From my clutter: brief items, sadly all COVID related

A terrible warning
The people of this Canadian church thought they were doing everything right -- limiting numbers at a birthday celebration, practicing distancing, washing their hands. It didn't work.

Despite that, 24 of the 41 people at the party ended up infected. Two of them died.

This is a cautionary tale I wouldn't want to live.

Must the 90,000 dead be unmarked?
Micki McElya, a historian of how our society mourns asks why we treat COVID deaths as entirely private griefs.

There have been no political funerals for the pandemic dead. In the absence of official national mourning, we’ve not seen many spontaneous memorials or vigils at all. Instead, plenty of flag-waving demonstrations to end stay-at-home orders and reopen businesses pop up all over the country. We’ve seen American Patriot Rally protesters armed with rifles in the Michigan State House as legislators debated whether to approve the governor’s request to extend the shutdown in that state. We’ve seen pandemic-fatigued New Yorkers rush to parks on the first warm day, barely distanced and some unmasked. But we’ve seen no comparable mass action for the dead.

... China recently observed a National Day of Mourning, and Spain plans to have a period of mourning when its lockdown eases. In the United States, we have not had so much as a collective moment of silence, even as the number of COVID-19 deaths exceeded the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. The American flag still flies high atop the White House. Instead, every reference to the costs of the pandemic seems to refer to individual losses and pain, the private grieving that is now rampant. ... Minneapolis Star Tribune

Obviously the last thing we want are well-attended public gatherings, but we ought to have the ingenuity to offer something unifying in response to 90,000 individual tragedies. And that's despite our lack of leadership ...

California is not really having success at stopping the coronavirus
It's easy, sheltering in place comfortably in San Francisco, to get the impression that the state is really doing quite well. Hardly anyone I know has been infected by the virus; those who have been sick have recovered. Most of us who can have accommodated ourselves to considerably constrained lives of infrequent excursions wearing masks and perhaps some boredom. But Kelsey Piper carefully explains that any impression that we're through the worst of this is simply unfounded. We're going to be living in some version of this for a long time ...

California is in limbo and is making very little progress toward an exit strategy. Case numbers aren’t falling, despite the lockdown. Testing is increasing, but too slowly. The state can’t meet its goals for contact tracing and isolating exposed people. The state’s guidelines for when to reopen look reasonable, but it’s not clear when (or if) they’ll actually be met.

This is bad news. It’s also jarring, because California has more resources, more public cooperation, and in many respects better leadership than most states. If all those advantages have nonetheless left the state with no real path to reopen, it seems as though most states should expect even worse. California’s experience illustrates just how vexing the coronavirus has been to deal with — and just how steep the challenge is for the country as a whole as it inches its way to a reopening that it hasn’t yet earned.

I want this to be wrong, but I find this exposition both informed and convincing. We need to adjust our expectations and hopes to accept a long, precarious siege of ill health, accompanied by awful economic pain. Read it all.