Life in the Time of COVID-19: Update for May 2, 2020

Photo Illustration: Pixabay

Hi, there, Constant Reader. Well, it's Saturday, May 2, and it's late morning here in my corner of Florida. The current temperature is 71℉ (22℃) under mostly sunny skies. Looking at the forecast, it looks like it's going to be a warm, sunny day, with temperatures expected to reach a high of 84℉ (29℃), dropping at night to a low of 63℉ (17℃). No rain is expected to fall in our area today.

Well, here we are in the fifth month of 2020, and we Floridians are still hunkering down in our homes due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Sadly, the Sunshine State is governed (for lack of a better word) by the Republican Party, and our governor, Ron DeSantis is a Donald Trump loyalist who is rarin' to reopen the state for business ASAP. This is not an attitude unique to our state; other Southern (and Republican-dominated) states like Tennessee and Georgia are reopening some businesses, although this is pretty much asking for trouble, as the virus is still floating around and more, not less, cases of COVID-19 are being reported.

As of this morning, the United States leads the world in the number of reported and confirmed cases of COVID-19: 1,104,305 (at 9:32 AM EDT). We also have the distinction of having the most fatalities: 65,069. In Florida, my home state, there have been 34,728 confirmed cases and 1,314 deaths. And because many people do not wear masks or practice the six-foot separation rules at stores and other places, the spread is not really slowing.

So if Governor DeSantis decides to "open Florida for business" soon, it will be a disaster, and we'll see a spike in both reported infections and deaths. Already, where Georgia's governor issued a limited lifting of restrictions on certain businesses, there was a "spike" in COVID-19 cases. Coincidence? I think not.

I wish that the pandemic would burn itself out or, at the very least, that the "slow the spread" campaign would be more effective than it is at present. Clearly, some of the self-quarantine and social distancing clearly works, or else the numbers of patients with COVID-19 and the death toll would be much higher. But many Americans are either in denial or think that "flattening the curve" and "slowing the spread" measures are just politically-motivated efforts to hurt the reelection chances of one Donald J. Trump.

 Trump and his supporters have made a bad situation even worse by (a) mismanaging the efforts to fight the pandemic from Day 1, (b) minimizing the severity of COVID-19's effects by saying "it's no worse than the flu," and (c) blaming others, including the Chinese government, Barack Obama, and the World Health Organization (WHO) for the Trump Administration's incompetence and slow reaction to the crisis. 

Ugh.

In other news, I finished reading Richard B. Frank's Tower of Skulls, the first book in a new trilogy about the Asia-Pacific War that began with Japan's war against China in 1937 and became, after December 7, 1941, another theater in the global conflict known as World War II. This first volume focuses on the first years of the Asia-Pacific War and ends shortly before the Battle of the Coral Sea (May 1942), the "high tide" of Japanese power in the region.

© 2020 W.W. Norton & Company

Overall, the book is a fascinating re-examination of the war that destroyed the Imperial Japanese Empire, with a badly-needed focus on the role played by China and its leaders, especially Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek in the runup to Pearl Harbor. Most Americans have forgotten that it was Japan's aggression toward China that prompted the Roosevelt Administration to take the measures that it did between 1940 and 1941, including the rebasing of the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Hawaii in 1940 and a total trade embargo - especially oil - after Japan's army occupied French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam) in early 1941.

The book is well-written and a riveting read, but I wish W.W. Norton's proofreaders had looked at the galley proofs a bit more closely.  Not only are there a few distracting typos in the text, but in the endpaper maps, there are quite a few embarrassing mistakes concerning the dates of Japan's conquests in late 1941 and early 1942. If I ever get around to reviewing the book here, I'll explain further.

Anyway, that's it for today. I will probably spend most of today writing another blog post for my WordPress blog, and maybe even watch a movie in the evening.

So, until next time, Dear Reader, stay safe, stay healthy, and I'll catch you on the sunny side of things.