It’s official. The University of Minnesota is taking tentative steps to dismantle mask requirements. I’ll still have to wear them in the classroom (I’m not planning to discontinue that, no matter what the administration says), but you can go to football games, plays, and social events without them now.

For our faculty, staff, and student workers in instructional, clinical, and transit settings, face coverings will continue to be required. Additional information on where and when masks may be required is available from Safe Campus.

Those who work in other settings—including residential housing, dining facilities, and offices—will not be required to wear a mask while at work. However, you may continue to wear a mask in these settings based on your personal preference and expect support from your coworkers and leaders in creating a positive workplace that is welcoming and respectful.

It’s too soon. We’re always doing this — backing off on the preventive measures as soon as they show signs that they’re working. And then everyone is going to act surprised when we get another spike!

gotta side with the experts: it IS shocking that covid cases spike every time we remove all restrictions. literally could never have seen that coming. especially on the nine hundredth iteration of its occurrence. who could reasonably have been expected to predict this

— nicole kornher-stace (@wirewalking) March 13, 2022

I’m also a little peeved at that admonition to be “welcoming and respectful” to the conspiracy theorists, like this guy, who is a pastor in Benson, just an hour away.

…Jason Wolter, is a thoughtful, broad-shouldered Lutheran pastor who reads widely and measures his words carefully. He also suspects Democrats are using the coronavirus pandemic as a political tool, doubts President Joe Biden was legitimately elected and is certain that COVID-19 vaccines kill people.

He hasn’t seen the death certificates and hasn’t contacted health authorities, but he’s sure the vaccine deaths occurred: I just know that I’m doing their funerals.

He’s also certain that information will never make it into the newspaper.

Wolter’s frustration boils over during a late breakfast in a town cafe. Seated with a reporter, he starts talking as if Anfinson is there.

You’re lying to people, he says. You flat-out lie about things.

No, he is not thoughtful, he doesn’t read widely, and he doesn’t measure his words carefully. He’s a dogmatic, blinkered COVIDiot, and no, I’m not going to be welcoming and respectful towards that kind of inane attitude. We’re going to get another spike thanks to the people who think we have to make nice with the ignorant.

If you want to see what I anticipate for our future, look to China.

In Shenzhen, officials ordered the city’s more than 17 million people to stay at home starting on Monday through March 20, after just 150 new cases were reported over the weekend.

The city is home to key Chinese companies like Huawei, electric carmaker BYD and Tencent. Apple supplier Foxconn suspended operations, as did circuit board makers Sunflex and Unimicron, also a supplier to Apple and Intel.

Authorities in the northeastern province of Jilin on Monday barred its 24 million residents from leaving, marking the first time officials have sealed an entire province since January 2020 when Hubei was put under lockdown.

Health officials said hospitals were overrun because of the rapid increase in cases since Friday. The province recorded more than 4,605 coronavirus cases on Saturday, while 3,868 residents have tested positive in preliminary tests but were not yet included in the official tally, officials said.

Somebody is smart enough to see that when 150 people sneeze, it’s a harbinger of millions getting flattened by a disease. We’re not that clever. We’re instead sending out memos telling us to be welcoming and respectful to plague rats.

Hey, check out Hong Kong.

There are no funeral ceremonies for some of the hundreds of elderly Hong Kong residents dying every day of covid. Their bodies are instead sealed in plastic bags and then quickly cremated, freeing up space at the morgue for more arrivals.

Hong Kong — a wealthy financial center — now has the highest covid death rate in the developed world. More than 2,300 people have died since the start of the city’s most recent outbreak, compared with just 213 in the two years prior. Those dying are overwhelmingly elderly, unvaccinated residents, but they also include toddlers and children too young to be immunized.

Gosh. Those vaccines must be killing all those unvaccinated elderly people and children.

We’ll never learn.

We vanished for the weekend and went out into the great wide world for a day and two nights. We got a lot done, even masked and avoiding most other human beings.

