Global Cases: 2,646,247; Deaths: 184,352;
The sun’s been shining the last couple of days and along the river the number of joggers, cyclists, dog walkers, and strollers has increased. “the swallows are back too, you see them flying around’, a younger man than me said as part of a recounting of our pastoral blessings.
It is indeed a glorious spot, as the Irish often say, when the sun shines. We are part of this war but it does not feel like the front line; even though I learned this week of a local Covid fatality – a sister of one of if not the first infected local.
In Ireland on April 22, there were 49 deaths and 631 new cases, numbers similar to what we’ve been seeing for the last 2/3 weeks. The next pivot point will be May 5th when the ongoing set of lockdown restrictions will be reviewed.
The discussions today are about how to ease the lockdown and the probabilities of there being a second/third/fourth wave of infections. Covid-19 has not disappointed. It is truly fucking up the way the world went about its business…and some of that is a good thing. Even the gung-ho outriders of populism are cagey about taking on the virus by pushing for an aggressive relaxation of lockdown restrictions.
Here’s a snapshot of the paper headlines today. The focus has shifted from the deaths and the infection numbers to the economic impacts – the huge numbers joining the unemployment register, the calamitous drop in air travel, the requests for business bail outs…all the fall out you’d expect from slamming the brakes on the global economy and sending almost everybody home to sit on their collective rear ends.
