TheBanyanTree: Wherein Peter goes shopping (peter macinnis)

[tobie at shpilchas.net]

Oh thank you Peter for your report from the razor edge of reality, upon which you are walking barefoot.

	You have restoreth my soul. (or thou hast, whatever)

	Round here, the news is that my state, California, has the highest number of Covid cases in the country.  But then here’s the nonsense in the statistics. (Thank you Mark Twain).

	The statistics about the number of cases has to derived from some bag of reported data. Because of the mismanagement of the pandemic, it’s up to each state, not the federal government, to take care of its people and ward off the pandemic in whatever way they can without the help of any national standards. Therefore, every state is reporting statistics based on different methods of tallying them.  Testing is not easily available. Take one red state:  no one is tested unless they turn up at the hospital with symptoms that can’t be managed at home. If the hospital staff suspects that this could be a case of Covid, then and only then do they test this person because the tests aren’t available. They have to ration them. (they have to ration masks, gloves, sanitation equipment, ventilators, beds in the ICU and a lot of other things too). So the number of reported cases is going to be a fraction of the actual cases in that state. 

	 In California, tests are available if you want one. Not mandatory, but if I wanted to get a test, particularly in Berkeley (and we all know about Berkeley) all I’d have to do is show up—free. We are also the most populace state in the country — 40 million people. Our numbers reflect that.  The federal government is actually fighting our governor over every effort to do this right.  But since we are testing generously, our numbers are higher per capita as well as in total count. 

	Under the circumstances, it baffles me why every report on statistics isn’t prefaced with a caveat that it actually means close to nothing. But the newscasters have to say something in the time allotted. They fill that time with whatever will attract the highest number of viewers. After a while, living like this, one begins to flinch from every headline and turn off the set when the news comes on.

	Can you imagine?

	My mother is a news junkie, or at least she falls asleep in front of the television. She watches what Meyshe and I call the 24/7 panic channel.  Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O’Donnel, Brian Williams, then someone else and someone else and another in depth news program and more. Expert after expert analyzing the same data, tsking over the same catastrophic government train wreck. Since my mother has a serious hearing impairment, the volume is way up. While this is going on, I’m in the kitchen making dinner.  Meyshe will kindly close the door to put some baffling between the panic and us and then we turn on the hood fan over the stove so we can’t hear it at all.

	Stay sane. Or at least hold on to the threadbare sanity that still lingers.

We do what we can,


Tobie

> On Aug 8, 2020, at 7:19 PM, peter macinnis <petermacinnis at ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> 
> There are whales frolicking in the waters, birds in the trees and clouds in the sky.  Because we came down fairly hard at the start, in spite of the idiots, we are holding the threat at bay, so Chris and I go walking most days for an hour and a half. We count the spring flowers (for plants, spring starts in late July) and stuff.
> 
> We're walking barefoot on a razor edge...
> 
> peter
> 
> On 9/08/2020 06:33, tobie at shpilchas.net wrote:
>> We’ve been sheltering extremely in place since very early March. Somebody tell me, are there still oceans? clouds? Is physical law still working? If I drop something outside of our shelter, will it be guaranteed to fall as per gravity?
> 
> 
> 
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"Be a Man."  (Man to child)

Tobie Shapiro
mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net <mailto:tobie at shpilchas.net>