The Pandemic Blog

I just posted this on Facebook. I realize it doesn’t have anything to do with the pandemic (at least not directly), but I think it should be of interest to human beings in general – and especially some people who read this blog who are Indian or have lived in India (as I have).   Will there be genocide in India?  https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../india-muslims-hindus.../ The idea might seem far-fetched, but consider this: https://www.nytimes.com/.../india-muslim-citizen-list.html And also consider the fact that the Hutus in Rwanda broadcast their intentions on the Tutsis long before they actually carried out their genocide: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-26875506 Also, consider that Modi presided over the slaughter in Gujarat of close to 1,000 Muslims, after Muslims had killed about 250 Hindus on a train. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_riots To quote Gandhi (now considered a traitor by many Hindu nationalists - and of course he was killed by a Hi...

Omicron finally made its mark last week, when new Covid cases jumped by 76% in a single week (vs. -4% last week). The last time new cases rose so much in absolute numbers was in early September. And the last time they jumped by such a huge percentage in one week was…well, it was probably in March or early April of 2020, when new cases were more than doubling each day, and new deaths were almost doubling each day. As I’ve said before, if deaths had continued to increase at those rates, the entire US population would have been dead before my birthday on May 10, 2020. Talk about a downer of a birthday! And yet a lot of people-who-should-know-better, like the WSJ editorial page, now push the story that we overreacted in April 2020 and should never have locked down as much as we did. New deaths, of course, aren’t increasing at the same rate as new cases, but they jumped by a healthy amount (if “healthy” is the right word), and now we’re over 1,500 a day again. I expect we’ll soon have the...

In the good old days (a little more than a year ago), a new variant took months to gain a hold in the US, when it first appeared in another part of the world. The British variant (that’s another relic of the good old days – you could associate a variant with a country, even though that was somewhat unfair to the country involved. What’s with Greek letters, anyway?) appeared in the early fall of 2020 and took at least 2-3 months to become the leading variant in the UK – and at the same time drove a big new wave of infections and deaths, since of course nobody was vaccinated then. It was I believe March of this year before that variant became dominant in the US, although by then vaccinations kept it from spreading anywhere near as rapidly as it did in the UK. Then the delta variant appeared in India last spring, with absolutely devastating results in deaths (and there isn’t much doubt that India, not the US, has had the highest number of Covid deaths of any country, even though offic...