COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases:  34,066
• New Deaths:      333

And the pattern continues, as it seems the virus takes the weekend off, but the uptick is definitely there.

We came off a peak in mid-July and got the daily count down. But then we eased up on the messaging for masks and distancing; and now as the cooler weather starts to kick in and people are headed back indoors - plus more people have to get back to work because Yertle McConnell either can't get his shit together, or he's running the Radical Libertarian play on us intending to shackle government to the emerging plutocracy - and we begin to see the upward trend that everybody and his fucking uncle have been telling us was probably gonna happen.

NYT:

Covid-19 Continues Its Ever-Changing Onslaught on the U.S.

The infection of President Trump and some of his top associates makes clear that the country is still in the throes of the pandemic.

Covid-19 has proved itself an unpredictable and ever-changing threat. As President Trump and some of his allies and associates test positive for the coronavirus, the number of new cases reported each day across the United States has been slowly rising. The nation’s response has been uneven and inconsistent. Here is where the country is now.
The U.S. is at a key moment in the pandemic.

Spread of the virus could worsen significantly through the autumn, experts fear, as colder weather forces people indoors. Winter, paired with a new flu season, could make the precarious situation of today even worse. Every day, some 43,000 new cases are being reported — far fewer than were being identified during the surge in the summer, but still an uncomfortably large number.

From the hospital where Mr. Trump is being treated, he wrote on Twitter on Saturday, “Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months in fighting this PLAGUE.”

But the pace has been ticking upward slowly since the middle of September as the virus reached parts of the country that hadn’t been hit hard before. By this weekend, 7.3 million people in the United States — some of them at the highest reaches of the federal government — were known to have been infected. More than 208,000 people have died.

The Great Plains, spared early on, is struggling now.

Some of the country’s least populous states are now seeing its highest infection rates.

When coastal cities suffered in the spring, cases remained relatively scarce across most of the Northern Plains and rural West. But since late summer, North Dakota and South Dakota have added more cases per capita than any other state. Nebraska, Wyoming and Montana have set troubling new records as well.

In North Dakota, state officials met with hospital executives recently to ensure there would be enough space in hospitals as cases surged around Bismarck, and health care workers said they were working overtime to meet the sudden rise. Leaders in Montana urged residents to take precautions as they warned of an uncertain new phase.
Wisconsin’s situation has become alarming.

Northeastern Wisconsin, a politically mixed region that also happens to be crucial to both parties’ hopes of winning the presidency, is facing one of the country’s most widespread, uncontrolled outbreaks right now.

By Saturday, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus. Three of the four American metro areas with the most recent cases per capita were in northeastern Wisconsin, with the Oshkosh area faring worst of all.

“I’m honestly not sure that anything we do right now will make a difference,” the mayor of Oshkosh, Lori Palmeri, said recently. “It’s too late.”

Across Wisconsin, warning signs mounted with few glimmers of progress. More than 3,000 new cases were announced in the state in a single day for the first time. The state set single-day records for deaths and hospitalizations. Its test positivity rate reached 20 percent, a loud signal that the outbreak in the state has spun of control.

Colleges are driving tens of thousands of new cases.

When college students returned to campuses for the fall, the coronavirus followed. University towns that had relatively few cases suddenly became hot spots. Clusters emerged in dorms, in fraternity and sorority houses, on sports teams. And in many places, in-person classes and parties and football games continued

Some of the worst trouble spots have calmed.

Misery in the Sun Belt has receded, helping to hold down the nation’s new case growth despite increases in the Midwest and West.

Summer outbreaks sent national case tallies soaring to more than 66,000 a day by late July. Arizona, California and Florida reported new records, then broke them, day after day. In some cities, officials shut down bars again and demanded that residents wear masks.

Florida is now averaging about 2,300 new cases a day, roughly one-fifth of what it was seeing at its worst. In Arizona, where overtaxed hospital capacity was once a concern, intensive care beds are now plentiful, and daily case reports have dropped to about 500 on average, down from more than 3,600. New infections have also plunged in California, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina. Mississippi, Texas and Alabama have made significant progress since midsummer as well, though case numbers there remain persistently high.

“Thankfully, we did not have a surge in Covid-19, as was predicted, after the Labor Day weekend,” Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, a Republican, said this week as she announced an extension of the state’s mask order. “But my friends, this isn’t just luck or coincidence. The fact is, our mask order that we imposed on July 16 is working, and the numbers speak for themselves.”

The question ahead is whether regions can hold on to their progress or whether new outbreaks will crop up quickly as limits are lifted and old hot spots surge again.

And the kicker - which I see as the actual intent on the part of people like Charles Koch:

America’s effort to stop the virus is a dizzying patchwork.

The nation’s effort to stop the coronavirus remains a constantly shifting amalgam of state and local rules. And that has meant starkly different realities from state to state, and from county to county.