My new classroom space set up for thirteen students socially distanced (still a lot of extra furniture and whatnot lying about, but all the desks are in place). Whether the students will actually see the inside of this room this fall is still an open question.
Imagine that you live in Syria or Yemen. Or any war-torn country for that matter, any place that has refugees fleeing by the millions. Schools are shuttered of course as people struggle simply to stay alive. Some hunker down, trying to ride out the shelling and sniper fire. Others flee, hoping for sanctuary some place else.
In this environment imagine someone making the impassioned call on social media that kids need to be in school. They need to have their lives back, be with their friends, do the things that kids do. Is this person wrong? No, they are absolutely right. The problem is simply this: What the kids need is not possible. It would be insane to send kids to school in the middle of a war zone simply because they need to "get back to normal." No school experience in time of war is going to be normal, and that's assuming that everyone stays alive. And likewise I always find it a little strange when we talk about the threat of this virus, and then in the same breath declare"But you know, the kids just need to be in school." My question is: What exactly do you expect to happen if they go back?
I don't know if people fully understand that in all but the most radical "Virus is NBD" schools our kids that go back to in person learning won't be going back to "normal." Between the social distancing, the mask wearing, the limits on the typical activities that might involve close contact from glee club to football, simply sending kids back to school is not sending them back to normal.
Do kids need to be in school? Sure. Do they need to have a normal life? Yes. The question is, is that actually possible right now?
So as I am getting into preparing for a very strange new school year, my time has become more compressed and as a result this post features data (and the above thoughts) from Monday, August 10 even though I'm only now organizing that information and posting today, Wednesday, August 12. That means there should be another Dispatch out tomorrow! Hopefully my schedule will even out a little bit so that I'll be able to get that post out on time.
As of Monday, August 10, there had 5,097,826 total cases of COVID-19 in the United States. This included 165,733 new cases, meeting my prediction that we'd cross the five million mark and surpassing my projected number by about 3000 cases. It took us 18 days to from the time I first documented the fourth million to get to the fifth, about three days longer than I'd predicted. At this rate we should hit six million by August 30. By Monday, we'd also experienced a total of 162,959 deaths connected to the virus in the U.S, 2,375 of which occurred in the previous three days. This is just about 2,000 fewer than I had predicted would perish in that time period. With this data in mind, I predict we'll have 5,271,152 total cases by tomorrow, Thursday, August 13 (As of right now we are only 75,000 cases away from that number). As for total deaths, on Monday I would have predicted 165,403 total deaths by tomorrow, but we have already surpassed that prediction by 46 souls as of today.
As of Monday new cases were up in Ohio and Florida. Florida's numbers, after briefly dwelling on my graph, have now once again catapulted beyond its borders with 26,572 new cases in the previous three days. Ohio's increase argues against a gradual decline and perhaps a new higher "normal" rate of new cases in the state.
Total Cases (as of Monday, August 10):
Florida: 536,953 total cases, 2.5% of the population
Ohio: 101,731 total cases, 0.87% of the population
Nebraska: 28,696 total cases, 1.5% of the population.
Florida's three day death toll has once again rocketed off the charts, with 830 people succumbing to the virus in the three days prior to Monday. It would seem that Florida's decline in deaths--if indeed it is happening--is happening slowly. Ohio, on the other hand has recorded it's second lowest death count since I began tracking the data. As for Nebraska, the state continues to trundle along showing very little variation in it's death rate in the entire time I've been tracking its data. Nebraska has recorded more than 15 deaths in a three day period only three times since the beginning of April and those instances were spread out, not clustered around a single peak. Likewise, since April 18, the state has had less than five new deaths only six times. Like it's endless sea of cornfields, Nebraska is notable for how unchanging the virus mortality landscape has been in that state.
Total Deaths
Florida: 8,276, a rate of 1.5%
Ohio: 3,673, a rate of 3.6%
Nebraska: 28,696, a rate of 1.2%
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