Another hike in Shenandoah National Park – A Memorial Day weekend party – Fresh bamboo shoots – Memorial Day weekend celebrations – Bear attack in Yellowstone – End of restrictions on South Korean missiles – Change in China’s family size policy – Increase in official death toll of Peru – Evening statistics
I met with AD and RH again yesterday for another hike in Shenandoah National Park. This time we started at Meadow Springs and went on a 10-mile loop via the Hazel Mountain, Catlitt Mountain, and White Rock Trails. Its ascents were easily graded for the most part and the elevation gain was about 1800 feet. The weather was better than forecasted; instead of the rain that was predicted, there was no precipitation and the air was less damp than that of the preceding day. It was warmer as well, going up to the mid-50s; and while the sky was clouded, it was not gray. With the sunlight continually trying to break through, the sky for most of the time was a luminous pearly-white. We saw several pink lady-slippers, as well as bushes of mountain laurel just beginning to bloom.
And today marked a momentous occasion: I attended the first indoor party I have experienced since the beginning of the pandemic. True, it was a fine day and many of the guests spent part of the time sitting outside on the lawn; but we sat together inside as well, gave embraces by way of greeting, and ate and drank together. I saw RK for the first time in many months; in fact, I believe that the last time we saw one another face-to-face was in March, 2020, when we attended the King’s Singers concert together. She is now back in the classroom, having returned in April, and is very well-pleased no longer to be teaching via Zoom. I spoke with her and with her good friend MF about the activities we have been doing during the pandemic; and MF mentioned that she has been looking into the blog from time to time. Some of the guests entered the house wearing facemasks, still incredulous that we could assemble together without this precaution; but eventually they came to realize it was unnecessary among a group of people who are all vaccinated and discarded them of their own accord. The hosts were DC and JC, whom I have mentioned in several previous entries, and they received the guests with their usual hospitality, which included several dishes containing fresh vegetables from JC’s garden.
When I departed JC gave me some bamboo shoots, which she dug from the grove of bamboo in the backyard. These require a little advance preparation. They must be peeled of the fibrous outer leaves and then parboiled to remove their taxiphyllin, a toxin that is capable of producing cyanide in the intestines. There is nothing to worry about after this preliminary treatment; taxiphyllin degenerates very quickly in boiling water. I mention this as an example of the increased dependence people have been displaying generally during the pandemic upon foods that they make with their own hands: gardening, bread-making, preserving fruits and vegetables – all have increased significantly during the past months. It must be added that, in the case of JC, she has been growing vegetables in her garden for years and needed no outbreak of disease to encourage her to supply her kitchen with home-grown produce.
The Memorial Day weekend celebrations have borne a closer resemblance to pre-pandemic conditions than any other public holiday for over a year. People congregated without wearing masks; after the CDC changed its guidelines on this issue mask mandates are been eased almost everywhere. At this point only California, Hawaii, and New Mexico are the only states that still enforce mask mandates for everyone. AAA has estimated that more than 37 million people in the US would travel at least 50 miles from home over the Memorial Day weekend, which is less than the number who did so in 2019 by 13%, but is 60% above last year’s figure. Come to think of it, I myself fall into that category: the Thornton Gap entrance to Shenandoah National Park, to which I traveled on both Saturday and Sunday, is well over 50 miles from my house.
A somewhat ominous event occurred in Yellowstone National Park on Friday. A solitary hiker was mauled by a grizzly bear in the Mammoth Springs area. He sustained significant injuries to his legs, but nonetheless managed to get away on his own. When I visited Yellowstone, it was impressed on me that I should not hike alone there – and I accordingly never ventured onto its trails without the company of others. Not only bears, but elk and bison have large populations in that area, and they can be skittish and unpredictable. One hike that we had planned to do had to be re-routed because a trail was closed off on account of grizzly sightings in the neighborhood. Yellowstone averages about 1 bear attack per year. There was an incident earlier this year with a less fortunate outcome. A backcountry guide was attacked by a grizzly bear just outside the park on April 15th and died from his injuries two days later. I have had a number of bear encounters over the years, but these were with black bears, not grizzlies. I’m not anxious to come close to one of them; they are considerably more aggressive than black bears, and stronger as well.
The U.S. government has ended decades-long restrictions that capped South Korea’s missile development and has allowed the latter nation to develop weapons with unlimited ranges. Kim Jong-Un, predictably, has reacted with anger, saying that this action could lead to an “acute and instable situation” on the Korean Peninsula. Biden, clearly, has rejected the conciliatory policy of his predecessor, and observers believe that he will not provide North Korea with major sanctions relief unless it takes concrete denuclearization steps first.
China has changed its policy on limits to family size. Parents are now allowed to have up to three children instead of two. The Draconian restriction on family size was instituted some decades before, when China’s over-population threatened to drive the country into economic collapse. But the situation has altered drastically since then. The current birth rate averages 1.3 births per mother, well below the 2.1 rate needed to maintain a nation’s population size. As a result, the population in China is rapidly aging and the number of people in China is expected to peak in a few years, with a decline beginning sooner than previously anticipated. It is far from certain whether Chinese families will take advantage of this permission to have more than two children. A large number of Chinese couples have complained that the high cost, professional sacrifice, and the need to take care of elderly parents has caused them to put off having children.
Peru has increased its official death toll from just under 70,000 to more than 180,000. Prime Minister Violeta Bermudez said that the number was raised on the advice of Peruvian and international experts, based on the amount of excess deaths in the country. But – just as is the case with Mexico when its government admitted that its case count and death toll were greatly under-counted and gave updated figures of its own accord – these corrections have been ignored by the official data sites that track the effect of COVID on a country-by-country basis: neither the Johns Hopkins site nor the Worldmeter site reflects this information. Whether such obliviousness is deliberate or simply the result of oversight, it undermines the confidence one can place in the figures that they present. Hence the figures below must be regarded with caution.
Yesterday’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 171,010,454; # of deaths worldwide: 3,556,327; # of cases U.S.: 34,043,010; # of deaths; U.S.: 609,544.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 171,385,482; # of deaths worldwide: 3,564,527; # of cases U.S.: 34,048,800; # of deaths; U.S.: 609,767. These past two days have seen the smallest number of daily increases yet, with less than 8,000 new cases and less than 150 deaths. Today’s daily increase of cases is about 1.5% of the global daily increases and today’s death toll is about 1.8% of the global deaths. At long last we are experiencing numbers that are under the ratio of our population to that of the world at large, rather than well over, as has been the case for many months previously.