• We visited our son Alaric in St Cloud. He’s doing well, his only complaint right now is that it’s impossible to get his hands on a PS5, which tells me he’s not facing any major worries right now.
• We upgraded our phones, something we’ve put off for a few years, even as screens cracked and their batteries got weaker and weaker. We now get 5G, which is great, since it means our brains are also mutating to receive telepathic signals from the Pleiades, and our new third eyes are beginning to erupt. The downside: a few hours spent getting them all reconnected with our passwords.^*
• I got my birthday present. We stopped by Cabela’s and I got a pair of good hiking boots. Some of my pedal miseries lately have been a consequence of always picking up the cheapest pair of shoes possible, and wearing them to destruction (it doesn’t take all that long, cheap shoes last about a year). Now I’ve got a solid pair of boots with firm ankle support and a good fit. We’ll see if they help.
• We visited our daughter, Skatje, in Wisconsin. She’s finishing up a PhD in computational linguistics, and her subspecialty is Russian. She’s not happy about the situation over there, but she’s very much into the Russian culture and language. So we had syrniki for breakfast. Do not speak to me of the decadent West, when Slavs eat fried cheesecake for breakfast.
• Then of course we also played with Iliana all day long. I had forgotten how exhausting kids are at three.
  

Now we are home again. It’s time to get back into my mundane responsibilities.

^*Passwords ought to be trivial, except I’m too old. I was an early adopter of the Mac (1984!) and signed up for mac.com network a few years later, which is now defunct. But every time I upgrade an Apple device, it insists on avidly taking up the mac.com network identity and telling me to log in to an extinct service in order to prove I am who I say I am.

I get a whole week off! I’ll use that time to catch up on grading and get a few lectures ahead, of course. It’s not like I’m going to be frolicking in the sunshine.

-17°C right now. I wasn’t wearing enough layers this morning and really felt it.

We are going to do one thing fun, though: we’re driving east today, stopping for a brief while in St Cloud to visit Eldest Son, then off to Wisconsin to visit Youngest Granddaughter for a day. I may overdose on cuteness for the weekend.

Oldest Boy is adorable. Granddaughter is pretty sweet, too.

I know it’s easy to do — so many distractions! And the powers-that-be are eager for you to cast all caution to the winds! — but this is an ongoing, world-changing catastrophe. So here’s a refresher.

The global COVID-19 death toll may be three times higher than official tallies suggest, according to a systematic analysis of excess mortality during the pandemic.

From Jan. 1, 2020 to Dec. 31, 2021, global deaths directly attributed to COVID-19 reached 5.9 million, yet estimates put excess deaths during this period at a staggering 18.2 million (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 17.9-19.6), Haidong Wang, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, and the COVID-19 Excess Mortality Collaborators reported in The Lancet.

India had the highest number of excess deaths (4.07 million, 95% UI 3.71-4.36), an estimated eight times higher than its 489,000 reported COVID-19 deaths, which was followed by the U.S. (1.13 million, 95% UI 1.08-1.18), where the official count reached 824,000 by the end of 2021.

Just remember, human beings, we can deal with more than one problem at once. It’s hard, but problems don’t disappear when a new one rises up.

I wish to register a complaint. I have now reached the age when my employer is supposed to hand me a gold watch and a fat pension, and then I retire to my rustic cabin on the scenic lake with my beautiful wife, and then I spend my golden years fishing and dandling grandchildren on my knee. I got the beautiful wife, but the rest of it ain’t happening. What went wrong?

For that matter, this whole dang timeline stinks. Wars and pandemics? No sirree, that weren’t on the retirement pamphlet. I’ve been sold a bill of goods here, and I want my money back.

I’m going to keep on doing the same things over and over again, until I get a refund or a complete timeline reset and I get my goldang idyllic, peaceful retirement. How’s them apples?

I might just keep on writin’ like a crotchety ol’ geezer rockin’ on the porch, occasionally hawkin’ up a wad into the spittoon. That’ll teach ya. Remind me to pick up a spittoon next time I take the buckboard into town.

There’s a new movie in town. Batman! The first Batman movie I saw was the 1966 version with Adam West. I thought it was wonderful. Still do.

Will this new one be as good? The second one I saw was in 1989, with my 5 year old son in tow.

The boy liked it, I enjoyed it, despite the controversy over casting Michael Keaton, he was excellent. It was grimmer, though.

There have been many Batman movies ever since, and they seem to demonstrate a terrible entropy, getting darker and grimmer and less enjoyable. It seems to be a trend.

I think I’m going to skip this one. The other movie playing in the Morris Theater is something called Dog. It looks rather less gritty and dark and grim and bleak. I might just go see that.