What we are talking about/and not

RI is talking about how many pushups the Governor can do in a skirt (12?, 15?) and whether Nibbles Woodaway (aka the Big Blue Bug) is really wearing a surgical mask (sadly, no, just photoshop), and how mad we are at the Mayor for closing the parks (more just sad, for me).

What we haven't been talking about as much as one might think: 180,000 workers out of a pre-Pandemic total of maybe 530,000 workers have filed for unemployment. Nobody can even muster up a "We're #1!" like we did in the old days when our 1st in the nation unemployment was around 11%. It's like we are in this collective fugue state.

I have a job. I'm thankful to have a job. My whole team is still employed. When I walk down the streets of downtown Providence past every closed restaurant and coffee shop, and even some Dunkins, I remember every time my dad got laid off.

The only person who is talking about RI being trapped between two COVID hotspots, NYC and Boston, is some lady at a White House briefing. Here we don't really talk about that. The state cracked down fast on wealthy people going to their summer homes in Newport and other places coastal, staties went house to house telling people with out of state plates to quarantine. But, the hardest-hit place in the state is Providence. Most people here have family and friends in NYC. In my neighborhood, which is majority Dominican, it's got to be at least 80%. I'm not saying it would be good to have cops going door to door here, but no one was warning people in the neighborhoods not to take the bus to New York, or to make their family members who decided to come here to ride it out quarantine for two weeks. Now, like other places, COVID is hitting hard among Latinos. There seems to be a demographic split where cases among whites are mostly elders in nursing homes, while cases among younger people are among people of color.