A Sad Image

[escape]

I was greeted by another death notice this week when I arrived at work—another co-worker had died. I took the photo to document the time and place.

[IMG]IMG_7645[469] by pongo now, on Flickr[/IMG]

[DanK]

How sad. Thanks for posing. The numbers are so overwhelming that it is hard to realize the real people that they represent.

It's hard to grasp the numbers without some comparison. I mentioned to a friend that the known COVID casualties in the US now exceed the total US casualties in the entire Vietnam War by nearly 1/3, and we know that the COVID figure is an underestimate. He replied that the COVID fatalities every three days roughly equal the casualties from the 9/11 terrorist attack. He brought this up because of a recent federal estimate that the daily rate may hit 3,000 in the not too distant future: another 9/11 every single day.

[rpcrowe]

Sad and fearful image... Our world has turned upside down... At least two White House staffers have developed COVID-19. I wonder if that might be a wake-up call for the Administration. A comedian recently quipped, "My doctor diagnosed that I have ebola but, I cured that! I fired my doctor!"

My favorite restaurant chain, The Soup Plantation, has closed 42 restaurants permanently. It as a salad bar buffet which cannot exist under the COVID-19 constraints. While this is inconvenient for me, it is devastating for the many thousands of workers from that chain. There are many-many other buffet type restaurants which will probably also be forced to close; resulting in more permanent job losses!

Additionally, I don't know if this is a local thing or throughout California (I know that the Federal Government would never bring up an idea like this) but, when eating establishments do open again, we will no longer have self service drink machines... This would eliminate many jobs in the industry that produces/services those machines.

Some supermarkets are now packaging their produce in plastic bags to prevent customers from picking through the produce.

I look around at young folks and realize that their lives have been altered in very significant ways. My parents had their lives impacted by the Great Depression... We will most likely look back at the pre-COVID 19 days as a Golden Era...

[Tronhard]

Our technology has become both a curse and a blessing.

The curse is that we have become a globally mobile society as never before, so people and goods have moved through borders, carrying the pandemic with them and at times faster than governments could react. It is a curse in the way that false news has proliferated through the WWW from interest groups assigning the pandemic to biological warfare, the 5G network (!), and a bunch of other crazy theories.

It is a blessing, in that we have the communication means to engage people to protect themselves (when willing to do so), and the ability for researchers to quickly identify, analyze and begin countermeasures as never before. The pandemic of 100 years ago kills many millions, and currently we are far from that.

This does not in any way reduce the pain and grief for lost loved ones, for businesses and livelihoods. This is a shock and it will have consequences into the future. Our globalized world worked because of trust, but now much of that is eroded as we fear the transmission of illness. International travel, especially tourism will take a hit for some time I suspect, and that will devastate whole economies that depend on it.

At the same time pandemics are not new. One site I viewed indicated a history of over 40 identified ones in our history, but as our population increases the damage gets potentially worse. We are in for an interesting few decades: between beating the pandemic and climate change. This does have a potential positive spinoff - that we will do things differently to protect ourselves and the planet.

[rpcrowe]

Somehow I became subscribed to a cruise ship YouTube channel. Not one sponsored by any cruise ship line.

It is difficult for me to believe that when one cruise ship company stated that they "might" begin cruises in August - that there were loads of people in line to sign up...

It seems to me that anyone going on a cruise (after the debacles caused by COVID-19) before there is a vaccine for the virus is pretty foolish. Of course, they might be listening to Fox News...

[escape]

I think this could be nature's way of making a corrective adjustment to our societies yin and yang. I also agree with Trev's comment, "This does have a potential positive spinoff."

Just found out that 14.9% of the employees here have antibodies for the virus according to our governor. Not sure how they came up with that.