Ernie was confirmed to have COVID at the end of May and was in the VA for a few days. This required Mom and I to quarantine for two weeks. 3 days before the end of the quarantine, I started having some of the symptoms. Add two more weeks of quarantine. Last Tuesday, Mom and I were able to get tested and yesterday we found out that we were negative.

Thankfully, the quarantine is over (knock on wood). The doc thinks that my shortness of breath is coming from the fire above Tucson, so even though I’m free to roam about the countryside, I get to have breathing treatments throughout the day.

This whole thing caused me to think. Everything is being opened to the public and mask requirements are to be determined by each jurisdiction (spoiler: masks aren’t required in most places) in Arizona. To date, there have been just shy of 60,000 confirmed cases and 1,463 deaths. Out of that, there were 1,795 new infections yesterday and 79 new deaths. All of those numbers don’t sound like much (actually only 8.7% of the population of AZ, all told), but when you factor that some people are carriers and don’t show symptoms, you have to consider that those infected numbers and percentage are actually higher (by how much, no one knows). Last week, we were only getting around 1,400 +/- new infections per day. Yet masks aren’t required in most places and the whole attitude is “let’s just keep going forward and not try to clamp down on the number of new infections.”

We truely live in the era of “I’m so stupid I don’t deserve to live”.