Coronavirus / COVID-19

[ReluctantSamurai]

Don't know what Tony Blair has said wrong.

You're right. Hadn't realized I screwed up the last name. Tony ABBOTT

[Pannonian]

In sort of Coronavirus related news but not really.

The UK government has used Covid legislation to requisition land to prepare for no deal Brexit. No planning permission required, no appeals allowed.

[ReluctantSamurai]

In case any fellow American Orgahs were wondering, we are still in the throes of a pandemic that is claiming over 1100 lives per day. In the never-ending game of Whack-A-Mole, the current shift is moving away from the Arizona/Texas/Florida/California quad back to the upper Midwaest:

https://www.vox.com/2020/9/2/2141881...-midwest-surge

[South Dakota]

The number of daily new cases is up 192 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 354, the highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 22.2 percent, the highest figure among states and more than doubled from two weeks ago

As you can see, South Dakota ranks an ignominious first in all of the leading indicators for a worsening outbreak. Hospitalizations also doubled from a low of 35 in early August to 78 as of September 1.

It’s hard to be sure what’s behind this spike in cases. South Dakota still doesn’t have a mask mandate, and Gov. Kristi Noem has said she won’t issue one, nor will she impose a stay-at-home order. The state has not placed meaningful restrictions on businesses or other public activities, according to Boston University’s state policy database.

There was also the Sturgis motorcycle rally last month, which state health officials have linked to more than 100 cases of South Dakotans contracting Covid-19. The number of people infected at the state’s universities ballooned from less than 50 in mid-August to more than 550 by the end of the month. There have been another 200 cases reported recently in K-12 schools.

[In North Dakota]

The number of daily new cases is up 77 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 332, the second-highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 20.1 percent, the second-highest figure among states and doubled from two weeks ago

Like South Dakota, North Dakota does not and has never had a mask mandate. The state did close some businesses in March, when the outbreak was largely contained to the New York City area, but they began reopening in May and no new restrictions have been put into place.

[Iowa---again]

The number of daily new cases is up 90 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 300, the fourth-highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 18.5 percent, the third-highest figure among states and nearly doubled over from two weeks ago

Yet Gov. Kim Reynolds is declining to impose any new mitigation measures. Iowa is another one of the 16 states without a mask mandate. Most business restrictions were lifted in May. And now Iowa State says it will allow 25,000 people to attend its season-opening football game on September 12.

[Kansas]

The number of daily new cases is up 26 percent over the last two weeks
Daily new cases per million people is 206, the eighth-highest rate of new infections in the country
The positive test rate is 16 percent, the fifth-highest figure among states and increasing from two weeks ago

The state has been more aggressive about trying to contain the virus than some of its neighbors. Gov. Laura Kelly imposed a mask mandate on July 1 and she waited until the end of June to allow bars to reopen. Still, the metrics in the state suggest the virus has started spreading in the community again.

And btw, that article was listed 11th on Vox's story board.....

[Montmorency]

Can states even set a higher drinking age?
https://kwwl.com/2020/09/02/governor...-young-people/

[drone]

Can states even set a higher drinking age?
https://kwwl.com/2020/09/02/governor...-young-people/

You must be younger than I thought. Yes, the states set the drinking age, it's only 21 nationwide because the federal government threatened to withhold interstate highway funds from states that did not raise the age to 21 back in the mid-late 80s. Some states jacked it up immediately, others grandfathered in on a yearly basis as they raised it.
Those of us on the wrong side of the cusp might still be a little bitter about it. Just a little.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

You must be younger than I thought. Yes, the states set the drinking age, it's only 21 nationwide because the federal government threatened to withhold interstate highway funds from states that did not raise the age to 21 back in the mid-late 80s. Some states jacked it up immediately, others grandfathered in on a yearly basis as they raised it.
Those of us on the wrong side of the cusp might still be a little bitter about it. Just a little.

Good side of the cusp by two months the whole way up...

