By Ricky Swindle

Muffler Shop Musings

Howdy, friends!

How’s this new normal treating you? As far as myself, I am about the same as always.

I work Monday through Friday, sit in my backyard Dewdrop Inn most every afternoon listening to music and enjoying a cool beverage, and then I aggravate Wendy as much as possible on The Local Yokels every Saturday morning.

Me and my other half have returned to enjoying our Friday night date nights having a sit down restaurant supper. We’ve kind of got used to that over the years and missed it greatly the past two months.

She has never bought my date night supper and never will. I am an old school guy that does not believe a lady should ever pay for supper, date night or not. I was raised proper by some good folks.

I have been keeping up regularly with the Covid-19 chart that the MS Dept of Health publishes daily. I see the increase in the numbers of cases and sadly the deaths this pandemic has produced also.

While the numbers are steadily increasing, I feel the health experts are not telling the entire story. It is sort of misleading in my opinion to not give all the data involved in a study.

I watch the Governor deliver his address on his Facebook page almost every day. He goes on there live and updates the State daily on the virus activity.

He has Dr. Dobbs on with him most of the time stating the statistics, data, and numbers that the Governor himself has been using to not only close the State for 60 days ago, but to reopen it as of now.

The question I’ve bounced around in my head is although I’m confident in the numbers of cases presented, how many people actually still retain the disease?

While listening to the Governor respond to a reporter last week, I heard a number I have been searching to find. The cases on that day were a little over 10,000. The Governor, in answering the reporter’s question, revealed that there were over 7,000 who were fully recovered from the virus.

That made me feel better because all I have seen is the number of positive cases increasing.

It makes a big difference in my mind that while there may have been 10,000 positive cases counted, no one has bothered to tell of the 7,000 recovered.

So that 10,000 number may be an accurate number of the positive cases overall, but it is an inaccurate number of the actual active cases.

What does that mean to me? It means we are winning. While 3,000 active cases are not good by any means, it is a whole lot better than 10,000 active cases.

I expect the number will increase as more tests in the future are given. That is simply common math sense. But, I believe that the MSDH should be more transparent with the data.

They should not only present the case numbers of folks infected, but also dole out the number of Mississippians who have survived, recovered and beat this deadly virus.

The only thing I can conjure in my mind is they want people to remain afraid. Be that as it may, I believe that grown up tax paying citizens should have all the data available to them and then conduct themselves as they see fitting.

Maybe I have got too much Mississippi blood in my veins. I will do most anything asked of me, but I do not take delight in being told to do anything.

Y’all know me folks, I like good news and I will dig, search and listen until I find it.

Take care of yourselves and check on your neighbors.