covid diary: day 71

I'm a tufted titmouse, and even I know something
about this advice is really sketchy.

Great news, you guys! Governor Holcomb said we can move to Phase 3 of reopening the state two days early! I'm sure that has nothing to do with reopening more stuff on Friday of a holiday weekend instead of making people wait until Sunday. So now you can go to the gym, or spend the weekend at a campground, or stay in one of our glorious state park inns, or go to the movies or the mall. You can dine in at restaurants or go drink at the bar. You can even have gatherings of up to 100 people! Isn't exciting?

Um.

Every day in Indiana, there are roughly 500 new cases of COVID-19 diagnosed. Some days there are more, and some days there are less. (Today, there were a whopping 676!) But friends, we don't even meet the *first* criteria set out in the federal guidelines for reopening (a 14-day downward trend in cases), let alone any of the other metrics.

But I guess that's cool, because most of the other states don't either, and they're all reopening.

Listen, I want things to be back to normal as much as anyone does. I want work to be steady and jobs to be plentiful and everyone to be traveling footloose and fancy free. I've got a lot of national parks still on my list, along with a bunch of other places I'd like to see and to show the boys. I miss going to the pool. I want to be able to buy toilet paper freely, for heaven's sake. But we're not there yet, and we won't be there for a long, long time to come.

So the governor can say it's so much safer now and we should feel free to congregate and get back to normal, but it's not, so we can't.

Nationwide cases: 1,577,758. Deaths: 94,729.