The Pandemic Blog

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott seem to be locked in a contest to see who can rack up the better record for increasing the number of Covid deaths in their state lately, since both states have banned both mask mandates and vaccination mandates. Up until yesterday, I would have said the Ron DeSantis was the odds-on favorite to win this race, but it seems that Gov. Abbott doesn’t have the quittin’ spirit in him, so he just promulgated a new executive order that promises to lead to a significant increase in deaths of his citizens – and the younger ones, no less. So I guess I can’t rule him out of the running for this treasured prize. Of course, the prize they’re both after is the GOP nomination for president in 2024, and it seems that polls tell them the number one issue GOP voters will be concerned about in that year is who can demonstrate they’ve caused the most Covid deaths – because that’s owning the libs, dontcha know. Gov. Kristi Noem was an early l...

Note from Tom: FeedBurner, which has been sending out the emails with my blog posts, will stop doing this after July. I have engaged  Follow.It  to take over that task immediately. If you aren’t receiving the emails from Follow.It (which are sent from my email address) and want to, please subscribe by choosing the menu at the top left of your screen (you may have to hit the left arrow shown on the screen first). There’s no question that daily new cases have jumped significantly, especially in the past week. We were at 73,000 average new cases a day for the seven days ending Sunday. We went through a five or six week period when that number was 10-20,000 each week. But it jumped to 54,000 the week before last. Not coincidentally, we had a similar jump in July of last year. Daily new cases had been in the 20-40,000 range in June, but they jumped up to 60-70,000 in July (and didn’t go above that until the third wave started to hit last October). That, by the way, was the se...