Trying To Keep Up

I keep checking several websites and follow news on several stations, trying to keep track of what the virus is doing. It's becoming quite the challenge.

Everybody has a different way of tracking cases. I tend to bookmark the ones I find most useful online. The first and best I found quit updating over a week ago. It was operated by a college student (grad?) and he simply stopped, hopefully only because he wasn't getting any financial support for his massive project.

There are still two I follow which cover our national cases, one as a breakout of one country in a long list of countries, the other as total for the country, then broken down by states. Their numbers do not match. One consistently under reports. News coverage has mentioned that some states refuse to reveal full death statistics, muzzling coroners to keep them from giving out numbers, or when the virus causes death by heart, kidney, or other causes in the variety of ways it kills, they get chalked up to that particular cause rather than the virus.  Can't discourage the tourists (ahem: Florida), don'cha know. Truth will finally emerge, but by then it'll be way too late for unnecessary victims.

Another differential in case numbers comes from which country the reporting source is in. "The Guardian" is a pretty solid source. It's in the UK. No axe to grind in keeping our economy running well enough to give the appearance of its politicians doing a good job. You may guess their numbers are higher than US sourced ones.

Local numbers are also reported in various ways. Arizona's official Department of Health site is upgraded daily, and offers clarification by cases per county. You know, in case I needed to know Maricopa County had the highest level of cases accompanying the highest population of our counties. Duh!

Another map offers cases by zip code. I have been plugging in two since the day I discovered it, Sun City (ours), and Sun City West. At the start, we had 23 cases, they had 6-10. At that low level, theirs wasn't broken down further. I noted how their level compared to ours, and both in reference to the fact they closed their community centers before we did.

After a couple weeks, numbers started moving. Of course that's bad news, but I was reassured that the site was actually operating in real time. Today we've risen to 39 cases. Sun City West jumped up to 55. I have to wonder if their slow start gave false reassurance and people started gathering sooner, though not in the community centers of course. No way to know how the number of cases by zip relate to deaths. That isn't broken down on this site.

I regularly check a country wide map showing cases by county. Since I have that information already for Arizona, I check in on Minnesota, see how it is where each part of the family is. Hennepin (Minneapolis) is worst of course. My daughter assures me they are seriously quarantining. Work happens from home. Chisago, where Paul lives and where we hope to return to for a bit this summer, was sitting at 7 cases for weeks and just now started to climb again. Everybody else is quite rural, and their numbers are pretty low. Beltrami, where my brother's family is, has been stable at 6. Period.

It's gotten so the big numbers, state and country, were somewhat easy to keep in my mind until the next day's update. But there have been too many changes. The only way I can keep track any more is by noting the numbers here, then going back and checking by date I posted. If you're both following this and alert, you notice I've stopped doing that. I think I'm in overload. It's going to take respectively larger numbers to register. Not one thousand but 10, not ten thousand but hundreds. I have no doubt that it'll be multiple millions way too soon.

Here's why. Steve and I went to WalMart this morning. He had to pick up his new glasses and have them fitted. We both took advantage of the outing to do our shopping so we didn't need to make another trip soon. One thing which stood out was the low percentage of shoppers wearing masks. Even compared to last week when he had his eye exam and ordered the glasses. Especially compared to our most local grocery store, where almost everybody wears a mask.

The trio who stood out for not wearing masks today was a daddy with two young daughters. I caught part of their conversation as we passed each other. The elder daughter, perhaps 8, asked her daddy to confirm that the virus was just going to fade away so they didn't need to worry about it. Daddy confirmed it to her.

I suspect the combination of my mask and distance which kept them from hearing. "That's not true," which I couldn't stop from saying in response to their backs. I hope they don't find out the hard way. But either Daddy is getting his information from the wrong places or he doesn't want to scare his kids at the same time he doesn't provide them masks. Then, again, the two are not mutually exclusive.