covid diary: day 16

Today was a quiet day, which is a good thing right now. We're cozy and relatively well protected at home (with the exception of Mike's ongoing exposure at work), and honestly, the biggest news today was that Radu's chicken wandered over from next door and Liam had to rescue it from the dogs and carry it back over and set it free on the right side of the fence.

So things are good at home, but we keep watching the news and seeing how not-great they are in the world generally. Late this afternoon, the United States officially became the country with the most confirmed cases of COVID-19, despite our ongoing shortage of testing kits. And that right there is the thought that keeps me in a perpetual state of anxiety: We have an ongoing shortage of testing kits. People across the country who clearly have all the symptoms are unable to get tested unless their symptoms get really bad. So now we have at least 86,140 cases that are bad enough to have been tested. What does the real number look like? I'm also seeing reports that the official death totals don't match what health care providers are seeing in their hospitals (for example, a doctor might note that three people died of obvious COVID-19 complications, but only one person makes it to the official report). This is partly because they can't afford to waste test kits on people who have died, so some of them will never be counted. Their families will never know their true cause of death, and we'll never know the true scope of this pandemic. Our toll today stands at 1,308, but who knows how many more there really are.