Relocking

Here you find me and my sparring partner Heironymus Bash ready for the renewed New Mexico lockdown that begins Monday.  Bars will be shut.  Indoor restaurants will be closed, though there will still be takeout and outdoor patio dining at half capacity.  Masks are mandatory in public, even for joggers and other people doing exercise.  Anyone from out of state is supposed to isolate for two weeks, though somehow I doubt they will.

The sad thing is that our governor did everything right.  Locked down in mid-March, followed the advice of scientists, issued regular bulletins, kept the state locked down despite the screams of those who wanted an early opening, then around the start of June ordered a staged re-opening, step by cautious step.

Right about the time the state began its re-opening it had a huge leap in Covid cases, but it was an outlier caused by the virus breaking out in one of our prisons, and the number of cases continued to decline for a while, but by mid-June (significantly, two weeks after the Memorial Day holiday) the number of cases started to rise, and the other day we had the single largest number of reported cases ever.

The number of deaths are down, because most of the new cases are young, active people who went out in public and got themselves infected.  The older folks never unlocked, and aren’t getting infected at the higher rate.

And in the rest of the country, over 68,000 cases in a single day.  That’s insane.

I got nothin’, folks.  I got nothin’ wise or encouraging to say, I have no bright ideas, and I have no observations.  Except one.

The virus is smart.  People are stupid.  Full stop.