- Quarantine Day 249
- Livermore cases: 1,184
- Alameda County cases: 26,164; deaths: 490
- U.S. cases: 11,650,000+; deaths: 251,000+
California moved most of its counties (including Alameda) back to the purple (strictest) tier this week and a 10pm-5am curfew goes into effect starting tomorrow night. This despite our cases-in-last-7-days-per-100k only increasing to 24 (up from 17). The goal, of course, is to stay ahead of the exponential curve because if you react once it starts spiking you're already too late.
Heather and Corinne had just restarted in-person gymnastics classes 3 weeks ago. Heather got to go twice, Corinne went once (she had a badly skinned knee the first week), and now they're shut down again. So the girls are pretty bummed out about that.
North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Montana, and Utah are all above 100 cases-in-last-7-days-per-100k.
The CDC recorded 2,045 deaths for yesterday. The highest since April. And as a nation we surpassed 250,000 deaths this week.
We're seeing news reports, again, about states setting up emergency treatment facilities in sports arenas and parking garages. El Paso county in Texas is now using at least 10 refrigerator trucks as temporary morgues while paying prisoners $2/hr to move bodies.
There's been promising news from the vaccine researchers over the past couple of weeks. Some are hopeful that emergency use authorization and administration to the highest-priority populations could happen before the end of the year (this would be front-line medical personnel).
I am quite concerned about what's going to happen to case rates with Thanksgiving less than a week away with already serious surges happening throughout the country. Thanksgiving is historically the busiest travel week of the year and that travel begins today.
Public health departments and medical advisory groups are practically begging people to stay home and not gather in large groups. The CDC issued an advisory statement recommending people to stay home and not travel for Thanksgiving:
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Meanwhile, as the country melts down around us due to lack of any national leadership on the pandemic, Trump continues to deny reality that he lost the election. He's currently attempting to convince Republican-held legislatures in states he lost to instruct their electors in the Electoral College to vote for Trump instead of who the voters in that state voted for. This is just the latest tactic in his so-far completely failed attempt to "prove" that he actually won despite all available evidence.
It has me concerned because apparently more than half of self-identified Republicans believe him. They're convinced that Trump won and will do anything to overturn the actual will of the people. And Trump is fueling this fantasy with a constant fire hose of disinformation. I'm becoming increasingly concerned about what these rabid followers might do come Inauguration Day when Biden is sworn in as president. We've already seen one group arrested in Michigan for plotting to kidnap their governor, seize control of the state-capitol building, and air a week of executions of democratically elected officials. This was their plan that they were actively pursuing. They think they're patriots and the disinformation campaigns they've glued themselves to convince them they're right.
When I was taking the graduate course on terrorism and counter-terrorism at Texas A&M in 2014 I had not thought that just a few years later we'd need to adapt the principles of radicalization intervention to be applied to right-wing terrorist groups within the United States. But here we are and it won't actually happen so long as the guy in charge of implementing such an intervention is instead actively fueling the radicalization efforts.
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I discovered that I'm probably not at fault for the broken fan blade mentioned in my previous post. I watched another one fall off the fan yesterday with nothing happening to it. I then inspected the remaining blades and found that all of them had been cracked in the same way due to improper installation and were all just waiting to fail.
I then inspected the 2nd fan we had installed and found those blades had also been incorrectly installed, however in a different way that did not damage them. We'll see what the company I paid to install them has to say about it. I'm hoping they are appropriately embarrassed and offer at least a partial refund for the work.
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Our tree is a really nice orange this year. Though it looks more brown in the picture.
