Hunkered down, somewhere in Wyoming, part 6

Is anyone else checking those daily COVID-19 tallies from Johns Hopkins University?

It's become a habit. It's always bad news. Thousands of new cases and thousands of deaths. The USA leads the pack as of right this very minute with 432,132 confirmed cases and almost 15,000 deaths. New York is still the epicenter, with NYC reporting the highest death count.

We are lucky and/or blessed in Wyoming as we have 230 cases and 0 deaths. I don't really trust those numbers as only 4,000-some tests have been done in a state of 580,000. We've seen in other states that deaths are being uncounted due to various reasons, notably the shortage of tests. The  Worldometers site has started including U.S. military cases provided by the Department of Defense. Its page reports 3,160 more cases than JHU.

The numbers are sobering. They scare me. I'm not as scared as I was when the pandemic swept into the USA and some hysterical reports made me believe that all of us over 60 were doomed. And then the toilet paper and hand sanitizer ran out. What will become of us? That was three weeks ago and friends and neighbors have kept us supplied and my family is still intact. We don't leave the house except to take walks in the park on nice days and maybe get ice cream cones at the DQ drive-up. This "social distancing" policy is working to "flatten the curve" of infections. The University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation has feeds COVID-19 stats onto its super-computers every day. The numbers are beginning to be reduced, showing fewer infections and deaths if we continue social distancing through August. If restrictions are relaxed too soon, we risk another outbreak.

We shall all go mad if we need to hunker down until August. Of course, some states do not have mandatory social distancing in place (looking at you Wyoming) which may affect the numbers. And there's a guy named Trump who wants everybody to return to work by May so the country's employment numbers will get better and everybody will be happy and vote for Trump and then he can finish fucking up our democracy.

People are dying. Time to listen to the scientists and statisticians and tune out the white noise from the White House.