A funeral – The relaxed attitude towards mask-wearing – The COVID “plateau” – The enforced delivery of a dead fetus – The sequel of the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago – Evening statistics
Today I attended the funeral of EP, She had been a member of the Wanderbirds and, although I did not know her very well, I felt that some members of the club should have been present. I’m sorry now that I did not get to know her better, for she was by all accounts a most extraordinary person: fluent in six languages, a respected figure on Capitol Hill (she worked for the Library of Congress as a specialist in foreign law), and an accomplished musician, excelling both at singing and piano-playing.. Whenever her relatives and friends spoke of her, their features brightened with animation and a delighted laugh came to their voices. She had strength of will as well: she had become rather frail during her last years, but she came to the club hikes on a continual basis, even after the pandemic intervened with the bus hikes and forced the club to resort to carpooling instead.
The ceremony was of interest for another reason. I and the other two members of the Wanderbirds who attended were the only ones wearing face masks. The church where the service was held was very spacious and the attendees were not crowded together at close quarters; but it still was a striking illustration of how relaxed people have become in such matters. The CDC has become very tentative in its recommendations. Currently about 35% of counties in the U.S. are designated at the “high” level for risk of COVID, 40% are “medium,” and 25% are “low.” At this point the CDC is not explicitly recommending masks for anyone living in a low-level county and only for the immuno-compromised in a medium-level county. Fairfax County is currently rated as low, but many of its neighbors are not: Arlington is rated as medium and both Montgomery and Prince Georges are rated as high. Given the amount of interaction between residents of these counties, it is only a matter of time that Fairfax’s rating will change, and not for the better.
We have been on a COVID “plateau” for several weeks, with something over 40,000 hospitalizations and about 400 deaths per day over the last month or so. These numbers are certainly an improvement over the ones of the past winter, when the hospitalizations were four times that amount and the daily death toll could easily reach 2,500; but they are still disappointingly high. The new variants and sub-variants are certainly less deadly than their predecessors, but they account for a death toll more than twice as high as the flu has attained in its worst seasons.
“What will Ofwarren give birth to? A baby, as we all hope? Or something else, an Unbaby, with a pinhead or a snout like a dog’s, or two bodies, or a hole in its heart or no arms, or webbed hands and feet? There’s no telling. They could tell once, with machines, but that is now outlawed. What would be the point of knowing, anyway? You can’t have them taken out; whatever it is must be carried to term.”
Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which appeared to be a dystopian fantasy when it was first published in 1985, has become sober fact. Dr. Valerie Williams, an OB-GYN in New Orleans, was prevented from performing a dilation and evacuation (an abortion procedure) to remove a non-viable fetus from a patient whose water broke while she was 16 weeks pregnant. The pregnant woman was already traumatized from her experience and felt that an induction, which would require labor and delivery of the fetus, would be too much for her. But the hospital lawyer said that it was too risky from a legal point of view to perform the operation, because nearly all abortions now are banned in Louisiana. So she was forced to go through an hours-long labor to deliver a non-viable fetus, which of course was dead long before it emerged from the womb, despite the woman’s own declared wishes and despite the medical advice given to her. She hemorrhaged about a liter of blood in the process. I am somewhat puzzled, in reading about cases such as these (and they are legion), to explain how the people who have crafted the laws that create such situations can describe themselves as “pro-life.”
As a result of their search at Mar-a-Lago, the FBI has removed eleven sets of classified documents. Somewhat oddly, Trump did not oppose Merrick Garland’s release of the search warrant. Up to this point he has been reacting along predictable lines, vilifying the Department of Justice and claiming that the FBI agents planted evidence; but for the moment, at least, he seems to realize that mere denials are not going to resolve his difficulties. This episode, however, does not appear to have dented his stranglehold on the Republican Party in the slightest. Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas – who formerly was a sheriff – has openly attacked the Department of Justice and the FBI, while yesterday the Ohio police were engaged in an hours-long standoff, and eventually a fatal one, with an armed man clad in body armor who tried to breach the FBI’s Cincinnati office. The party is now encouraging its most vicious elements to grow unchecked, while its ablest exponents are immediately expelled from their ranks at the first sign of a humane passion.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide 593,861,995; # of deaths worldwide: 6,451,212; # of cases U.S.: 94,643,632; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,062,151.