The last person that I saw in Massachusetts

by philg

It’s October, the month when rich people show up to their South Florida houses (folks without kids in school don’t rush back to catch the 90-degrees-and-humid high temps of August and September; see Weather Spark for an analysis of the climate and the opinion that mid-October through early May is when a rich/flexible person should be in Palm Beach). Starting in mid-September, we noticed that it was pleasant to be out walking Mindy the Crippler in the mornings and evenings.

I’ll take this moment to reflect on the last person whom I saw in Massachusetts. It was a hot August day. He was alone on the South T hangar ramp at KBED. There is no FBO there, just individual hangars to which aircraft owners must drive in private cars. As such, there was nobody within 300′ of him other than myself (taxiing past inside a Cirrus SR20 being ferried to its new Florida home).

He was wearing an N95 mask.

(No photo, sadly, since capturing the scene would have required a telephoto lens and I was solo in the airplane. Taxiing is an operation that demands concentration and avoiding distraction. There are a lot more taxi accidents than in-flight accidents, though obviously the consequences are less severe when something bad happens on the ground.)

What’s the current COVID-19 situation in a state that is fully vaccinated and fully masked? It’s an “emergency” according to this email from yesterday:

An Act extending COVID-19 Massachusetts emergency paid sick leave, H.4127, was signed into law on September 29, 2021. This legislation modifies the Massachusetts COVID-19 Emergency Paid Sick Leave program in two ways:

Extends the program until April 1, 2022 or the exhaustion of $75 million in program funds as determined by the Commonwealth, whichever is earlier; and

Effective October 1, 2021, permits employees to use Massachusetts COVID-19 Emergency Paid Sick Leave to care for a family member who needs to obtain or recover from a COVID-19 immunization.

During this period, employers must continue to offer Massachusetts employees leave time for qualifying reasons related to COVID-19. Further information on the updated law is available at https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-temporary-emergency-paid-sick-leave-program.

Employers may continue to apply for reimbursement by logging into the Department of Revenue’s MassTaxConnect website. Further information, including detailed instructions, is available here: https://www.mass.gov/info-details/covid-19-temporary-emergency-paid-sick-leave-program#how-to-apply-for-reimbursement-.

As the federal Emergency Paid Sick Leave program comes to an end, the extension of this state leave program will assure continued support for businesses of all sizes, including smaller businesses that to date have relied primarily on federal financial support for employees’ COVID-related leave time.

(Note in the above that the COVID-19 vaccine isn’t in any way harmful, but you might need to take some taxpayer-funded days or weeks off work to help a family member “recover from a COVID-19 immunization.”)

12 thoughts on “The last person that I saw in Massachusetts”

  1. Will you ever go back to visit?
    Another Florida guy is doing that this weekend, maybe you should see what kind of reception he gets before you decide….

    • The comparison to Tom Brady is appreciated (though I have a deeper kinship with Gisele Bündchen due to her having been a Robinson R44 helicopter student pilot (sadly not at our school)).

      Like Mr. Brady, I might return to Maskachusetts periodically for work. Depending on the coronapanic level at MIT, for example, I might be up there in January teaching in person (right now they #TrustVaccines but also #RequireSalivaSoakedClothFaceRags; I don’t know if students would want to sit in a mask for 8 hours per day, 3 days in a row, when they could be comfortably at home in sweatpants and breathing without obstruction). I’ll probably go up in March to teach at Harvard Medical School, again depending on the coronapanic level.

      If you live in Florida during the school year, Massachusetts is actually not a good summer destination. Why roast in 90-degree heat in MA when you could enjoy temps in the 70s in Maine, Vermont, or Europe/Russia? Massachusetts is at its best in September and early October, in my opinion, but our family is pinned to Florida during those months. This past summer was particularly awful in MA. Brutal heat, high humidity, dense thickets of mosquitoes. I blame… #ClimateChange!

      (Also, if you’ve been in a completely flat state for 9 months, it would be good to go somewhere with mountains during the summer. The Cape and Islands of MA are completely flat. Eastern MA has a few hills. Western MA has some big hills that folks there call “mountains,” but which are laughable by the standards of the Rockies or the Alps.)

