covid diary: day 117

Lego tree swallow. Because Mike likes them.

After a long weekend of doing not much of anything, today was a busy day around the homestead. Almost like normal times. Mike went off to work this morning, and then Bethany came to pick Max up for a day of outside work at her house. (They are clearing their backyard in preparation for getting a pool later this month, and none of us can wait.) Then at 10:15, Laura picked up Liam because today is the first day of summer tennis. My cousin Jimmy is a freshman this year (same as Max) and plans to play on the tennis team, so the two of them will have the same schedule for a while. Liam reported that tennis was "hot but fun." He did have a talk with his coach, though, about what precautions they will be taking. I didn't even ask him to do it -- he just decided that was the right thing to do. Coach acknowledged that (as I have been worried about) the drills are the riskiest part of the early season. They're planning to play mostly doubles this year to limit how many courts they need (so people aren't playing multiple singles matches and moving around talking to people between matches). Only one kid will be allowed on a bench at each time. Everyone has to bring their own water bottles and towels and stuff. I guess some teams are having designated balls for each kid, but our team decided not to go that route ... that's a decision I agree with too, because surface transmission is a much lower risk than initially thought. 

Over the long weekend, we had an explosion of new cases of COVID-19 in our county. To put it in perspective, they measure the rate of daily infection in cases per 100,000 people on a rolling seven-day average so they get a consistent rate for every location. According to that Harvard tracker I mentioned last week, Cook County, IL (Chicago), has a rate of 7.7. DuPage County, IL (hi Barb!) has a rate of 5.6. And our county, Marshall County, IN, has a rate of 24.4. We're right on the edge of the orange/red divide, meaning we basically have uncontrolled spread. 

I wanted to know more, so I went to look at the state's dashboard, which breaks down the demographics of the cases. Here's the story for Marshall County:

Look at that: 19.2 percent of new cases are kids 19 and under. Another 18.4 percent are age 20-29. That's almost 40 percent of new cases happening in young people. Roughly as many kids 19 and under are getting infected as adults ages 50 and older. That's a 20-year span on the young side, but a 40+ span on the older side. 

But sure, let's have school in person! It's not like these kids are coming home to families or anything.

Related to that, Harvard announced today that all classes for the entire upcoming school year will be held online. They're not giving kids a break on that $50,000 tuition though, so Harvard kids, maybe consider switching to a state school for the year and transferring some credits. Princeton is taking a different approach, allowing freshman and juniors to come back for the fall semester, sophomores and seniors for the spring semester, and the rest online. For that, they're giving a 10 percent discount on tuition. And the University of Georgia system? Welp, they're going back in person, masks optional. 

I'm sure that will work out very well.

Anyway, that was a whole flurry of college announcements this afternoon, and I suspect it's just the start of an avalanche of them. And once the colleges start going online, I'm guessing the odds will improve that K-12 schools will thing about following suit. We'll see.

Nationwide cases: 2,922,000. Deaths: 130,208.