182,904 new COVID cases today, including TechTalk's friend. 1394 new deaths today. One projection suggests that we could be at 320,000 dead by the end of the year. Crickets from the President, other than an elaborate press conference in the Rose Garden, flags fluttering, first remarking that it was a beautiful day, and then taking credit for Pfizer's progress on a vaccine. Crickets from my Republican governor. Two days ago, my Republican governor suggested that the unemployed should consider going back to school.
Wow I go away for a day to shoot and there's a tidal wave of posts to read to catch up.
A quick story about my experience yesterday with Covid. I went to shoot in a small town in NE Indiana. We go there to work a lot. So much in fact that we are given access to the factory like we are employees. The product we were to shoot was located in a partially empty building away for workers and we had no in-person interaction with any staff. We kept a couple of overhead doors partially open to provide airflow even though it was brisk outside. We brown bagged lunch. Overall we felt pretty safe.
So I texted my contact in the Marketing Dept. to tell him we were on the job and I asked him how things were going. He proceeded to tell me that a huge chunk of the Marketing Dept. as well as others in the Corp. office were out with Covid, either had it or were exposed via their kids in school or their spouses. My contact told me that even he had to quarantine because his dentist had Covid and exposed him. My contact did not get sick. I didn't ask how they were doing in the production side, but if I had to venture a guess I would suspect they were having issues as well.
We have been concerned about this area all year. Mask wearing in the general surrounding community is pretty low. There is a very large Amish community and they are a pretty big part of the workforce for these factories. I see very low mask usage for them, but thats not to say the non Amish any better. This county has 300-400 new cases a day, 13,000 total cases and 186 deaths. Currently they are between 1-6 new deaths per day depending on the day. Roughly 200k residents in this county.
Lucky for us this is the last Motorhome or RV we have to shoot until next spring. This is normal for us,and we generally don't work from Nov. to late Feb. or March anyway. So we are going back into "mostly stay at home lockdown" mode. Hopefully we can ride this out safely. I was to have some surgery but thats on the back burner now. We are fairly well stocked with supplies but I think we will hit the stores mid week and lay in a bit more, just in case. We have been shopping on a regular basis in person all along but I'm considering going to internet ordering and in person pickup from the grocery. For my mom, going to the store once a week is about the only thing besides a walk that lets her get out of the house. I'm not sure I can take that away from her. She has an interesting outlook, She says, I'm 90 and I don't want to die, but I still want to have a little bit of life as well.
Yea Covid is real but there is a big part of the world, at least in my little slice, that are still saying screw it.
