CoViD-19 and I

In case you missed it, the four of us still seem to be quite healthy. The political balance is clearly tilting in favour of giving people some hope, though the (detected) infection rates in both US and UK are roughly flat and the death rate, while declining quite convincingly in the UK, is going down slowly and somewhat ambiguously over here. About those death tolls, there is reason for doubt. Comparing mortality figures in March and April against previous years, the NYT finds  that New York (the state) has some 23k deaths unaccounted for, versus an official body count of 26k due to CoViD-19, and California slightly more than 1k.  China has also revised its numbers upward. The silver lining of this analysis, if one dare call it that, is that the real death rate probably peaked sooner than we realised. The lead lining is that the infection spread further, faster, and probably started even earlier than any of us knew. I'm now re-reading  The Mercy Men , a childhood favourite o