Global Cases: 7,325,839; Deaths: 413,761
Locally, the number of new cases has slowed to a trickle – yesterday there was 9 – and people have moved on from obsessing about the disease to obsessing about ‘opening up’ as businesses and society return to operation.
This Monday, June 8th, the rowing club opened its doors for the first time since March. Eager beavers, like bargain shoppers overnighting on a pavement for a sale, were there at 8am to savour the right to row again. For now, access is limited to single sculls, as you’d expect with social distancing, but the impact to the village after long weeks of social hibernation of seeing these sleek boats once again on the river is something.
In the US, there are protests upon the theme of Black Lives Matter. These protests have overshadowed the story of the pandemic. The Guardian Newspaper yesterday reported that more than a dozen states had registered new highs for infections over a rolling seven day period. Trump no longer talks about the virus, apparently believing that with silence will come absolution. The vacuum of leadership at the apex of the administrative triangular system, the federal government, has forced the states of the union to depend on their own resources.
This has resulted almost inevitably in the lockdown easing equivalent of a bidding war, where states compete with each other to remove restrictions more quickly. They are egged on by constituents weary from the lockdown and fearful that the jobs they temporarily stepped away from will cease to be.
In this rolling mess of misinformation, information fatigue, and fast changing circumstance, people in states that have not yet had the full brunt of the wave see badly hit states coming out of lockdown and wonder why they should persist with precautions for an illness that has not yet arrived.