Five years ago

[bigsky]

Today was the Japanese earthquake/tsunami of 2011, resulting in a huge man-caused disaster of a nuclear resctor melting down.



Writing of man made disasters, today was also the day an NBA game got canceled due to covid and that precipitated all tournaments getting canceled, pro and college.

Five years ago, March 11, 2020, began the covid pandemic “hitting the fan” for real in the United States. People had been dying in Washington and Oregon, about 37 nationwide. And people like me had decided not to attend college basketball conference tourneys (hence “hitting the fan”, get it?). But on March 11 a team doctor canceled a pro basketball game live on TV due to an NBA player testing positive for covid. (Gobert for trivia players)



ESPN(!) that night, right then, speculated the leagues and tourneys would follow. It was not just sports; Public events and gatherings began to shut down in earnest everywhere. The stock market promptly tanked, too.



Before this we had puttered and sputtered along, for example, on January 19, 2020, the World Health Organization had tweeted that "preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel #coronavirus” even after(we know now) some of the people in the lab had gotten the disease in previous months.



But despite WHO’s China absolving tweets, before the year was out, 3 million people died of what we now know with reasonable certainty was the Fauci funded lab leak of a novel coronavirus from a lab in Wuhan, China.



March 11th.

[dan_bgblue]

March 30, 2020, I received an email from my employer that gave strict orders to all traveling employees to park our vehicles and begin conducting business over the telephone. That began 11 1/2 months of the most difficult work i ever did. It also pushed me into retirement 03, 22, 2021. Fauci and the folks at the Wuhan lab ruined my best laid plans for retirement, and I will never forgive either of them for that.

[bigsky]

The people that died, the economic disaster, the education disaster, the social mores disaster.

[dan_bgblue]

That too. I did not realize how selfish I sounded until I read you post and then looked back at mine. Compared to your words mine were just an inconvenience.

[bigsky]

No you didn't. It WAS an economic disaster for people. if you had complained about running out of your favorite blackberry jam we would have had words. Losing job and retirement was a real thing. Bozeman did not go down the path of closing down totally but I lost friends over not punishing bars and restaurants and other moms and pops and making them close, while WalMart and all the big box stores stayed open.