So Indiana’s governor has announced that we’re going to move to “stage 2” of his five-step reopening program next Monday.

Today, we had 795 (or 815 depending whose meter you’re tracking) new cases, the second-highest new case total day Indiana has had so far. The day that the lockdown order went in place, there were 100 new cases. So we’ll start the doubling again, only this time three doubling cycles higher than we were.

He apparently thinks that a slight downwards trend in hospitalizations (maybe 15 percent over the last month, almost flat over the last two weeks) is sufficient rationale to start sending people back out into the public spaces. https://www.regenstrief.org/covid-dashboard/ Nifty site for some of the hospital stats in Indiana. ER visits are slightly UP, ICU admits are arguably slightly down.

Sure, this first step is supposed to be incremental, but the lockdown here was wishy-washy at best - I saw a lawnmower repair company that declared itself to be essential, and got away with it - and I’m pretty damn sure that the goddamn anarchists are going to lean hard on everyone around us.

Seriously, why is it too fucking hard for professional Republicans to read graphs? I don’t expect the anarchists to even look at numbers but for that asshole to say this is good data driven policy is an insult to good governance.