Masks at a residence home for the elderly – Scouting a hike for the upcoming Wanderbirds picnic – Eric Adams in New York – Rise of the Delta variant – Marjorie Taylor Greene in the news again – Evening statistics
I spent much of yesterday making arrangements to have my mother moved from the independent-living room she now occupies (with a full-time caretaker) to an assisted-living room. There is naturally a certain amount of paperwork involved, but on the whole matters went smoothly. I underwent a slight surprise when I entered the facility: several residents and even a couple of the staff members were not wearing masks. I remarked on this to MB, the caretaker, who told me that the requirement is now being less rigorously enforced as the virus is perceived to be receding, particularly as almost everyone in the building has been vaccinated.
The Wanderbirds club will be having a picnic on Sunday, the first official group event in well over a year. As part of this festivity there will (of course) be some hiking available to those who want to go on the trails before the food is served. Typically our picnics have featured shorter hikes than usual to allow us to devote the afternoon to feasting and other amusements. In this case the longer of the two hikes offered will be about 10 miles. I have volunteered to lead it, so I went out to scout it today. I went as early in the morning as possible, because the temperatures rose to the upper 90s later in the day. Even during early hours and even while walking in shady glades, the atmosphere became oppressive by mid-morning. But the hike makes a circuit around a beautiful lake and there were numerous clusters of wineberries and blackberries, both of which taste best fresh off of the bush. The weather forecast for Sunday, happily, is more favorable than today’s, in the mid-80s and with clouds to mitigate the glare of the summer sun.
Eric Adams has secured the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. That is welcome news, for Adams has consistently opposed the “defund the police” mantra of the far left flank of the party. Police reform is certainly needed and, in addition, the police should to be relieved of certain tasks that can be more appropriately assigned to social workers. But, as Adams noted, “You can have all the reforms you want. You can have a kinder, gentler police department. But if your streets are filled with guns and you’re dealing with a lot of violence, you are still going to have a lot of children being shot. . . . If you erode that trust [in law enforcement], you are going to erode public safety.” Adams himself is not only a former police captain, but has had first-hand experience in his youth of the sort of harassment to which many blacks are being subjected. It is no accident that while in the early stages of the primary he was not one of the front-runners, the recent surge in crime steadily pushed his platform to the fore. People assuredly do not wish to be harassed, but neither do they wish to be unprotected from the numerous felons who prey upon them as the police is deprived of the ability to combat them.
The Delta variant of the COVID virus is now the dominant strain in the U.S, accounting for 51.7% of the new cases over a two-week period ending on July 3rd. The average age of these new cases is considerably younger than of cases from previous phases of the pandemic – not surprisingly, since adults in the range of 18 to 29 years account for nearly a quarter of those adults still unvaccinated. In Maryland alone, every single person who died of COVID during the month of June was unvaccinated. The unvaccinated also accounted for 95% of all new infections and 93% of all new hospitalizations during that period.
Speaking of vaccinations, Marjorie Taylor Greene has compared Biden’s vaccine push to Nazi-era “brown shirts” just a few weeks after she was forced to apologize for her remarks comparing Capitol Hill mask-wearing rules to the Holocaust. When asked about this comment by CNN, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said simply the White House does not take medical advice from Greene. It would be pleasant to write this latest antic of Greene’s off as another desperate bid for attention, but it would not be true. She raised $3.2 million during her first three months in office, an exceptional amount for a freshman member of the House. She is as toxic as Trump himself; the scale on which she operates is somewhat more limited, but not limited enough to prevent her from doing an appalling amount of damage.
Yesterday’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 185,349,814; # of deaths worldwide: 4,008,455; # of cases U.S.: 34,616,333; # of deaths; U.S.: 621,563.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 185,807,906; # of deaths worldwide: 4,016,953; # of cases U.S.: 34,639,016; # of deaths; U.S.: 621,819.