Morning statistics – Encouraging news from New York – Leisure activities of football players – A common fallacy – Comic opera president of Brazil – Unpromising weather again – Evening statistics
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 AM — # of cases worldwide: 4,821,561; # of deaths worldwide: 317,004; # of cases U.S.: 1,527,951; # of deaths U.S.: 90,980.
The outbreak is ebbing in New York. Hospitalizations have fallen by more than a third. This is welcome news, for New York State accounts for about 30% of the number of deaths nation-wide. Restrictions have been eased in central and upstate New York, where construction and manufacturing work has been allowed to resume. Retail businesses offering curbside pickup or in-store pickup for orders placed ahead have been allowed to reopen. New York City and the more densely-populated regions are still under more restrictive guidelines until May 28th at the earliest.
As the NFL season remains in doubt, several football players are turning to robbery as an alternate profession. Cody Latimer, a wide receiver for the Washington Redskins, has been arrested in Colorado for illegal discharging of a firearm, as well as of second-degree assault, menacing, prohibited use of a weapon and reckless endangerment. NFL cornerbacks DeAndre Baker (New York Giants) and Quinton Dunbar (Seattle Seahawks) were at a house party in Florida where several attendees allege the two football players stole thousands of dollars in cash from them as well as valuable watches while armed with weapons.
I had a rather disturbing conversation with a friend when we discussed the growing pressures confronting the majority of Americans as a result of the pandemic. He was advocating a course of action that would have the Government give more and more handouts, and I had some difficulty in getting him to understand that if the Government simply prints more money and increases the national debt to unwieldy amounts (it has already, as I noted earlier, exceeded our GNP), the currency will eventually be devalued, resulting in a decreased purchasing power of the dollar and a return to the very impoverishment that the suggested handouts are designed to solve. And yet he is an educated man, and he had even studied for a while in Heidelberg – an experience that should have given him some knowledge of the history of a country whose inhabitants at one point saw their life-savings rendered worthless by spiraling inflation. It seems only too probable that the majority of voters are in a similar state of ignorance of economics, and that they will push for policies that must impose a crushing burden on the generations to come.
I have complained about President Trump a great deal in these pages, but the example of Brazil shows that we could be worse off. Brazil’s case count has overtaken that of the U.K.; at this point only the U.S., Russia, and Spain have more. Sao Paulo now has nearly 40,000 cases and its hospitals are now nearly out of beds. Yet President Bolsonaro not only refuses to work with the various state governors to contain the virus; he flouts social distancing guidelines, fires health ministers when they do not tell him what he does not want to hear, and participates in protests against the lockdown procedures. Thus Brazil presents the bizarre picture of a president leading a protest march against his own country’s government – that is to say, against himself.
It’s been dreary today – not merely cloudy, but gray and dingy and dim, without a trace of sunshine. It was so gloomy that I was inclined to remain indoors all day, “but that way madness lies, no more of that!” The more-or-less continual solitude enforced by the restrictions is bad enough; never stirring out of the house can only make matters worse. In any case, the weather is supposed to be like this for most of the week, culminating in rain on Friday. Fortunately there were a few errands to do and all of them within walking distance. Tomorrow I will hike somewhere no matter how the weather turns out, unless it’s a complete downpour.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM — # of cases worldwide: 4,887,842; # of deaths worldwide: 319,960; # of cases U.S.: 1,550,083; # of deaths U.S.: 91,976. At this rate Brazil’s case count will overtake Spain’s in two days, at which point it will be contending with Russia for the position of the country with the second highest case count. The number of new cases in Russia appears to be declining, although it is still high. Spain’s death toll is steadily dropping; it was well under 100 today. Its number of severe cases is now encouragingly low, so that there is less strain on its health system than in earlier weeks. For that matter, the virus appears to have spent its fury in most of the Western European nations. The U.K. is still struggling, though; it had over 2,700 new cases today.