breathing will be banned when it becomes too dangerous

Singing produces 6x more droplets than regular speech.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-38808-z

breathing will be banned when it becomes too dangerous

My choir director banned breathing long before COVID-19.

@Jeffrey Quick

Unfortunately, I did not intend that to be purple. I hope it does not come about.

Has anyone else had actual cases in their choir or parish staff? So far not here. I know of one friend whose stepmother may have the virus and is currently in the hospital being evaluated intubated! Sad to say! But no further news yet....

I've always said that one day they will determine that life causes cancer and to prevent it's spread will line us all up against the wall.

That certainly fits in with the "progressive" line of reasoning. You know, it's not a tragedy if you kill someone, but it is if they die of illness.

Francis


Will we have to swear allegiance to anything before being allowed to rent the device?

We live about 2 hours north of NYC and 2 of our friends and a spouse have had it. These were in 2 different households. They have all recovered. The married couple cases were confirmed by testing and the other case was diagnosed by a doctor during a telemedicine visit but it was a "classic" case with high fever, fatigue, and shortness of breath. I met a nurse friend out buying pizza last week and she said the local hospital situation was unbelievable. We appear to be turning the corner, but keep your guard up!

Has anyone else had actual cases in their choir or parish staff?

Brother-in-law of a choir member in my parish; uncle of a singer in one of my choirs. They died at age 84 and 90, both apparently in good health until three weeks ago.

Chris – I don’t see how that argument makes any sense at all. Back when the churches were open, we had plenty pestilence to go around, from asthma to Zika. Even if we did have a jackass of a God who loved to afflict the world with diseases, we certainly haven’t seen a spike in cancer, diabetes, etc. since the churches closed.

God allows us to suffer so as to bring us to repentance, and so, since he's allowing us this special wake-up call, we really ought to take it. There's our personal sin, but there are also the grave sins of our society's mores.

Couldn't be be more true - and still isn't an argument for re-opening chuches vor public masses.
Rather: let's make use of this time to re-discover adoration, spiritual communion, LOTH (a lot of life streams popping up to join in!), lowest possible threshold for confession, ample of new opportunities to help your nearest (just six feet away), to evangelize etc. etc.

Certainly the praying of the psalms in the normative manner approved of by the Church is worth rediscovering; I can't imagine how this could be an appropriate moment to defecate upon LOTH in favor of the older Office. I'm as much a trad as any, but let's not use this moment to denigrate the official prayer of the Church, regardless of the version. Come on now.

Fr. Thomas Joseph White OP, director of the Thomistic Institute in Rome, has written a sensible commentary on the state of things, and about the right and duty of bishops and priests to protect people from disease, even by closing access to the Mass:

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2020/04/epidemic-danger-and-catholic-sacraments

By the way, the Dominicans at the Thomistic Institute have lectures for the current situation and retreat talks for Holy Week, so we can get some benefit from the time:
https://thomisticinstitute.org/quarantine-lectures

I live in eastern France, not far away from the French most important cluster in Mulhouse. We haven't had a Mass since early March. No confessions either. As my parochial church is always closed anyway, it is not opened at these times. I don't know of much cases in the parish, though there must be a lot of it : I'm a librarian at the public library of the city and at least three of my about 100 colleagues have or have had it, as well as an uncle of mine living elsewhere. No deaths at this point though, and no one even needed to go to the hospital, which is a relief.

The great luck we in France had is that western France wasn't really struck before the lockdown, so the hospitals there are not overwhelmed, and there is a lot of solidarity, meaning transport of intubated patients from one end to the other end of France. This means things were far less horrible in here than in Italy or Spain - I here we haven't such a shortage in ventilators or medicine.

The peak has been passed a few days ago and the epidemic is actually plateauing.
However we're in huge shortage in masks and tests, which basically means we won't be getting out soon because the epidemic would restart -and with our ICU rooms already more than full, we can't afford it.

I hope we have a Mass on Whitsunday, but I would not place a bet on it.

Yes, there has been a lot of solidarity also with Germany and Switzerland either. Some of the patients from here have been taken to Saarland, which is way nearer than Switzerland.

We're all very grateful to all those hospitals, in western France, Switzerland and Germany, that have taken in our numerous ill people... Hadn't they, it would have been like Brescia or Bergame in here or in Alsace, and it's not, thank God.

It's not yet getting better in here, but it seems to have stopped getting worse. I hope and pray it finally gets better...