  2. The N95 mask alone comment makes me think you’ll enjoy a mask interaction that made me leave LA:

    Was walking on the side walk unmasked and a lady masked, 20ft away ran into a fence she didn’t see trying to get more distance from us. Since the street was lined with cars she was kind of trapped.
    An unmasked couple walking towards her, cars parked on the street, and a fence. She chose in her horror to dart to the street in terror.

    Almost was hit by a car that slammed on brakes.

    Not safe to be around panicked people

    • Justin: That is a great story and I have a lot of sympathy for this lady. Somehow my vision is impaired whenever I’m wearing a mask and I’m more likely to run into objects, other people, etc. This is true even when the mask isn’t resulting in eyeglass-fogging.

      Congrats on your escape from LA! (though actually LA is a lot more tethered to reality than San Francisco!)

    • That is a beautiful necklace. Thank you for the link. I will order one for Mindy the Crippler, who is due for her next rabies vaccine shortly. It will look nice against her golden fur.

  4. Re “emergency paid sick leave,” since April 2020, my FL employer has granted up to 240 hrs of emergency paid sick leave to every employee that had to be out due to covid-related reasons (including the reason being that an employee had no childcare or schools were closed due to covid). At first, my employer tried to demand documentation of the covid-related reason, but quickly gave up after employees refused to share that medical information.

    • This is beautiful. 240 hours of paid time off. That would enable a typical worker to have the same length of vacation as a schoolteacher. “My COVID-related reason is that I needed to go on a six-week cruise to make sure that the CDC COVID guidelines were being followed by Royal Caribbean.”

  5. I have not seen the “Maskachusetts Institute of Technology” in Jupiter FL registered with the FLSOS yet – what is the hold up? I was hoping to enroll this fall.

  6. So who pays in case if a vaccine injury? In the UK you only get a maximum of £120,000, which perhaps equals 12 years of social security. If you get it at all:

    https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-57836287

    Perhaps you’d be better off taking that social security in the first place to avoid forced vaccination.

    • I didn’t mean to offer an opinion on whether the COVID-19 vaccines are likely to be harmful (though my friends who are medical school professors say that they wouldn’t give one to slender healthy people under 30 due to the risk outweighing the potential benefit to the patient him/her/zir/theirself). I only was enjoying the apparent contradiction between one part of government saying that it is a trivial ask for people not at risk from COVID-19 to get injected. They just need to go on the Internet, schedule a couple of appointments, clear their calendars for those appointments, drive to those appointments, etc. Other than the admin hassle, according to this part of government, there is no reason not to get a COVID-19 vaccine every week. Now this other part of government comes in and says that the COVID-19 vaccine is so regularly harmful that we need a government program to give money to those who will have to provide 24/7 care to the recently vaccinated.

      COVID-19 is the richest source of cognitive dissonance in human history!

    • > COVID-19 is the richest source of cognitive dissonance in human history!

      If you mean “richest” in terms of absolute dollars and number of people impacted – yes, I think you’re correct. But on a “dollars per dissonance” basis for the average woman, I still think the “richest source” of cognitive dissonance in human history is Cosmopolitan Magazine. I used to leaf through Cosmo whenever I wanted to be completely confused on behalf of women. “OK, over here on Page 26 are all these dieting and exercise tips so a woman can lose all the weight she wants, firm herself up and look super, and then we’ve got all these ads for various kinds of junky food and self-esteem columns telling her that even if she gains another 40 or 50 pounds, she’ll still be gorgeous and proud. And that’s just in the first two minutes.”

      Now that I think about it, I wonder if out modern Technocratic society (hey, everybody has to have a chance to get their ideas out there and fail bigly!) is being modeled after Cosmopolitan Magazine in its heyday – not the vastly diminished, “anorexic” shell of itself being published today, I’m talking about Cosmo. circa the 1970s and ’80s.

      https://www.amazon.com/Best-Cosmopolitan-70s-80s/dp/1906032157

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