[Montmorency]

You must be younger than I thought. Yes, the states set the drinking age, it's only 21 nationwide because the federal government threatened to withhold interstate highway funds from states that did not raise the age to 21 back in the mid-late 80s. Some states jacked it up immediately, others grandfathered in on a yearly basis as they raised it.
Those of us on the wrong side of the cusp might still be a little bitter about it. Just a little.

You thought I was a Boomer?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation...inking_Age_Act

Somehow I had been under the intuition that this acted as a ceiling as well. I was never in a place to entertain raising the drinking age, though there have always been notable voices toward its lowering.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I thought this was a joke, at first. Scratch & Sniff? Upon further reading:

https://www.inquirer.com/health/coro...-20200821.html

“Our message is ‘If you have sudden-onset smell loss, in the absence of other explanatory history like a head injury, the chance of you being infected is high,’” said John E. Hayes, a professor in the department of food science and director of the Sensory Evaluation Center in the College of Agricultural Sciences. “This is about raising awareness that smell loss is an early symptom of COVID-19.”

“More COVID patients have loss of sense of smell than have a fever,” Reed said. “Yet fever is often first on the checklist of COVID symptoms and sense of smell is at the bottom, like an afterthought. We think it should be near or at the top.”



A recent study based on a worldwide survey of 25,000 patients by the Global Consortium for Chemosensory Research found that COVID-19 is more strongly associated with smell and taste than with fever, cough, or shortness of breath, though those are the “cardinal symptoms currently highlighted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).” The study has not been peer-reviewed.

Several other studies have linked the loss of smell to the virus. Researchers at the Mayo Clinic reported in June that patients with COVID-19 were 27 times more likely to lose their sense of smell than people without the virus, while less than three times as likely to report fever and/or chills. Another analysis of medical records by Mayo researchers suggested that routine screening for those changes "could contribute to improved case detection in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic."

Perhaps the best part of smell testing is that it doesn’t involve discomfort or stigma, and it can easily be turned into a game. Soon, Reed said, instead of being zapped with a digital thermometer, individuals who are entering a meeting or store may be handed a card with three peel-off stickers and asked which one has a scent.

Scratch and Sniff---brings back childhood memories....

[ReluctantSamurai]

And in the ongoing game of COVID Whack-A-Mole here in the US:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/0...ds-home-409262

American colleges are a mess right now. And public health experts and school administrators are still deciding whether the best strategy is to forge ahead with in-person instruction, send kids home with a Zoom syllabus and risk spreading the virus, or shelter them in place. The last option could be a potentially miserable experience for a teen riding out the pandemic alone in a dorm with ramen noodles and Pop-Tarts.

President Donald Trump has demanded that colleges reopen, with minimal guidance from the federal government on how to safely bring students back or what to do when infections are found. Administrators confronted with thousands of positive cases are improvising on the fly, trying to both prevent new flare-ups and keep the disease from spreading beyond their walls.

“I don’t think there are two universities that have the same protocol,” said Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University. “It’s national chaos.”

Experts say the variable conditions are a reflection of the broader U.S. response and expect more islands of disease when the season changes.

“A school is not a spaceship, a school is not a bubble, it’s a reflection of the community it’s in,” Frieden said.

"Islands of disease". Interesting way of putting it....

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...s-tracker.html

With no national tracking system, colleges are making their own rules for how to tally infections. While The Times’s survey is believed to be the most comprehensive account available, it is also a near-certain undercount. Among the colleges contacted by The Times, many published case information online or responded to requests for case numbers, but at least 360 others ignored inquiries or refused to answer questions. More than 170 have reported zero cases.

Given the disparities in size, reopening plans and transparency among universities, this data should not be used to make campus-to-campus comparisons. Some colleges remove people from their tallies once they recover. Some only report tests performed on campus. And some initially provided data but then stopped.

No national tracking system....

[drone]

You thought I was a Boomer?

I had you pegged as younger side of GenX. Now you have outed yourself as a Millennial, since Millennials tend to think GenX doesn't exist and everyone older than themselves are Boomers. Which, of course, is the worst thing you can call a Xer.

