Calvert Cliffs and Battle Creek Cypress Swamp – Another hiatus in club hikes – How children adjust to mask mandates – Another case of hubris and nemesis – The issue of body storage – Rand Paul’s blindness to the bad effects of ingesting medicine for cattle – Evening statistics
I led the hike in Calvert Cliffs that I scouted last month for the Capital Hiking Club. It came off quite well. It was very warm today, but not overpoweringly so. The temperature of the water at the beach was extremely comfortable for swimming, and while some sea nettles were still present, they were less numerous than they had been a month earlier. The hikers expressed appreciation in particular of the views of the cliffs at the beach and of the water lilies as we went along the boardwalk. Afterwards we went to Battle Creek Cypress Swamp, which many of the hikers had not seen before, and they were all impressed by the majestic stature of the trees and the serenity of the forest. Many cardinal flowers were in bloom when we passed upon the boardwalk through the swamp; they need soil that is moist at all times and are most frequently found in the vicinity of lakes, swamps, and rivers. The facility has an indoor exhibit as well describing various flora and fauna of the area, and in particular it features a large albino snapping turtle that had been rescued thirty years earlier when it was still young. Albinism is a relatively rare feature in turtles (about 1 in every 100,000 hatched eggs) and they ordinarily do not survive long in the wild. Their coloring makes them fairly easy targets for predators to detect.
The only drawback was the disappointment of the next CHC hike being canceled for lack of hike leaders and my being obliged to tell the participants of this hike, in response to their inquiries, that the club may be obligated to suspend hikes again unless the number of cases in the fourth wave reaches some sort of plateau. The CHC board will be holding an online discussion on this point this coming week.
One of the hikers is a teacher in the DC school system and I asked her whether there was any difficulty about implementing mask mandates. She said that there was none; there has been no opposition among the DC authorities to such mandates; and as for the children – they have come to look upon masks as completely normal and are rather inclined to take adults to task if they see any indoors without a mask on. It may be just as well, perhaps, to put some of them in charge of such matters in states like Texas and Florida; I’m certain that these states would be better served by toddlers just beginning school than by the officials who are currently in power.
There are so many stories now about people fiercely opposed to vaccination contracting the virus and suffering fatal consequences that encountering them in various media is rather like picking up grains of sand from a beach. Here is one, nonetheless. Scott Apley, a Republican member of the Dickinson City council, was 45 years old when he died. He was a determined opponent of vaccination, frequently venting his disapproval of them in public, and his last Facebook post on July 30th was a mocking reference to COVID and the various vaccines. Two days later he was admitted to a Galveston hospital with pneumonia-like symptoms. He tested positive for COVID-19 and was placed on a ventilator. He died on August 25th, some 3½ weeks after he was hospitalized. Both the Texas Republican Party and the Galveston County Republican Party issued statements calling his loss a tragedy and extending condolences to his family. It is scarcely necessary to add that neither of them made the slightest reference to the COVID virus that caused his death.
Two counties in Oregon, Tillamook and Josephine, have requested refrigerated trucks to hold the bodies resulting from the death toll from COVID. In Tillamook only 30% of its residents are unvaccinated, but hospitalizations and deaths among them are sufficient to overwhelm the hospitals and the morgues. Suicide rates have also risen in the counties as a result of the stresses imposed by the pandemic. Morgues are restricted to contain a certain number of bodies at the same time, so the counties are forced to fall back on refrigerated trailers that must be obtained from the state. Josephine County Emergency Manager Emily Ring asked the state on Tuesday for a refrigerated trailer that could hold “20-48 cadavers.” Oregon is not the only state coping with this issue. Alabama activated two of its four refrigerated trailers for the first time since the pandemic began in Mobile and Baldwin counties this week.
Rand Paul has issued a statement saying that he doesn’t understand why scientists are not devoting much-needed resources to testing ivermectin for its efficacy against COVID, even though FDA and the CDC have already warned people from ingesting it. It may interest him to know that the Georgia Poison Center has fielded 23 calls so far this month related to ivermectin, as opposed to two or three in a typical year, in which the callers are complaining of vomiting, faintness, and double vision. This last symptom gives plausibility to an interesting speculation: Rand Paul is an ophthalmologist – can it be that he’s trying to drum up business for himself?
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 216,709,866; # of deaths worldwide: 4,506,796; # of cases U.S.: 39,617,417; # of deaths; U.S.: 654,381.