The Pandemic Blog

WaPo had a good editorial about Fox News and their heroic role in the pandemic today. Some of my favorite quotes: “Just nine days after calling the pandemic a hoax, Hannity  said , “This program has always taken the coronavirus seriously. We’ve never called the virus a hoax.” “The liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America  reported  on Oct. 5: “Fox pushed a claim undermining vaccines during 99% of the days in the past six months.” “A working paper from the  Swiss Federal Institute of Technology  found that “watching one additional hour of Fox News per week for the average household” in May-June 2021 reduced “the number of vaccinations by 0.35 to 0.76 per 100 people.” “While its hosts attack vaccine mandates as “ totalitarian tactics ,” Fox itself  requires  that anyone entering its building must either show proof of vaccination or submit a daily test.” “Their cynicism is galling. It suggests that Fox hosts aren’t lunatics or fanatic...

I read in several sources over the weekend that the US is finally on the downward slope of the Delta variant spike. However, look at the numbers: In the past week, daily deaths increased from 1,520 to 1,945. And daily new cases increased from 101,218 to 109,636. That doesn’t look like a downward slope to me. In fact, the daily new case number of 101,000 from the previous week, the week of September 26, was suspiciously low – the lowest since the week of August 3. I’m sure there wasn’t any intentional obfuscation, but this one-week drop certainly didn’t mean we were out of the woods.   As long as there are substantial numbers of non-vaccinated people, and as long as the delta variant rules - and especially as winter approaches - it’s hard to see how we’re going to find ourselves at the daily new cases numbers of last June (13,874) or even July (38,809) – BTW, daily new cases in September were 139,056. The numbers These numbers were updated based on those reported on the Worl...