I don't think raising the drinking age will help at all, and I'm basing this argument solely on my experience with the NMDA. It never stopped anyone from drinking on campus when I was in college, since we all knew people above the age willing to supply. Things probably changed later as the those close to the cusp left and 21 was considered the new normal, but at the time everyone thought raising it was a bit of an injustice. Which is what will happen now if it gets raised again.

[Shaka_Khan]

I think the use of generation labels became common when the term Generation-X began to appear on the news articles. I had never heard of the term Baby Boomer before I heard the term GenX, but that was probably because I was too young to remember it at that time.

When looking at what I know of the generations before the Boomers, I see similarities from the Boomers to the Millennials in life having been much easier, abundant, safer and with high expectations when we were growing up. The Boomers may disagree in that I believe that the 'me me me' thing began significantly with the Boomers. (In certain other countries, the generations as late as the Boomers suffered hardships from wars and poverty. Some countries have the current younger generation experiencing it now). I agree that there's a difference with the generations after GenX who grew up during the Information Age, but when looking at my grandparents' generation, there really isn't a big difference between GenX and the later ones. The wealthy people and the flappers of the Roaring Twenties might've been similar to us, but I heard that those people didn't represent the majority of the population (far from it).

The current children and teenagers are different. They're growing up during an unusual time not experienced before since the 1918 pandemic. We're all being affected by the current pandemic, but I think the impact is being more felt by the younger generation who are growing up at this time.

[Shaka_Khan]

[ReluctantSamurai]

Glad to hear that Dr. Fauci agrees with me:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fauc...ry?id=72952834

On Thursday, in contrast to the president's rosy outlook, Fauci told a Harvard forum, “I just think we need to hunker down and get through this fall and winter, because it’s not going to be easy. We know every time we restrict, we lift restrictions, we get a blip. I mean … it’s whack-a-mole.”

[Hooahguy]

At least the Senate is taking this seriously.

The Senate has confirmed six of Trump’s judicial nominees in the past 30 hours. These are lifetime appointments that McConnell’s pushing through instead of the HEROES Act & other crucial legislation

Oh also the CDC director said that a vaccine probably wont be available until middle of next year.

The director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted Wednesday that most of the American public will not have access to a vaccine against the novel coronavirus until late spring or summer of next year — contrary to President Trump’s assertions that the pandemic is nearly over.

At a Senate hearing on the government’s response to the pandemic, CDC director Robert Redfield adhered to President Trump’s oft-stated contention that a safe and effective vaccine will become available in November or December — perhaps just before the presidential election seven weeks away.

But Redfield said the vaccine will be provided first to people most vulnerable to covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and supplies will increase over time, so Americans who are lower priority for the protection will be offered the shot more gradually. For it to be “fully available to the American public, so we begin to take advantage of vaccine to get back to our regular life,” he said, “I think we are probably looking at late second quarter, third quarter 2021.”

I'm surprised that Trump hasn't fired him yet.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I've not heard a single broadcast media here in the US say anything about this unfolding catastrophe ( I guess it does nothing for ratings):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...attle-rages-on

Five months on, Mumbai has 1.8 million coronavirus cases and on Thursday, India crossed the dubious threshold of reporting more than5 million cases nationwide. With the fastest rate of infection in the world, and no signs of the country hitting its peak any time soon, many predict India will eventually overtake the US – currently on 6.6 million – to report the most cases worldwide. While cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kolkata have recorded the highest concentration of cases so far, data shows the virus is now spreading to rural areas, which are reporting two-thirds of new cases.

Honestly, I don't know why this hasn't happened sooner considering the state of medical care, and the abysmal living conditions for millions of Indian people.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I've not heard a single broadcast media here in the US say anything about this unfolding catastrophe ( I guess it does nothing for ratings):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...attle-rages-on



Honestly, I don't know why this hasn't happened sooner considering the state of medical care, and the abysmal living conditions for millions of Indian people.

India has some really bright people in medicine there...

But I guess the physical conditions with poverty etc. can become almost an insoluble obstacle to curtailing this sort of thing.

