Wednesday, August 26th, 2020
Not sure why, but last night I was exhausted and ended up going to bed at 21:30. EM thought I must be unwell. I did feel a little under the weather and am attributing it to the ample sun exposure I had throughout the day. Unsurprisingly I woke up at the ass crack of dawn, or rather even before (4:39), but managed to go back to sleep, making for almost 12 hours of sleep!
Unlike EM who worked out this morning I started the day with coffee in bed and a thorough news scan. Most of it was about the RNC, which is somewhere between a family affair and cheerleading for the moron in chief, mostly filled with lies. On any given day upwards of 1000 citizens in the USA die COVID-19 related death, 1.147 yesterday, and top officials at the RNC speak of the pandemic in the past tnese as somethign successfully overcome. As if ignoring its existance will make it go away. No mention of: 30 million people going hungry, 50 million unemployed (never mind the underemployed, who cannot live of their wages), 20 million who lost their health insurance, ~6 million who infected. And the Virus is history?
Everything I read today is outrageous. The GOP has no political party program, but decided that anything the President wants / does is the party's political program. At the same time they criticize Vice President Biden for not discussing enough policy in his nomination acceptance speech. It is pure hipocracy.
Speakers at the RNC blatantly lie, the moron in chief misuses the insignia of his office for his re-election, right winged armed “protectors” of businesses shoot protestors in Kenosha during protests, which have been going on for three days after a young man trying to appease a conflict was shot by police in the back 7 times while he was leaning into his car to speak to his three kids. Brian Jacob is 29 years old and now paralysed! It is simply revolting.
Badly needed to detox from the frustrating reads, so the beach without any electronics was a welcome respite. We tried the Fishing Pier again, opting for the very last beach access. I still need to get used to cars on the beach, but the way things were, they were pretty far apart leaving ample space for pedestrians such as ourselves. We set up on the soft sand farther from the shore. There was a strong wind, half onshore, half off-shore, so even with the sun out it did not feel to hot and only the odd fly found its way to us. Given EM was supposed to have an interview at 12:30 and we had planed to leave the beach in time for that the first two hours felt almost rushed, between warming up, a 20 minute walk and some swim time.
At the end EM left to head back to the house without ever having touched the water while I stayed and I am glad I did as it was a perfectly lovely day. Not too hot, seeing I migrated between sun, shade, sun, water, sun, shade, and so on and when summoned my personal Uber arrived to pick me up.
Our friends arrived around noon and over the afternoon everyone minded their own business: work, workshops, college briefings. Only I could lead a life of leisure, though I did prepare everything for our burger BBQ later tonight since it was too hot to sit out on the deck. Also, there is this annoying dripping of water from the balcony above.
Research on transmission suggest that aerosol transmission is underestimated . The main take away is that most transmissions are through aerosols, which is why masks can limit the spread and being in closed rooms is not a good idea. The author compared it to being in a room with a smoker and how smoke is accumulates depending on ventilation and is inhaled by other people in the room. Especially the comparison with smoke makes a lot of sense to me; it is like a virus made visible for illustrative purposes of the spread.
As Virus infections continue to rise (38k yesterday) to reach close to 6 million (at 5.99 million in the USA of 23.9 million worldwide), there is more political meddling. CDC has issued new guidance to states suggesting people who show no symptoms after having been exposed do not need to get tested for COVID-19. This is against all findings, where people need to know they are positive so they can quarantine and not expose others. Of course the only purpose of this guidance is to reduce the number of positives in the run up to the election. The administration wants to declare victory at any cost.
Please can this country return to some form of normalcy? Can there be a functioning adult at the helm of the administration rather than a narcist?