A day without incident – Speculation about duration of the COVID virus – The saga of Brazil continues – Evening statistics
After the almost perfect weather of the preceding week, today was quite dreary and tomorrow promises to be more of the same – not merely raining, but so overcast that the sky was barely illuminated at all. The headlines, such as they were, did not report much that is new and altogether it was a fairly uneventful day.
“This blog of yours might turn out to be a life-time project,” RK remarked to me during our conservation a few days earlier. I hope that she is not right, but it does seem that I’ve been overly optimistic in entitling my blog the Journal of the Plague Year. Some epidemics have indeed lasted for about a year: the Great Plague of London, the Great Plague of Vienna, the Manchurian Plague, the Asian flu epidemic, and so on. Others have taken longer to run their course, sometimes much longer – the Black Death pandemic, for instance, which lasted for seven years. It seems likely that the COVID virus will be expanding for some months to come at the very least. We have completed our season of warm weather; the more comfortable temperatures we are now enjoying will in a few weeks be followed by colder days; and the virus flourishes in colder temperatures and in interior settings, where most of the people will be spending the majority of their time in winter and early spring. The figure of 2.5% of the population that I mentioned earlier certainly represents an extensive amount of damage, but it falls far short of conferring herd immunity.
Oddly enough, the rate of infection appears to be slowing down in Brazil, where most of the people are no longer observing the rules of social distancing. Experts fear that it will undergo its second wave of virus infections before the first is under control, but for the moment the majority of the Brazilians seem to be as insouciant in their attitude towards COVID as Jair Bolsonaro himself – whose popularity, incidentally, has reached record approval levels.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 37,732,511; # of deaths worldwide: 1,081,146; # of cases U.S.: 7,991,069; # of deaths U.S.: 219,695.