[ReluctantSamurai]

But I guess the physical conditions with poverty etc. can become almost an insoluble obstacle to curtailing this sort of thing.

They do have good medical facilities......in the cities. India is 65% rural. With 1.4 billion people, that's 910 million people with substandard healthcare. India's healthcare leaders are mostly pointing to the sudden, and drastic lockdown measures imposed by the Indian government in late March. Counter-intuitive to how we think here, but in India, millions of indigenous migrant workers were trapped in cities and not allowed to leave, thereby contracting COVID-19. Millions left anyway, bringing the virus from the cities to the countryside. Lack of testing also led to undercounting.

Despite still having ~40k cases/day, and ~1k deaths/day here in the US, sometime this year India will surpass in both cases and deaths

[Montmorency]

One consideration is that India, by factors of size and infrastructure, is less capable than the US or other rich countries of comprehensively tallying its deaths even in the best of times. Beneath the formal statistics it is easily plausible that India has already been experiencing the world's highest rate of infections and number of COVID deaths for months.

But yeah, at this rate India will overtake the US for #1 in case count sometime in October.

In better news, some American Indians are turning the page on COVID without much support.

In other news, Singapore seems to have crushed their outbreak at last, having seen one COVID death in 3 months and 15K cases in the same period, only 2K in the past month. After a 2-month battle with a resurgence in Melbourne (in which up to 90% of cumulative Australian COVID deaths were recorded), Australia's measures seemed to have paid off in returning to the status quo ante.

In worse news the Rona is breaking records across Europe this month, as the failure to contain the resurgent outbreak was seemingly comprehensive. I'll start reviewing the record on school openings in Europe in October. But even here is a silver lining, as has been observed throughout the summer, namely that time has allowed us to more than halve death rates (and the gains are most pronounced among the oldest and most vulnerable demographics). How much more justice need be done on behalf of early and aggressive suppression?

[ReluctantSamurai]

Under the radar:

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcar...rd-researchers

Scott Atlas, one of President Trump’s coronavirus advisers, is threatening to sue a group of Stanford doctors and researchers after they penned a public letter calling out “falsehoods” and “misrepresentations” of science around COVID-19.

Atlas, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who has questioned the science of wearing masks to stop the spread of COVID-19, has made claims that “run counter to established science” and undermines public health authorities by doing so, 78 researchers and doctors wrote in the Sept. 9 letter posted on Stanford's website.

Apparently cut from the same cloth as his new boss:

Attorneys for Atlas responded Thursday, threatening to “vindicate his reputation in court” and “seek compensatory and punitive damages” if the letter is not withdrawn.

“Your letter, which you wrote and sent with no regard for the truth, maliciously defames Dr. Atlas,” wrote Attorney Marc Kasowitz, whose firm helped represent President Trump during the impeachment proceedings.

Kasowitz demanded that signatories immediately issue a press release withdrawing the letter and contact every media outlet that has reported on it to request a correction by Friday.

And:

Atlas, a neuroradiologist who has no training in infectious diseases, public health or epidemiology, recently joined the White House coronavirus task force and appears to be favored by the president.

Experts have raised concerns over Atlas’s hard-lined push to reopen schools and his skepticism around the science of mask-wearing to slow the spread of COVID-19.

He has also pushed an approach to the pandemic that focuses on protecting those most at risk for serious COVID-19 illness including the elderly, while minimizing restrictions for the rest of the population, butting heads with Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, who are also on the White House coronavirus task force, according to The New York Times.

Sounds like "herd mentality".....errr I mean herd immunity, to me.

So who is the latest "totally unqualified yes man" hired by Fearless Leader?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattper.../#23ee266220a4

A senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank, Atlas is not an infectious disease expert — he’s board-certified in diagnostic radiology, which means he specializes in reading and interpreting imaging like X-rays, CT scans and MRIs, and he served as a professor and chief of neuroradiology at Stanford University Medical Center from 1998 to 2012.

During a Fox News appearance on Aug. 3 discussing college reopenings, Atlas echoed an argument often made by Trump that children "have no risk for serious illness" and "they're not significant spreaders," adding, "There should never be and there is no goal to stop college students from getting an infection they have no problem with."

