Incident at Riverbend – Thanksgiving travel – The Denver Broncos – Jon Voight’s dire warnings – Evening statistics
A somewhat awkward incident occurred in Riverbend State Park. The park staff recycled and used an old board to prevent erosion along a trail following flooding. Unfortunately, the board previously hung over some stalls to notify visitors about “Public Restrooms.” The board of course was turned backwards so that its lettering was not apparent, but a park visitor with a sense of humor flipped it over. I’m in two minds about this. I naturally would prefer not to witness people relieving themselves directly on the trail, but I can easily understand the temptation that caused the visitor to play his little prank. The board has since been removed.
Already some of my premonitions about Thanksgiving are being realized. TSA has revealed that more than a million Americans have used the airlines to travel to holiday celebrations, despite the request from CDC to refrain from unnecessary traveling. Admittedly, that amount is less than half of the usual amount of traveling at this time of year, but it is still a high figure in light of the warnings about travel and social gatherings of any kind. And that is merely the figure for airline travel. Many others have traveled by automobile as well, and there is no way of telling what this number may be. There are already over 88,000 Americans hospitalized with coronavirus, and new cases and deaths are climbing. In nine states there are twice as many new cases a day now as there were two weeks ago.
The Denver Broncos were in a somewhat discomfited position today. They were scheduled to play a game this afternoon but had no qualified quarterbacks. There are four quarterbacks on the team, but all of them have been deemed high-risk for practicing and playing without masks. One of them has tested positive and the others have all been in close contact with him as a result of the practices. They are required at this point to quarantine for several days before entering any game. The Broncos were forced to fall back on a wide receiver on their practice squad as their emergency replacement. This last-minute substitution did not do them much good; they lost the game, 31-3. The NFL forced them to play after their violations of the COVID restrictions in order to teach them a lesson, and it certainly was a severe one. The NFL has also fined two teams hundreds of thousands of dollars for COVID restriction violations. I question the wisdom of having football games being played at all but I will admit that the NFL is behaving as responsibly as it can under the circumstances.
Jon Voight has announced that the country will be “in great danger” if a Biden administration comes to power. I find this interesting, for a number of reasons. In the first place, I am rather curious as to why the words of an actor who has never held office should carry any weight at all in political matters. However, there is nothing new in that; Hollywood actors on both sides have proclaimed their views at length, taking advantage of their privileged position (for they are well-aware that anything they utter will be quoted and repeated at length) as a matter of course. More significant, with respect to this particular pronouncement, are the current figures regarding the COVID virus. I would say that we’re in fairly perilous straits right now under the current administration. We had over 140,000 new cases today and over 800 deaths – typical of the daily figures for the past two or three weeks. At this point the only countries with populations over 10 million whose case incidence rate is higher than our own are Belgium and the Czech Republic. We are tenth in the list of nations ranked by mortality rate. The U.S. accounts for nearly 22% of the cases in the world and over 18.5% of the deaths. Our hospitals, as I noted above, are nearly at full capacity, and there is every reason to suppose that the strain on their resources will increase dramatically over the next few weeks. Taking all of these factors into account, I should like to know what Voight’s definition of “danger” is.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 63,066,168; # of deaths worldwide: 1,465,048; # of cases U.S.: 13,750,404; # of deaths; U.S.: 273,072.