A DC hike – Race relations then and now – Declining rates of COVID – Evening statistics
The return of the sun has brought about a lightening of mood – that, as well as an 18-mile hike with RS, starting from the Martin Luther King monument and skirting about the Kennedy Center, Glover-Archibold Park, the Cathedral, the Normanstone Trail, Dumbarton Oaks Park, Dupont Circle, the Kennedy Center again, and Roosevelt Island. Every time I go on ventures of this sort into DC, I discover something new. In this case I saw the Gandhi sculpture for the first time (although I have heard of it before) and the Dewi Saraswati statue, a relatively recent addition (it came to DC in 2013) in front of the Indonesian embassy. I was puzzled by its location, since Indonesia is predominantly a Muslim country, but it turns out that the statue came from Bali, the archpelago’s largest island with a Hindu majority. It was breezy but not blustery like yesterday and the skies were bright blue in contrast to the dull grey of the day before.
There will be more to come tomorrow, when RS and I will lead several others in a circuit from the MLK memorial in our annual commemoration of Martin Luther King. It was very pleasant to see African-Americans, Asian-Americans, whites, Hispanics, and so on, mingling together on the streets, in restaurants, in stores, on the Metro, and so on, in a manner that would have been much less common even as little as half a century earlier. However, there is a way to go. When I was in Iceland this past summer, I overheard one American tourist remark that for the first time in his life he was unaware of being black. It will take a long time yet for us to reach that stage.
There are, perhaps, less personal reasons for rejoicing as well. COVID is easing worldwide with a weekly 23% decrease in cases and 13% drop in deaths. There is one exception: mainland China, where the virus emerged three years ago and where reliable data are simply impossible to obtain. Wonderful to relate, the WHO itself has actually requested China to supply them with information that is verifiable; and such a request and its implied criticism, though timid and tentative and far less censorious than the Chinese medical officials deserve, is yet better than nothing.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 671,340,707; # of deaths worldwide: 6,730,405; # of cases U.S.: 103,577,391; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,125,541. The numbers are not misprints, as one might think in comparing them with yesterday’s statistics: there were indeed only 2 COVID deaths in the U.S. today.