Not Quite a Flower...

...but the light touching the new little leaves on our Sango Kaku maple (Acer palmatum)  and their graceful shapes mean they are more flowerlike  than most other things in our garden. 

I had a bit of a tantrum when I read the headline in the paper this morning (Lack of Virus Testing Hindering Reopening) so consider yourself forewarned that this is a rant,  but I may have learned from it the difference between information and knowledge. 

We are so bombarded. with information that we cannot process it enough to turn it into knowledge. Our paper has been publishing a chart with various statistics (number of cases in a week in total, number of deaths each day, etc.) usually accompanied by a story which quotes our 'county health officer' or our 'vaccination czar'  or a county supervisor or the mayor who repeat the same statistics to back up whatever decision  they just made.

As far as I'm concerned, none of this makes much sense. How are these numbers generated or reported? Why, for instance, are there always more deaths during the week than over the weekend? 

There are people in this county whose businesses have been opened and closed two or three times. There are others that have gone out of business altogether. The  schools have not been been allowed to open at all. People are losing their livelihoods, their social lives and their sanity. And the decisions being made, seemingly solely on the basis of these numbers do not make sense.

I have been patient. I have followed all the rules...well, almost all of them. I have struggled through the morass of websites, apps, passwords and rumors to get vaccinated. And now they tell me that lack of testing is hindering reopening? Give me a break...what does that even mean? It seems obvious to me that fewer people are getting tested because fewer people are feeling sick. But all I could get out of reading the article was that they need large numbers of tests to generate the statistics they need to move to the next level. That hasn't happened in almost a year not matter how many tests are conducted. 

Information  is random collection of facts. Knowledge  is the ability to sort through all the facts, decide which ones are relevant, or even real, and determine how they relate to each other to form a coherent plan that makes sense. 

OK. I'm all done now. But I am still sick of alarmist news reporting that is not useful....