matching tracksuits

Part 1: The Day

Our weed eater -- I think that's a brand name but I could be wrong -- has been broken for some time. How long? Embarrassingly so. Today, we finally got a replacement, but we didn't get as sturdy a model as might be expected. The reason? Turning things over to the Boy.

A battery-powered, small trimmer that E can handle. His reaction? "I love, love, love this!" He's going to want to trim every day.

Part 2: Will This Change Anything?

K and I were talking a few nights ago about how this whole tragedy perhaps could have been significantly lessened if our inept president weren't the egomaniacal narcissist that he is when our talk turned to how this might affect the country. K suggested that it would be a turning point, that the fact that America -- the most powerful country in the world, the richest country in the world, the superlative-in-every-sense country in the world -- was brought to its knees like this will necessitate some change, a whole new way of looking at things.

I disagree.

What I fear is that instead of turning this country's populace into a science-first, technology-led country where politics and religion take a backseat to what science says (and if this were the case now, we might not be in the situation we're in), it will only reinforce the same backward thinking that continues to threaten us now. Instead of seeing it as a science problem, they'll see it as a religious problem. "God took his protection away from us because of X, Y, and Z" -- fill in your favorite liberal boogieman.

We really don't have to wait for that -- it's already happening. The amount of religious stupidity coming out of this is just mindblowing. Stuff like this.

One would think that given the evidence, anti-vaxxers would be shutting up about now:

The person credited with saving the most lives ever is Edward Jenner, inventor of the smallpox vaccine. The disease had a much higher mortality rate than the novel coronavirus that is confining many people to their homes right now; about 80% of children and 60% of adults who contracted smallpox died of it. In the 20th century alone, it killed more than 300 million people before the vaccine eradicated it worldwide in 1979.

The polio vaccine is estimated to have saved 10 million people from paralysis just since 1988, and prevented 500,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organization. A global vaccination campaign for measles that began in 2000 prevented an estimated 23 million deaths by 2018, the organization reported. (LA Times)

One would think -- but then again...

And this old nonsense about Bill Gates ushering in the apocalypse. (Money says he's using a Windows computer here...)

And people trying to call judgment down on a virus as if it's an incorrigible child.

And when you mix in bat-feces crazy like Alex Jones and people who take him seriously, well...

When you see everything -- everything -- as part of some conspiracy that was foretold in a book written by Bronze Age soothsayers,  no amount of science, logic, or critical thinking can penetrate your worldview.

It's not just a pessimistic sense that there's a problem: there's quantifiable data to show there's a problem. Google has begun compiling reports on the changes in people's mobility during this time.

As global communities respond to COVID-19, we've heard from public health officials that the same type of aggregated, anonymized insights we use in products such as Google Maps could be helpful as they make critical decisions to combat COVID-19.

These Community Mobility Reports aim to provide insights into what has changed in response to policies aimed at combating COVID-19. The reports chart movement trends over time by geography, across different categories of places such as retail and recreation, groceries and pharmacies, parks, transit stations, workplaces, and residential.

What do the data show? Well, as a disclaimer, Google warns about doing what I'm just about to do:

Location accuracy and the understanding of categorized places varies from region to region, so  we don’t recommend using this data to compare changes between countries, or between regions with different characteristics (e.g. rural versus urban areas).

Still, data from three locations show the vast difference in national and local response.

Here's the data from our county:

Now, we made the news recently as being the most mobile county in the nation during this time, so our stubborn little county is an outlier, but it's where I live, so it's the data I'll use.

And here's the data from the administrative district in Poland where K grew up, where Babcia still lives, and where I spent seven years:

A randomly selected district in Italy.

Are these two countries faring better than America? I suppose in raw numbers, they are. The long term picture looks better there. Why? Because they don't have people going around saying, "I'm covered in the blood of Jesus -- I'm saved and safe" like we do here.

Of course, in Poland, some bishops and priests are desperately trying to get churches reopened on some kind of limited basis, but even there, they understand the risk and want to have limited attendance. These bloody American Evangelicals -- i.e., "covered in the blood of Jesus," which is itself a disturbing image, but the second, British meaning of "bloody" works as well -- want to have full, regular church services. The data makes their claims a little spurious, though:

And it's not as if this virus is enough: we as a species can't even go through this without some people turning it into a hell on Earth for those who are stuck with them:

In Hubei province, the heart of the initial coronavirus outbreak, domestic violence reports to police more than tripled in one county alone during the lockdown in February, from 47 last year to 162 this year, activists told local media.

“The epidemic has had a huge impact on domestic violence,” Wan Fei, a retired police officer who founded a charity campaigning against abuse, told Sixth Tone website. “According to our statistics, 90% of the causes of violence [in this period] are related to the Covid-19 epidemic.”

It is a pattern being repeated globally. In Brazil a state-run drop-in centre has already seen a surge in cases it attributes to coronavirus isolation, the Brazilian broadcaster Globo said.

“We think there has been a rise of 40% or 50%, and there was already really big demand,” said Adriana Mello, a Rio de Janeiro judge specialising in domestic violence. “We need to stay calm in order to tackle this difficulty we are now facing.” (Lockdowns around the world bring rise in domestic violence in the Guardian)

The virus is always teaching me something new:

The increased threat to women and children was a predictable side effect of the coronavirus lockdowns, said activists. Increased abuse is a pattern repeated in many emergencies, whether conflict, economic crisis or during disease outbreaks, although the quarantine rules pose a particularly grave challenge.

Predictable for some, that is. I hadn't even thought of this -- that's how privileged I am.

So, no, I don't think anything will change. At all.