Today’s numbers for Indiana from the State Board of Health are 39 positive with 193 tested. (Update – those were numbers for 3/17/2020, the newly released 3/18/2020 numbers are 56 positives, 2 deaths, and 380 tested. So they doubled the testing and yielded an additional 17 positive cases, an increase of 43%. Update 2: For 3/19/2020, the numbers are 79 positive, 554 tested, and 2 dead: that means for the day we had an additional 23 positives and an additional 174 tested. Also a second positive case in Tippecanoe County – someone who had traveled to Paris). My friend Kate from Spain is providing daily reports from our future. They identified 3,000 new cases in the last day. They are on lock down. Reports are that Tippecanoe County had its first case — someone who was asymptomatic but flew to Florida a few days ago and is now in the hospital in Orange County, Florida. Given the timing, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I knew the person — it sounds a lot like it could be someone from West Lafayette who headed to Orlando for Spring Break. But that’s speculation.
I feel like the social pressure is shifting such that there is a lot of opprobrium developing toward people who aren’t taking this seriously. A few days ago, it felt like maybe things were a little up in the air about how serious this was or, to the extent it wasn’t, there was some live-and-let-live as to how long it was going to take people to appreciate the threat. Now there’s less patience. There were some people who went ahead with their Spring Break plans 5 days ago. Things are probably changing rapidly where they are too, so it probably won’t be that drastic, but in some ways, I feel like they might as well be coming back from the moon. Today was the first day I’d been to a store in over a week. I picked up carry-out from the Black Sparrow – they had some classical type music playing (I’ll call it Gothic, but I really don’t have the vocabulary) – the dining room was, of course, empty, and the lights were pretty dim. It was a little surreal. Then I went to CVS to pick up a couple of things. Other than people standing pretty far apart in line, it was pretty standard.
County government is adjusting. The Governor entered an executive order modifying the open door law such that more meetings can be conducted remotely. County facilities are mostly closed to walk-in traffic. The Courts are trying to operate, but they’re trying to postpone non-critical cases and handle more things by telephone, cancelling jury trials, and that sort of thing.
Guess that’s all I have for today.
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