Small mercies

What I haven't been able to say is how glad I am that my parents have both passed. Imagining them in Hawai'i, my father increasingly frail and certainly at high risk; or perhaps worse, my mother alone and unwilling to ask for help. If one of them were ill, what would we do? Fly to Hawai'i, would that even be possible right now? It doesn't bear thinking about.

I'm glad they didn't live to see some of what's happening now. The immense stupidity, the shocking indifference on display in the federal government. I have rarely been more grateful to live in Oregon. We got an early look at a bad scenario, courtesy of our neighbors to the north. Social distancing took hold here, and seems to be flattening the curve measurably.

Meanwhile New Orleans is facing a catastrophe of Katrina-like proportions; New York is maybe, finally, peaking or at least reaching a plateau; the CDC is recommending face masks for everyone; and some states still don't have stay-home or social-distancing orders in place. A few evangelical mega-churches are continuing to hold public services (and in a couple of those cases, the pastors have been arrested).

One of the things people aren't noticing: So far, the media coverage has been centered around major cities, and also that's where the most intensive testing has been done. This makes it look like the epidemiology is urban-centered. But, in fact, we don't know what the infection rates in rural areas are like. We tend to assume the spread would be slower, with fewer people coming into contact with one another. That's a big assumption.

We also know for sure that the health infrastructure is less developed in most rural areas. Hopefully someone is looking at the challenges of delivering the kind of care that COVID-19 requires, at scale, in the big empties of the Midwest and the Intermountain.

Meanwhile, ProPublica has the news you did not want to see... Early Data Shows African Americans Have Contracted and Died of Coronavirus at an Alarming Rate

Available! High-Voltage Lines, Knocking from Inside