Waiting For The Hurricane
This is my inaugural Music and Musings post.
It's Monday, August 3, the morning after Isaias made his pass up Florida's east coast during the night. Fortunately for the folks in this part of the state he's now known more for his unpronounceable name than for his hurricane strength. We've been here only two years but pretend like we're hurricane weather veterans after enduring the threat of Dorian last year.
Hurricanes are a part of life in Florida. Some of our neighbors are genuine veterans, recently having endured the likes of Michael, Matthew, and Irma. (I wonder which hurricane gender has done more damage over the years). Last year as Dorian ravaged the Bahamas and set its sights on Florida, we learned of Mike's Weather Page where the author sticks to the facts, tracks the spaghetti models and stays away from the "panic porn" of the major news networks. Of course, to avoid succumbing to the panic you can adopt the behavior I captured in song last year.
The term "panic porn" is now also being used to describe some of the media coverage of the pandemic in Florida where COVID-19 cases are spiking. Depending on how the statistics are treated by your news source, you can easily think that our Governor made a mistake by relaxing stay at home orders too soon. But headlines about 10,000 cases a day can be misleadingly panic-inducing unless you bother to probe the more important statistics like death rate, and hospital utilizations that result from the cases. I saw a report this morning, for example, that after 300,000 cases over the last month in Florida, there are more hospital beds available now than there were a month ago.
Alex Berenson (@AlexBerenson) Tweeted:
Four weeks and 300,000 #SARSCoV2 positive tests later, Florida has more hospital beds available than it did on July 5. How ‘bout them apples?
The last thing we need is a hurricane to go with a pandemic. But the first one of the season seems to have been relatively benign for Florida. Hopefully the "eye" of the pandemic will pass soon too and the strength of the viral storm will begin to dissipate. It's going to be harder to determine the residual damage in the pandemic case. It won't be due to just fallen trees and flooded homes.