Yeah, gardening is definitely a learning from experience type of thing.
The wildfires did affect us a little bit. Not as bad as some other areas of Cali. Nothing really burned too close to where I live, but their was so much smoke in California from the wildfires that we had ash raining down for days and days, and when ash wasn't raining down, the sky was red and nasty from all the smoke and ash up higher in the sky. What really sucked is that we also had a massive heat wave at the time. Over on the coast where I live, 99% of people don't have AC since the climate is so mild. When it gets warm, we open our windows. Well, can't do that when the air outside is hazardous to breath. So we just lived inside our hot hell-hole of a home for a week or two lol.
In regards to the lockdown, it's still nothing compared to what you saw in Australia. I wouldn't even call it a lockdown. We are just going "back" to the way of life we were in a few months ago. Which truth be told, isn't much different than what is going on now. Moving from purple to red tier only made minor changes such as now certain indoor activities were allowed (eating inside restaurants and working out inside gyms at capped capacities, etc.) The only real thing that I even noticed from us going down a tier earlier this year was our big box store costco, wasn't counting the amount of people allowed to go in. Now that we are back in purple, I imagine they will start counting again. But it's really not an issue.
What is new this go around, is our governor putting into place a curfew. Which, for the record, a few sheriffs have already stated they will not be honoring. And I'd imagine more will follow suit in the disregard for the governors curfew or his hypocritical "rule" on thanksgiving gatherings (he was caught eating dinner at a fancy restaurant with a group of high profile people, all of which sitting closely together and not wearing masks).
So in reality, we are just going back to life how it was a few months ago, which as I'm sure you're aware, wasn't really much of a lockdown to begin with.
For what it's worth, cases in my county have sky rocketed (along with many other counties in Cali). Back when we were in purple, we were getting like 5-7 new cases a day. Once we moved down a tier into red (looser restrictions) we slowly started going up to maybe 12 cases a day, 15 cases, then 20 became an average number. But in the last week or two, we have seen 50 cases a day, 70 cases a day. We are averaging around 70 a day.
But here is the kicker, back in march or april, when we were averaging only 5 or so new cases a day, we were also averaging like 10-12 people in the hospital with covid. This week, we have averaged around 70 cases a day like I mentioned, and we have also averaged 7-11 people a day in the hospital with only 2 in ICU.
So, there is some interesting conclusions you can come to based on that data.
Back in march and april, we were probably seeing similar infection rates as we are now, we just weren't testing as many people. (everyone who wants a test can now get one, and many people are getting weekly tests now because their employees want it to be done, so testing isn't an issue here anymore, we are catching way more asymptomatic patients that way)
If you are curious as to my specific county, here is the Gov page on it with the data:
https://www.emergencyslo.org/en/covid19.aspx
Note the total hospital beds available, and total ICU beds available.
The whole point for the "lockdowns" for us, was to allow the hospitals to not be overwhelmed. IMO, we shouldn't reach stricter lockdowns again until we are getting to a point where they can be overwhelmed. As I stated, we have about 10x the daily cases now as we did months ago, but the hospitalization numbers have stayed the same.
Not that the lockdowns affect me much anyways, I don't have time in my day to day activities really to go around eating out, and hanging out having a good time out in public. Even in our worst lockdowns, I still never had to go without any needs or wants really when it came to foods and supplies.
And that's good, because at this point, I'd probably starve if I had to rely on my gardening haha :mrgreen:
-Brandon