?!?!?
I mean, it's almost certainly nothing.
That's a feature of the plan where the WH is directly handling testing data.
You're only allowed 4 tests per family.
Sometimes I think I'm just a straightman delivering improv prompts for you guys.
Any other symptoms? Fever, rash, breathing problems? Do you have a pulse oximeter?
Pokey is negative!
My dad suggested that he might have a mild encephalitis.
No rash or breathing problems. He was complaining that his legs were super tired earlier in the week.
Wow, results in 24 hours? Super jealous. We're still masked up around my in-laws in MN, waiting for our results. We got tested a week ago. I hope Pokey perks up!
116: The antigen ones here take 15 minutes, though I realize they aren't as good as PCR.
Encephalitis still sounds less than pleasant. Hope he feels better soon.
I am very surprised our results came back so soon! They told us 3-5 days, and a few weeks ago they were saying results in 10-25 days.
So it's funny, after months into this coronavirus awfulness, the thing that gets you really upset, the thing that has you dissolved into tears.
My cousin, a hockey reporter with the Leafs for many years, has decided to resign in order to spend more time with his wife A., who has been battling cancer for the past five years. And everyone at that other place is all, 'Good for you! You're such a great husband! and you and A. have the rest of your lives together, it's only the beginning of a new life....' and etc; but I'm thinking, 'Wow, A. must really be sick for P/H to resign like that.' A. is an awesome person, who has been living with cancer with great, good humour, and with grace, since about 2015.
She is too young to die.
I hate 2020.
Got back from an excursion with Pola and another friend to three beaches on the north east including an island covered in mangrove forests which was very nice indeed.
Heebie, in the old old times saying your kid had gone to a pool and now his legs are weak would merit a complete freak out. Thank goodness polio is no longer on the differential in the US.
Zoé, your cousin wanting to maximize time with his wife because things aren't getting better would be my pessimistic read too. I do hope that reading is not correct. This year has had enough tragedy.
I'm so sorry to hear that, Zoe.
Heebie, is it possible that Pokey is just having a growth spurt?
Zoe, I am so sorry. I think I would fear your interpretation as well, and that is awful.
Sometimes I think I'm just a straightman delivering improv prompts for you guys.
"We need a job, a location and a novel sex act"