Holiday travel

We just blew past a quarter of a million people dead in the US alone, no estimate of total COVID deaths worldwide, those numbers are exponentially growing daily, California broke its own infection and hospitalization record last week. Washington DC numbers are through the roof. That’s almost 1,500 deaths a day.

Yes, it’s a pain that California is back on lockdown curfew in an attempt to slow down the disease vector, it hasn’t even been a year since the pandemic struck, and people are seriously thinking of traveling for the holidays? What is this bizarre mindset, kamakazi lemmings attempting to outfox death?

Someone in the Irish in California group asked, Hi all, quick question. What are your sentiments traveling home for Christmas? Most answers were all for traveling back to Ireland. Even though the pubs are closed. COVID be damned. What kind of mindset is that? One Irish guy said his mother would kill him if he didn’t return home for the holidays. I said you might kill her if you do. Coffin nails.

Geez. My sentiment is that I want to stay alive. I’d stay home, certainly not endanger myself or others. Too many places are disease vectors—especially planes. As Kim Silverman so eloquently said, “Travel is exactly how the pandemic became a pandemic. And it is now more prevalent than ever before.” 

From a friend: “More than 200,000 NEW cases of COVID in the United States today. Only 37 countries in the world have had more than 200,000 cases in TOTAL since the pandemic began. For God's sake, and for the sake of our health workers, and of your loved ones, please be safe. Stay home. This is such a dangerous time.”

“California just surpassed a sobering threshold – one million COVID-19 cases – with no signs of the virus slowing down,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom.

So sad, all of it. There are refrigerator morgues permanently parked outside Kaiser in SF. At first I wondered what they were, then the grim truth hit. Last month, my cousin and I went to visit the shipping container place at the port of Oakland where they customize and trick up shipping containers for you, and there were stacks of refrigerator morgues at the ready. They said the refrigerator morgues were selling like hotcakes. Grim thought.

And the Irish in California host thought I was being too heavy-handed because I shared this information on their page. Someone said, Shouldn’t you be out on a ledge somewhere? So a laissez-faire attitude is the appropriate response? What am I missing here? Death is not reversible. Death is heavy-handed.

Please feel free to rant about it. I’m flummoxed and angry at the gross stupidity of some sectors of humanity—and these people are not from the T.rump sector. I have little time to engage in schadefreude because COVID is relentlessly rolling its way through the upper echelons of the Republican Party. I just want my life back. Pre-COVID. But we have to work on this together. That COVID vaccine is still pie in the sky. And the reality check is not in the mail.

Photos: Shipping containers serving double duty as morgues. This is not something we should get used to seeing.  Stay home. Stay home. Stay home. Wear your mask. It’s the humane thing to do.