This is a little more politically hot than I usually like to get into, but...

...have you seen #filmyourownhospital?

I suppose there will always be a few hospitals that aren't as busy as the ones that we keep seeing footage of on the nightly news, but after a while it will be fair to ask "is the real crisis ever really going to happen?"

It may still be premature on my part, true, but I'm starting to smell a parallel between a couple things.

The first is three years of "the proof of Trump's collusion with Russia is imminent."

The second is "the coronavirus surge is no longer racist paranoia but imminent."

The scientist in me is interested in seeing what kind of data we'll get from this epidemiological experiment.  But the historian in me wonders how many patriotic sheriffs are out there who will refuse to support the encroachment on civil liberties that is happening because of all this.

I'm not talking about real threats to public health.  I'm talking about one guy paddle boarding by himself getting accosted by two boats and arrested.  I'm talking about 19 year old Pennsylvania girls getting $200 tickets for driving after "curfew" despite being socially distant from everyone except the cop that pulled her over in the first place.  

I'm also talking about the strange policies that sound like they're supposed to reduce human contact but in effect only make it worse.  Does a store get 100 customers during the ten hours it's open each day?  That's about ten customers an hour.  Cut that down to five hours and the hundred customers now have half the time to go shopping, and if it's an essential business like a grocery store, people on average aren't going to stop coming.  In the short run it may, since people will binge shop and then stay home, but when people come back to find empty shelves, they'll come back more often hoping for a restock, and thus we have more shopping trips than we would have seen otherwise.  So we have 100 customers coming in five hours instead of ten, and thus instead of ten customers per hour, we have twenty.  Twice as many.  Was this just stupid, or was it irrelevant to the real goal of the exercise?

The historian in me also wonders if the patriots who are staying at home for now and issuing warnings about post-Weimar Germany on social media will notice when the last chance to stand up, to draw the line in the sand, comes and passes.