The Pandemic Blog

In case you haven’t noticed it, there are three “wings” of the GOP now, each with its own leader. One wing is really more of a feather: It consists of the few Senators and Representatives who aren’t inclined to parrot every falsehood that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth, even if that means there might be some – horrors! – negative impact on the GOP’s chances in 2022 from doing so. This group is small enough that they could easily hold their meetings in the men’s room, were it not for the fact that their current “leader” is Liz Cheney. The first of the two real wings is of course the Donald Trump Wing. This is the group that either a) believes the nonsense that Trump spews (i.e. the about 30% of the electorate that continues to have a high opinion of Trump, although that percentage continues to fall. I read that Trump’s new blog – his only official social media platform now – gets around 2,000 hits a day, which isn’t much more than twice what my cybersecurity blog gets. And I’m n...

The rate of increase in total cases in the US continues to drop rapidly. The weekly rate of increase in cases has dropped .2% for each of the last 5 or 6 weeks, and now stands at .5%. Of course, if it were to continue to drop at that rate, we would have no new cases in about three weeks. Nobody expects that to happen, but hopefully we’ll get to the point where your chances of catching Covid are no more than your chances of catching the flu and – more importantly – the consequences if you catch it are no more serious than those of the flu. Of course, annual flu deaths aren’t negligible: they’re ranged between 12,000 and 61,000 since 2010. It’s very possible that the best we can hope for is to keep them in this range. But the important thing is getting vaccinated, since even if you do catch the coronavirus after you’ve been vaccinated, your chances of being hospitalized or dying drop precipitously. And you’ll probably have to be vaccinated every year. Hopefully, people who refuse to ...

The numbers keep improving every week. Both new cases and deaths grew at the same 0.7% rate in the past week, vs. 0.9% for both cases and deaths the previous week. And average daily deaths in the past week were 573. For perspective, the last time deaths were this low was March 31, 2020. But given that daily deaths hadn’t gone above 10 until March 15, the fact that they’d accelerated to 468 on March 31 was a bad sign (at the time, my big concern was that total deaths would end up in the low tens of thousands. In fact, they passed 600,000 last week). This morning, WaPo ran a story on the new Indian variant’s arrival in Britain, where it passed 2,000 cases recently. It seems to be at least 50% more transmissible than what we used to call the UK variant, but which is now the dominant variant in both the US and Britain. And that variant in turn easily displaced what had been the previous dominant variant in both countries, since the beginning of the pandemic (in fact, I remember a lot o...

Rich Mitch and the Republicans (good name for a rock band, no?) have been advancing the theory, since last Friday’s disappointing unemployment rate announcement, that this shows that the socialist (nay, Communist!) policies of the Biden administration are causing Americans to sit at home and not work, while plenty of good minimum wage jobs are going begging (in fact, some that pay more than the minimum wage!). Specifically, it’s the extra $300 a week that was guaranteed by the jobs act in January that’s the culprit, since obviously $300 a week lets you live like a king. Given an extra $300, who wouldn’t take the chance to lie about and watch soap operas (or whatever’s on daytime TV nowadays) all day, rather than go back to work as an investment banker? Of course, I agree with this argument totally, except for these small quibbles: 1.       Employment actually increased by about 1 million jobs last month, which would normally cause economists to dance in th...