COVID-19 Update

World

New Cases:   476,355 (⬆︎ .50%)

New Deaths:      9,242 (⬆︎ .45%)

USA

New Cases:   142087 (⬆︎ .58%)

New Deaths:     1,425 (⬆︎ .35%)

Vaccinations took another day off

10.6 million total vaccintated

9.6% Priority Population

3.2% Total population

Wouldn't it be nice if the dip in numbers over the last few days turns out to be a downward trend - like the holiday surge is done and we're going back down into relatively low trough, or maybe we've even started to get a handle on this thing.

Looking for the bright spots in what has been a very dark aspect of the world.

Coverage of the pandemic is a little sparse these days. Seems there must be a few other things occupying the Press Poodles' time.

Unfortunately, there's never a shortage of stories about how shitty it's been to lose good people to a monster largely of our own creation.

NYT:

Lives Cut Short

On one single day in a monthlong period during which the United States lost more people to Covid-19 than in any other during the pandemic, Stacey Williams, a beloved youth football coach and father of five in Florida, was among more than 2,000 Americans with the virus to die.

Along with Mr. Williams, Jose H. Garcia, 59, the longtime chief of the Roma Police Department in the South Texas border region who was known to friends and family as Beto, died of Covid-19 complications. So did Nelson Prentice Bowsher II of Washington, D.C., 80, an affordable-housing advocate whose family’s feed mill business was a fixture of South Bend, Ind., through the 1960s.

Combing through hundreds of local obituaries, county records and interviews with families, New York Times reporters were able to piece together a tapestry of some of the lives lost on that day, Jan. 4.

Sherri Rasmussen, 51, of Lancaster, Ohio, was one. She is survived by a daughter who said she will always remember the day her mother gave her purse to a woman who complimented it in a CVS store, saying, “I want to pay it forward.”

And then there was Pedro Ramirez, 47, who loved his Puerto Rican homeland, salsa dancing and restoring Volkswagen bugs. Days before, he told his wife, Shawna Rodriguez, about the vaccine and how people like him, with chronic medical issues, would be getting it soon.

“I told him I loved him and how sorry I was that he had to be in the hospital by himself,” said Ms. Ramirez, 52, who works in a bridal salon in Macon, Ga.

The surge in deaths reflects how much faster Americans have spread the virus to one another since late September, when the number of cases identified daily had fallen to below 40,000. Since early in the pandemic, deaths have closely tracked cases, with about 1.5 percent of cases ending in death three to four weeks later.