In these days of obsessive heat, high humidity, pandemics and a nation out of control, it’s hard to not get depressed.
Tuesday brings another day of hot sun, high humidity, a high temperature of 82 and a chance of rain at 30 percent, according to the National Weather Service office in Blacksburg.
Pretty much the same for Wednesday and Thursday before we head into a weekend of scattered thunderstorms as temperatures climb into the higher 80.
The United States topped 3 million total cases of the Covid-19 Coronavirus overnight with nearly 300,000 new infections and more than 540,000 have died worldwide.
“The United States is still knee-deep in the first wave” of the pandemic, said Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute Allergy and Infectious Disease on Monday.
America’s seven-day average of daily new cases of the virus has set record highs of new cases for 28 straight days.
Why? Communities in the U.S. “never came down to baseline and now are surging back up,” says National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins. Several of those states have reversed their openings of businesses, restaurants and public areas. They are closed “until further notice.”
Arizona has more than 100,000 new cases. Florida’s caseload is past 200,000 with more than 10,000 new cases a day.
In Virginia, however, no one died from the coronavirus on Sunday — the first day of no new deaths in three months.
The pandemic comes in a time of financial catastrophe, protests over social justice and spikes in violence in major cities.
Law enforcement reports show 65 people shot over the weekend in New York and 87 in Chicago. In Atlanta, 8-year-0ld Secoriea Turner died from a gunshot wound while riding a car with her mother on Saturday night.
In Washington, DC, gunshots erupted across the street of at an anti-violence cookout and one bullet struck and killed Davon McNeal, age 11. He was one of seven killed in the nation’s capital city over the weekend.
Contrary to popular belief, children also die from the Covid-19 Coronavirus.
In May, the Journal of the America Medical Association Pediatrics studied 48 of victims from birth to age 21 at 14 hospitals and found that two died and 18 were placed on ventilators with two remaining critical after more than a month.
Says Dr. Daniele De Luca, president of the European Society for Pediatric and Neonatal Intensive Care, in an Interview with The New York Times:
You can read this either like a half-empty glass or a half-full glass. At the end of the day, we have to realize that this disease can actually be serious in children. It’s not like in the beginning when some people said, OK, this is never going to happen
–The New York Times
On May 6, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found at least 58 deaths of young people, with 10 among those ranging from 14 and younger and 48 aged 15 to 24. CDC continues to study illnesses and deaths from the virus.
As we said earlier, it is not hard to be depressed in these difficult times.