World
- New Cases: 485,830 (⬆︎ .96%)
- New Deaths: 6,696 (⬆︎ .53%)
USA
- New Cases: 125,759 (⬆︎ 1.21%)
- New Deaths: 692 (⬆︎ .26%)
We've been over 100,000 new cases per day for 6 days in a row now - with no end in sight.
Not long ago, President Stoopid asserted that we'd stop hearing anything about the pandemic immediately after November 3rd.
I thought I might be able to say, "That was LIE NUMBER THUS AND SUCH", but we have no idea how many outright lies he's told now. It's a very large number - way north of 22,000 - so while it's important to try to keep track in a general way, it's pretty much impossible to know precisely. It's a big fuckin' number.
Pandemic Reaches Grim Milestone as Biden Moves to Take Charge
With average new infections totaling 111,000 per day, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is confronting a coronavirus pandemic that is surging out of control
Coronavirus cases surged to a new record on Monday, with the United States now averaging 111,000 cases each day for the past week, a grim milestone amid rising hospitalizations and deaths that cast a shadow on positive news about the effectiveness of a potential vaccine.
As the number of infected Americans passed 10 million and governors struggled to manage the pandemic, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. tried on Monday to use his bully pulpit — the only tool at his disposal until he replaces President Trump in 72 days — to plead for Americans to set aside the bitterness of the 2020 election and wear a mask.
“It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day,” Mr. Biden said in Delaware after announcing a Covid-19 advisory board charged with preparing for quick action once he is inaugurated. “It doesn’t matter your party, your point of view. We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democratic or Republican lives — American lives.”
Hours before Mr. Biden’s remarks, the drug maker Pfizer announced that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19, a promising development that sent stock prices soaring. The world has waited anxiously for any positive sign that there will be an end to the pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people worldwide.
“It’s extraordinary,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, said on CNN. “It is really a big deal.”
Mr. Biden called the development “excellent news” but cautioned that the country was still “facing a very dark winter.” The average daily death toll in the United States is inching back toward 1,000, and hospitals nationwide are strained with patients. The president-elect said that Americans would need to rely on basic precautions, like wearing masks, to “get back to normal as fast as possible.”
“It’s clear that this vaccine, even if approved, will not be widely available for many months yet to come,” he said. “The challenge before us right now is still immense and growing.”
The sheer breadth of that challenge was striking on Monday: More than 784,000 cases have been announced in the United States over the past week, more than in any other week of the pandemic. The country now averages 900 deaths each day, and 28 states added more cases in the seven-day period ending Sunday than in any other weeklong stretch of the pandemic. No states are reporting sustained reductions in cases.
Coronavirus hospitalizations, perhaps the clearest measure of how many people are severely ill, are approaching record levels set during earlier surges of the pandemic, according to data collected by the Covid Tracking Project. A wave of more than 59,200 patients threatened to overwhelm hospitals in communities across the country on Monday.
The outlook is especially grim in the Midwest and Great Plains, where North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Wisconsin and Nebraska had more new cases per capita over the past week than any others. In the Iowa county that includes Des Moines, more than 400 cases are being identified on an average day. In Milwaukee County, Wis., around 900 new cases are emerging each day. The Nebraska county that includes Omaha is averaging about 460 cases daily, a roughly threefold increase in one month. In Ohio, reports of new cases have risen by 91 percent over the past two weeks.
At the White House, which has been the site of several high-profile outbreaks in recent months, Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, tested positive for the coronavirus on Monday, according to a spokesman for the agency. He became the latest in a long list of administration officials, including Mr. Trump himself, to contract the virus.
At least three people who attended an election party at the White House last week, including Mr. Carson, have tested positive for the virus. At the event, several hundred people gathered in the East Room for several hours, many of them not wearing masks as they mingled while watching the election returns.
David Bossie, an adviser to Mr. Trump who attended the election night party, tested positive on Sunday, two people familiar with the diagnosis said. Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, tested positive for the virus the day after the election, aides said, although he tried to keep it quiet.
Mr. Carson, a neurosurgeon who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016, has defended Mr. Trump’s response to the virus and is a member of the White House virus task force. An aide said he was in “good spirits” but declined to specify his treatments.
Beyond the impact of the virus itself, when Mr. Biden takes office, he will face a sobering economic reality.
Even as the Dow Jones industrial average gained nearly 3 percent on news of the vaccine, the economy remained depressed by the spread of the virus. There were 10 million fewer Americans working in October than in February, according to the Labor Department, and the pace of job growth has slowed every month since June. Airlines and other tourism-related industries are nowhere close to regaining their normal levels of customers. And several indicators suggest consumers have pulled back on dining and some other activities in recent weeks as infections have surged anew.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York raised doubts that the Trump administration could handle vaccine distribution, even if a vaccine did become available in the coming weeks, suggesting that governors would have to step in.
“The Trump administration is rolling out the vaccination plan, and I believe it’s flawed,” Mr. Cuomo said Monday on “Good Morning America” on ABC. “They’re basically going to have the private providers do it, and that’s going to leave out all sorts of communities that were left out the first time when Covid ravaged them.”
Mr. Biden, moving to signal to Americans that he is prepared to take charge after a chaotic year, named a new coronavirus task force headed by a former commissioner of food and drugs, Dr. David Kessler; a former surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy; and a Yale public health expert, Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith.
Mr. Biden will have the difficult task of governing a country that is deeply divided about how much the government should do to slow the virus at the expense of jobs, schooling, recreation, socializing and religious gatherings. The president-elect vowed to “spare no effort” in fighting the virus, with the goal of getting the economy “running at full speed again.”
His comments contrasted Mr. Trump’s. The president has spent the past eight months dismissing or playing down the need for Americans to wear masks, saying frequently — and falsely — that public health experts disagree about masks’ effectiveness.
Vice President Mike Pence, who serves as the chairman of Mr. Trump’s coronavirus task force, convened the group on Monday after meeting about once a week over the past several months. But Mr. Trump, who remains in office until January, is openly at odds with his own virus advisers, including about mask wearing.
The wave of cases sweeping through much of the country remains largely a matter for state and local officials whose citizens are divided over the need for restrictions, impatient to improve the economy and fatigued by the pandemic.
The piece goes on, but you get the picture. The Forces of Stoopid are relentless.
We have so much work still to do.
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