Infectious disease specialists are saying that COVID-19 cases may be falling in the south, but the midwest is about to become the new Ground Zero.
That’s no surprise if you saw the news this weekend, including footage of yet another Lake Of The Ozarks party, with hundreds of people jammed together at a concert and around swimming pools — all while not wearing masks. What should we expect in a state where the governor refuses to mandate you cover your face, and hasn’t offered any valid health guidance about the coronavirus?
Not to be outdone, Illinois had its own super-spreader event, the self-titled “White Trash Bash,” with some 500 partiers gathered on the Illinois River in East Peoria. Also without masks or social distancing, of course.
As with other such careless mass gatherings, the attendees of both these events have since headed back to their home communities without being tested, without quarantining, and without any form of contact tracing. That won’t end well.
Meanwhile, on Friday, the first public school to re-open — Greenfield Central Junior High in Indiana — ran into a little snag. One of the kids, who’d been in the classrooms and hallways with his fellow students all day, tested positive for COVID-19. This wasn’t a unique report from halfway through the semester. This was just a few hours into Day One.
Hopefully, other school districts will take this as a learning opportunity. Anyone — from Betsy DeVos on down — who thinks students, staff, and teachers will be safe inside school buildings for several hours at a time is out of their mind.
But it’s not just schools that are trying to return to normal at the wrong time. Also on Friday, the first cruise ship to resume sailing reported — upon returning to dock after a week on the water — that four of its crew had tested positive, too. The ship’s next voyage has been cancelled, and the cruise company is trying to track down 177 people who’d been on board with the asymptomatic crew members but had disembarked and returned to their homes around the world.
And don’t even get me started on baseball, which will be lucky to play enough games to finish this week, let alone its planned sixty-game season.
If you need me, I’ll be right here at home, breathing only on my wife.