Milam County Judge Steve Young has recently included in some of his daily updates of the county’s COVID-19 numbers a warning for residents not to see the continuing avalanche of numbers as “just numbers” and not feel the human toll behind them.
Exactly. At last week’s county commissioners meeting a deputy sheriff recounted his harrowing struggle with the virus.
Every one of those numbers has a story behind it.
At the same time, it’s awfully easy to let the numbers become so overwhelming we just want to throw up our hands and say “stop, just don’t give us any more.”
Both the judge and The Reporter have received communications like that. But those numbers have now been going on long enough that it is possible to step back and look at the bigger picture.
That’s what we’ve been trying to do in our weekly front page articles, give some perspective by crunching the numbers a week at a time, while continuing to post the judge’s updates daily, for the most part, on our website and on Facebook.
If you’ve been following The Reporter through this pandemic—it started six months ago, it only seems like it’s being going on forever—some interesting patterns have developed.
The number of Milam new cases has been steadily going down from a worrisome spike in July.
For the seven days ending July 29, there were 69 new cases reported. Since that week the average has been much less than that and for the past three weeks less than 20 new casesper-week have been reported.
That’s the key stat right now, not the cumulative case figure which can’t go down. But it is going up more slowly.
Why? If you’ve been shopping anywhere recently you can probably come up with an opinion on that. People are wearing masks and they are obviously doing more than that, observing personal hand-washing hygiene and social distancing.
It takes a lot of dedication and that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Schools have been underway for a month and it’s just about a flat-out miracle that no more cases have been recorded by Milam schools than the handful so far.
That, of course, could change on a dime, if we still had dimes. What a fantastic job by school personnel, parents and the students themselves.
Of course, this isn’t the time to get complacent or to “get comfortable” with COVID-19. Another Milam death over the week highlights that.
You can get comfortable with anything, even war. The opening line in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “In Another Country” which dealt with World War I, notes “...the war was there but we did not go to it anymore.”
It’s not the time to adopt that attitude about COVID-19. Things look to be getting better in our county but they haven’t gotten better because we’ve forgotten the virus is still there.—M.B.
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