I wonder how many people are driving to Arizona right now.
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IIRC, Thanksgiving is kind of the unofficial opening of Snowbird Season, so a “non-zero” number of folks from up north coming down and (usually) stay until after Cactus League baseball training ends. (at least that was my experience when I lived in Mesa)
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Yeah…super excited about that: a state already in crisis about to be flooded by boomers.
The thing about boomers is that it seems like even the liberal ones (which on balance we get a lot more of here in Tucson) seem to have a very hard time getting their heads around COVID. I don’t track cable news, but I have to assume that CBS, MSNBC, CNN etc. are only marginally less shitty in explaining things than Faux News.
Does Florida also have a snowbird cycle, or is it mostly permanent retirees? I guess Florida doesn’t approach “unlivable” in the summer in quite the same way.
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One of our local epidemiologists pointed out that treating a public health emergency as a political issue has ended badly every time.
Our Ontario 
Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. David Williams was on CBC’s Metro Morning today and I almost fell out of my driver’s seat onto the road when he said (6m25s on the clip) that they got requests from retail to stay open, saw they were “holding” in their modified stage two and didn’t want to “close down in September and October and November, it would be really difficult”.
Hang on a minute… 
There’s so much to unpack here… it appears that:
- he doesn’t think the lockdown would work anyway,
- he’s looking at the “heat map” and colours not the trend lines,
- he’s put retail and restaurants, a relatively small sector of our economy ahead of public health and, to cap it all off,
- Had to kill off end of year gift sales and party revenue for both anyway.
We’re doomed…
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yes and yes (yours truly, being one of the latter). snowbirds come to stay a few months in vacation rentals, second homes and RV parks. these islands get real crowded this time of year and stay that way until around April - May (much like in AZ).
tourist traffic has been next to nothing so far, but I notice more out-of-state plates filing in every day.
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Oh… and there’s a wishy-washy article in The Toronto Star today with "Some safe travelling tips during COVID-19".
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The airlines are running YouTube ads based on their self-funded “planes are totally safe, nobody has ever gotten COVID on a plane” study, too.
And I thought the GoDaddy ads that start off with “As we re-open…” were bad.
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This just in: China suggests using QR codes globally to track people’s health. What could possibly go wrong with that?
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“Don’t.”
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What? Are they tattooing them?
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Sung to the Danny Elfman tune Making Christmas in Nightmare Before Christmas.
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Just no.
The Mummers Are Secretly Planning a Parade, Even Though Philly Has Canceled It
“The parade has always been a political event,” says one Mummer. “And if there can be parties in the streets for Joe Biden and big demonstrations for this and for that, then they can’t stop the Mummers.”
https://www.phillymag.com/news/2020/11/23/mummers-parade-2021-philadelphia-covid/
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Every time I see this or hear this on the news, I get so angry. We wonder why some people aren’t isolating and it’s due to the mixed messaging. Even the CDC had tips early last week. I saw my single neighbor welcome a family of four yesterday – big hugs and kisses all around. And this is LA County. 
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Sigh
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On the one hand, this makes me angry because sports is so unimportant in the scheme of things. On the other hand I suspect that sports scholarships will be yet another one of the ways that COVID disproportionately affects minority communities. Kids who would be up for sports scholarships will probably be missing them, especially ones that can’t afford to travel to other states to avoid restrictions.
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Sigh.
From Nov. 12 through Nov. 21, UA found 126 positive coronavirus cases after administering 11,504 tests for a positivity rate of 1.1%, an increase from the 0.9% positivity rate the university reported the previous 10-day period.
Okay.
“We are in a post accelerated stage of the pandemic right now. So while the university continues to do incredibly well and is an exemplar for us of what we could be doing, we are not seeing that in the general community,” Cullen said.
Uh-huh. It could have been zero.
“If you do travel, including going home from your student residence, quarantine after arrival.”
“So when you get home for Thanksgiving on Wednesday, quarantine for two weeks, then fly back to Tucson, and quarantine for another two weeks. Why are you looking at me like I’m crazy?”
Reentry Task Force Director Richard Carmona
I confess that “Reentry” might be better than my “Reopening Fever”.
Sad but wise:
Regina Romero for Governor. Like, immediately.
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