StrangeSox

Many if not all of the countries that have handled this much better than the US have much more robust social systems including (especially) health care.

China had their national guard delivering groceries to everyone I think. @caulfield12 talked directly about it first-hand earlier in the thread. That was one city/region and not an entire country, though. If we got to the point where someone's weekly grocery store trip is the biggest possible vector, we're already in pretty strong lockdowns/distancing to the point that we probably don't have to be that worried. But the situation we find ourselves in now is an uncontrolled and probably uncontrollable outbreak growing in more than half of the US's metro areas while many states refuse to close down bars and restaurants or even mandate masks while the federal government still flails around at best.

Don't worry guys the stock market had it's best quarter ever!

Illinois has been trending back upwards slightly in daily case counts since mid-June.

Coworker reports from mid/northern Wisconsin are the same.

Probably a good idea to continue to avoid indoor spaces

I'd be looking for multiple CDC/FDA equivalents out of say Germany, SK and others to approve a vaccine for their population before trusting it here. We've seen too much political manipulation out of our own CDC/FDA imo.

I'm sure the park rangers would be happy to tell you what the visitor volume is looking like in a couple of weeks as you get closer if you called them up. If you want any more Bryce/Zion/Cedar Breaks (worth the detour between the two!) thoughts or recommendations just shoot me a PM.

Our health care system is an immoral disgrace

We stayed at the lodge our first time as well. You can drive into the lodge. The canyon road continues another several miles past that point and is shuttle/bike/walk only. The Narrows is at the very end. Since a lot of the hikes are out-and-back's, you can start early and have relative isolation for your way out, but you'll be crossing a lot of people who got later starts on your way back down. We did Observation Point after chickening out on Angels Landing from the point all the pictures of it are taken (combo of crowds + heights), and were nearly alone on our way up. On our way back down, maybe 11am or so, lots of people making their way up. This is just general heads up/warning to set expectations for the park even in "normal" times. If you do go ahead with the trip, we really liked the Falcon Guides Hiking Zion & Bryce Canyon guide book. I wonder what the crowds are looking like there right now. Looking at NPS's latest stats, Zion is the 4th most popular park in normal years. How many are staying away due to the virus? Lots. How many might be heading there because they want *something* to do, and this is outdoors and a doable drive from LA or Phoenix? I wonder. I hear you on the idea of roadtripping form Chicago. There's a whole lot of boring flatness before you get anywhere interesting in any direction.

SWA is still not flying full planes and strictly enforcing mask requirements. If we can analogize to train travel, which has the caveat of length of time on board, it might be safe. Tokyo subways are jam packed with little or no transmission because everyone wears masks and no one's really talking. Per an episode of TWiV podcast (infectious disease and virology experts), airplane viral spread is mainly in the area around the person who's infected and not recirc air spread. Still gotta go through O'Hare or Midway though. I still wouldn't get on a plane right now. I'm supposed to be in a family vacation right now that we called off. @NorthSideSox72 if you do go either now or in the future, you could mirror the second trip we took to Zion last spring where we day a (long) day trip from Las Vegas to Death Valley. Incredible place. I'd say Bryce could be a day at most unless you want to go out to Dixie national forest or something. Like Greg said, Zion is an incredible place. The Narrows is the best hike we've ever done. And it hurts to lose a year. Your kids will never be 8 and 11 again (ours will never be their ages). But Zion will still be there next year. At the least, like you said, keep an eye on infection rates both here and in Nevada and Utah. If you could take an extra couple of days and make a road trip out of it, that might really reduce some risk.

Something to keep in mind about Zion is that it's one of the busiest parks and you have to rely heavily on the park shuttles to get around unless you're on bikes. Pretty much any trail is going to be crowded by 9 unless you're way out in the back country. Springdale will likely be packed, too. E: looks like shuttles restart on July 1st and require advanced reservation. They'll probably be limiting the number of passengers if I had to guess, which could me long wait times for an available one. Bryce is also really just one big drive with lots of stops of scenic viewpoints. There are some trails but not a ton, and it'll be pretty crowded probably. At least it was in early June when were there a few years ago. Now that I think of it though, there probably won't be as many tour company buses of international tourists. I wouldn't go, but I'm at let's say an 8/10 on precautionary scale for this thing right now.

Taking this convo here rather than the baseball thread, but basically this whole post is wrong. We're not "way beyond" the 6 countries that are ahead of us in deaths per capita, aside from perhaps Belgium. We're also catching up on them all at a decent pace. Belgium had 4 deaths yesterday, 5 today. France, Spain, Italy and Sweden are also down below 50/day. We're not doing pretty good. We're doing awful and getting worse while the EU as a whole and even the UK are actually doing much, much better than they were a few months ago. We'll spike, and as we continue to implement ineffective half-measures at best in too many places and reopen too early, we'll continue to grow. Look at this graphic: Note that it is only 3 days old, and we've already broken 42k new cases a day today. We see from the experience of many other countries around the globe that there didn't need to be the huge upswing we're seeing here. It's here because of horribly insufficient public policy and a rush to "open back up" well before we had this under control to the point that we could do so safely and contain any future outbreaks. We're at more than 120,000 dead Americans and growing by hundreds every day, and we are seeing hospitals in the hotspots getting overwhelmed now. This isn't working. We could have done better.

Plus snowbirds returning from the Sunbelt and Florida

We're not even bothering to meet our crucial requirements to move to phase 4 (Tracing: Begin contact tracing and monitoring within 24 hours of diagnosis for more than 90% of cases in region) so I'm doubtful we'll do anything to stop the second wave until it's too late.

We're still trending down or basically flat on a 7-day average, but we've ticked up very slightly on a 3-day average. No incoming quarantine restrictions.

We're #9 in the world in deaths/million, #7 if you take out tiny countries San Marino and Andorra. We're adding more deaths at a much faster rate than the countries ahead of us, meaning we're going to keep climbing in those rankings. Perhaps it's not safe for all of us to be rushing back to work.

Cities and states should be doing everything they can to enable people to meet up and do activities outdoors. We've got a decent chunk of data now that outdoors + masks is pretty safe, indoors/no masks is huge spreading potential. edit: to this point: Florida's posting huge numbers again today. edit2: and now Florida is shutting down bars wear your masks, don't go to indoor hangouts. the problem is that we don't see the impacts of our collective decisions and actions for weeks, and by then we've already baked in a lot of damage.

Trying to throw 20,000,000+ Americans off of their health insurance in the middle of a pandemic and recession/depression seems like a pretty terrible move. Not so sure about Abbott's win-win strategy

https://apnews.com/9d742ebaf97612860438dd3890dc810e U.S. officials estimate that 20 million Americans have been infected with the coronavirus since it first arrived in the United States, meaning that the vast majority of the population remains susceptible. Thursday’s estimate is roughly 10 times as many infections as the 2.3 million cases that have been confirmed. Officials have long known that millions of people were infected without knowing it and that many cases are being missed because of gaps in testing.