My mother’s assisted-living facility – Running errands – The motorcycle rally in Sturgis – Developments in college football – Evening statistics
It’s been a relatively quiet day. I saw my mother in the morning. The facility where she lives is doing an excellent job of protecting the residents from infection. Visitors must register whenever they enter, and even residents leaving the building temporarily have to undergo a temperature scan upon re-entering. Sanitizer is available in the main corridors and surfaces are wiped clean on a continual basis. No one to date in the facility has come down with the virus, which is a tribute to the rigor of their precautionary measures.
Other than that I spent much of the day on various errands – although, since I undertook most of these on foot, I find by consulting the pedometer app on my cellphone that I covered well over 11 miles today. I went out on relatively short excursions to various places (including a lab for the routine annual blood test), but there were many of them and they added up to a significant amount of mileage.
Regrettably, the discretion displayed by the people running the facility where my mother lives seems to be in short supply in the nation at large.
The motorcycle rally in Sturgis is progressing as expected. At this point there have been 84 arrests, 226 citations, and 18 crashes – a somewhat higher amount of arrests and citations than those of previous years but not unusually so. No social distancing has been in evidence and only a relatively small number of attendees are wearing masks. They have come from all over the nation, and after the event they will naturally disperse back to their homes in every state in the country, so we may expect a fairly significant surge in the number of COVID-19 cases in the next few weeks on the basis of this event alone.
Two of the largest college athletic conferences, known as the “Power Five,” are showing a most unexpected display of common sense: they will probably cancel their 2020 football season games. The National Junior College Athletic Association has already announced that its close-contact fall sports, including football, would move to the spring semester, and the University of Connecticut canceled its 2020 season games. These concessions to concerns about students’ safety do not sit well with our Chief Executive, who has already pushed for colleges to re-open in the fall and who has now tweeted “Play College Football.” But in this respect he is a worthy representative of our country, which has had a long history of emotional involvement in games that is far out of proportion to their intrinsic importance. Football, baseball, basketball, golf, tennis – they can all be quite entertaining, but there is no justification for the 8- and 9-figure incomes lavished on the participants, particularly when the majority of the spectators are living from paycheck to paycheck. Such sentiments would sound like heresy to the majority of my compatriots; so the spectacle of our President urging college students to endanger their health and those of spectators crowding the stadiums should excite no surprise.
There has been no shortage of warnings about the dangers of congregating in large numbers and the advisability of avoiding events that involve people crowded together in close proximity; and yet Americans as a whole seem to find it impossible to forego rallies, sports events, protest marches, large parties, and heavily crowded bars. Is it any wonder that Canadians and Europeans don’t want to receive visitors from a country whose people so recklessly disregard considerations for their own health and those of others?
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 20,238,926; # of deaths worldwide: 737,900; # of cases U.S.: 5,251,416; # of deaths U.S.: 166,192. This is the second day with less than 50,000 new cases and well under 1,000 new deaths – which would be a comforting trend, were it not for the recent rally in Sturgis and the rallies to come during the months preceding the election.