The World's Common Tater

I wish I had something else to write about, but when you are home all day every day it doesn’t give you much material besides what is going on in the world. I wrote before about trying to find hope and that is still the case. I seem to be in a state that will be one of the last ones to reopen, so staying hopeful and positive is hard. It’s even harder when there is so much out there trying to crush any hope people might have.

I’ve been trying to avoid the news past reading the paper and watching part of The Today Show in the morning. I do check the Maryland numbers when they are released at 10 every morning in hopes of seeing positive news. Some days the numbers are better than the day before and I get hopeful. Other days the numbers aren’t better than the day before and the hope goes away. I’m not going to stop checking the numbers because I want to be informed, but I can avoid the news takes about the numbers. As I’ve written about before, the news stations love to post graphs and numbers that make things look worse. Over the last three days the number of people hospitalized have come down in Maryland. Our number of deaths have slowed a bit as well. All of the headlines after the new numbers come out focus on the totals that look really bad. If all you do is look at the headline you would have no idea that there have been some positive trends. Also, if you look at the graphs on the website you will see that the total number of deaths over the past 24 hours are confirmed deaths. The graph will show that the actual number of deaths from the day before are lower. Death is still sad no matter the number, but the trends look better if you look at all of the information.

The news and others online also tend to try to crush any hope about medicine and vaccines. There are experts out there saying we could have a vaccine by January. There is one expert that is on Governor Hogan’s team who said there might be a vaccine that could be used as early as this fall in any cities that have an outbreak. The paper this weekend had opinion pieces from doctors who think it will be years before we have a vaccine and then another article about a time a fast-tracked vaccine failed.

There are articles out there saying some experts say this might be with us for 2 years.

Some people seem to hope that the states opening up have a spike in deaths so they can say “I told you so”

We have people saying they hope their neighbors get sick because they had friends over.

We have people saying we should accept old people dying so the country can go immediately back to normal.

There seems to be no in-between. There are ways to slowly ease back to normal while protecting the vulnerable. We can’t go back to normal immediately, but we also can’t stay locked in our houses indefinitely. Unfortunately, it seems like everyone wants to take sides and fight instead of working together to figure things out.

It’s hard to have hope when we are fighting a virus and each other.

It’s hard to avoid the hopeless when they seem to be everywhere.