Coronavirus Nibbling at Conservative Strongholds

For the second time this year, guests have bailed out due to coronavirus worries.

I invited two friends and their son to visit this weekend. Another friend with three sons was also going to come. A third family with two adults and 5 kids was also included. The lady with three sons decided to bail because she was concerned about taking the disease to her elderly mother.

I’m so used to being insulated, I couldn’t figure out why she was canceling. She had to explain it.

Let’s see how things are going. The papers say we are approaching 800 known cases here, up from something like 300 as of June 1. Testing has gone crazy, which accounts for some of the increase, but it may also be that there is a real spike in cases. Our death toll is stuck at 10, and we have only had around 70 hospitalizations.

Interesting fact: the county is 11.5% black, but 17% of the known cases are black. The figure for non-Hispanic whites is not published, but based on other figures that have been disclosed, it looks like we come in at a little over 50%, in a county where 84% of the people are white and the vast majority of whites are non-Hispanic. In this county, Hispanics make up something like 6% of the population.

Conclusion: white people are doing very well, and other people are not. Why? Also, women are doing much worse than men.

Are white people and men really less likely to be infected, or are we just less likely to get tested?

As always, I don’t know. Testing is still sporadic even if it’s much more common than it used to be. The tests are not reliable. When they work, they only identify active cases, so we have no idea how many people have been infected, had no symptoms, and recovered. No one really knows what’s happening.

Am I concerned about this weekend? I’m not too concerned about myself, but guess who I’m entertaining? Blacks and Hispanics. None of them are old or severely obese, but three are on the heavy side.

I am not anxious to get sick or die, but I’m also not excited about cowering in my burrow and enjoying a continually contracting standard of life just so I can remain alive in a country which, were it a person, would now be close to being wheeled around on a handtruck wearing a straitjacket and plastic face restraint.

One family is from a county with 2700 cases, with a population about 25% greater than the county where I live. Not good, but well below 1%. The others live in a county right at 1%, although they don’t live in the densest area.

What do you do? Do you wall yourself into a hole and have food pumped in through a tube? Do you tear up all your masks and do whatever you please?

We still don’t have much in the way of major-celebrity fatalities. The only one I know of is Roy Horn, and calling him a major celebrity is gracious. Where are the deaths? Many celebrities are wealthy enough to hole up for the rest of their lives, but many are not. There are a lot of broke celebrities. Why aren’t any of them dying? Where are the broke ex-athletes who are very famous yet not rich enough to insulate themselves from coronavirus? They’re all still alive. Why?

The epidemic still doesn’t make sense. It probably won’t make sense 5 years from now. We have been lied to over and over because of Trump Derangement Syndrome, and leftists don’t like to go back and correct their lies years later. We may never know what is and is not true.

If there truly is a serious spike, we will see deaths spike just as much by the middle of July, and we will surely see some famous people die. If we don’t see these things, how can we believe the epidemic got significantly worse? What magic could explain it?

What if I get sick and die? I guess people will mock me for downplaying the epidemic. I’ll be on the streets of gold, however, so it’s not like I’ll care. Hooray for you; you got to deal with the end of civilization a lot longer than I did.

Based on New York’s experience, we have maybe another month of high numbers before us.

I will take reasonable precautions, as always, and leave it at that. I’ll keep trying to stay close to God. Hope I don’t end up in the hospital. If I die, I die. I don’t think it will happen, though. The odds against me being infected are high, the odds of dying are very low, and there is a very good chance I already had the disease in February.

If I stop blogging for a month, send donations to the NRA or World Relief and move on with your lives.