Gloria in Excelsis Deo: {SQT} Self-Isolation Day #49

Friday, Self-Isolation Day #49

We request continued prayers for my husband's mother D. She has been sick with COVID-19 for about five weeks (now negative, but still sick), alone in the hospital for a month, and is now on her second stretch of being on a ventilator in order to give her lungs support for longer while they heal.

If you're here from Seven Quick Takes, note that I've been writing daily during this lockdown.

We limped to the end of our school week. Chris did our weekly grocery shopping: my putting away the groceries for a full hour always takes a bite out of a normal school day. I count my blessings that we have groceries to put away, unlike many jobless citizens in this country right now.

Two-year-old making me numerous "meals" while I taught first grade

A 15-foot branch fell and cut my head, which bled in the generous way head wounds do and left me with a bit of a headache; I'll spare you a photograph. The girls took a neighborhood bicycle ride in gorgeous weather. My 13-year-old and I transplanted his beautiful potted succulents which had been overtaken by red mites: quite a project! My 7-year-old wrote a letter to a pal; snail mail letters, often with tiny handmade gifts, have been zinging back and forth among the homeschool friends during lockdown.

Friday night pizza

After dinner and the oldest three kids cleaning the kitchen by themselves (yay!), Chris took all the children outside so I could lay on the couch with my ouchie head and read a book. Soon I was hearing fireworks . . . it turns out the little boy across the street is turning four years old, so his parents celebrated with simple, but super fun, fireworks in their driveway, which our kids got to watch. They had a fabulous time!

Bonus Reading for Posterity:

The following document from the CDC came across my desk, so to speak, today, and has me very upset. It seems legitimate to me: does it to my readers? Influenza has always been tracked honestly as "confirmed influenza" cases and deaths versus "influenza-like illnesses" (ILIs), which are unconfirmed. What is advertised on the media is that all these deaths are definitely, positively from COVID. Yet apparently even the CDC separates them out with ICD9 codes, such that mid-way through April, while our country was advertising more than 50,000 deaths "from COVID," it was only 11,000 confirmed cases. The much larger number was a combination of all illnesses possible from COVID, or influenza, or pneumonia from any cause. (Provisional Death Counts of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Pneumonia, or Influenza by week, United States. Week ending 2/1/2020 to 4/11/2020.)
Why would there be incentive to inflate numbers of known, true cases of COVID? A video put out by Veritas Press explains how rampant this practice is in the New York City metro area, and it is likely happening all over the country. (Funeral Directors Blow the Whistle on Deaths Falsely Attributed to Coronavirus) Hospitals get significantly more money for COVID cases than for other cases, even if the treatment was exactly the same, or if the treatment involved nothing for COVID at all. "Because if it's a straightforward, garden-variety pneumonia that a person is admitted to the hospital for—if they're Medicare—typically, the diagnosis-related group lump sum payment would be $5,000,” said Jensen, whose claim was fact-checked by USA Today. “But if it's COVID-19 pneumonia, then it's $13,000, and if that COVID-19 pneumonia patient ends up on a ventilator, it goes up to $39,000." (Physicians Say Hospitals Are Pressuring ER Docs to List COVID-19 on Death Certificates. Here’s Why.)
The American people are not going to stand for 30 million unemployed so far--a number definitely low because it does not count all those honest, low-income folks who work off the books, for example, many housecleaners. There are now protests in many states, including armed protesters inside the Michigan House of Representatives. (Whitmer Facing Full Rebellion as Armed Protesters Storm Building, Legislature Turns on Her.)
From entrepreneur Elon Musk, who considers these lockdowns "fascist," shares some statistics from his home state of California (which just extended its lockdown another month):