Calling the debate around reopening schools "irrational," Atlas said during his Fox appearance that "people are kidding themselves" if they believe testing is valuable and seemed to criticize the practice of quarantining asymptomatic carriers of the virus if they test positive, though studies have shown the virus can be spread by people not exhibiting symptoms.

A quick perusal of COVID-19 cases on college campuses here in the US and in other schools points up what an unmitigated quack this guy is. But the real reason he was hired is:

Trump brought in Atlas as an adviser after repeatedly contradicting the advice of the lead healthcare experts on the administration's coronavirus task force. The administration has particularly taken aim at Fauci. In late July, Trump called him "a little bit of an alarmist," to which Fauci said, "I consider myself more of a realist."

"Scott is a very famous man who’s also very highly respected," Trump said on Monday. "He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus. And he has many great ideas."

But hey, let's adopt "herd mentality"...I mean herd immunity, and 2 million deaths later (hopefully all Democrats) the US will have "turned the corner" on COVID-19 and we can all get back to merrily living in "normalcy" again.

Rock On Baby Donny

[ReluctantSamurai]

And another episode in the continuing Rocky & Bullwinkle Show entitled "Olympus Has Fallen" or "Help Me, I Can't Get Up":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0KjJROCZ-E

A president who is openly only the leader of "Red States".....

[Furunculus]

..European countries bet on personal responsibility and targeted measures, instead of sweeping restrictions that froze their economies in the spring

https://www.wsj.com/articles/as-coro...jtwittertest19

now who does that sound like?

[Furunculus]

latest results from the Oxford group's Covid Openness Index:

https://covidtracker.bsg.ox.ac.uk/stringency-map

+ "New Risk of Openness Index available: see the press release and the research note. The index aims to help countries understand if it is safe to ‘open up’ or whether they should ‘close down’ in their fight to tackle the coronavirus."

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/sites/defau..._09_2020v2.pdf

https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/pu...e-increased-or

[Shaka_Khan]

https://news.yahoo.com/covid-19-pand...115756134.html

Coronavirus pandemic may have started in October, says UK-French study

Henry Samuel, The Telegraph May 8, 2020

.....The theory the virus was circulating earlier than had been thought came after a French athlete who fell ill after competing in Wuhan in October said she had been told by doctors it was likely that she had caught Covid-19.

The claim by Olympic silver-winning pentathlete Elodie Clouvel bolstered theories that coronavirus may have been carried around the world by people who had taken part in an international competition in the Chinese city.

Ms Clouvel, 31, said that she and her 27-year-old boyfriend Valentin Belaud, also a pentathlete, had fallen ill after the Military World Games, held in Wuhan between October 18 and 27 and featuring 9,308 athletes from 109 countries.

Other French team members have since spoken to the French press, mainly on condition of anonymity, to say they too had become sick.

"We all fell ill with the same symptoms," Ms Clouvel, a military police officer, told RTL radio. "We have recently had a contact with the military doctor, who said to us: 'I think you had [it] because there were a lot of people who were ill afterwards'.".....

Then the first infection to a human began before October 2019.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Then the first infection to a human began before October 2019.

I'm not sure that "Patient Zero" will ever be found

Another strange twist on the CoronaVirus trail:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54288067

The dogs can detect coronavirus in humans five days before they develop symptoms, Anna Hielm-Bjorkman, the University of Helsinki professor who is running the trial, told Reuters news agency.
"They are very good [at detecting coronavirus]. We come close to 100% sensitivity," she said.

Be interesting to see if any business or agency here in the US looks seriously at this....

[Shaka_Khan]

https://www.the-sun.com/news/1525439...d-last-week-2/

Earlier this week it was revealed that one in four patients admitted to Preston hospital trusts during the pandemic had died from the virus.

[Montmorency]

https://www.startribune.com/covid-su...ion/572535141/

A door-to-door COVID-19 testing survey has been halted due to multiple incidents in greater Minnesota of residents intimidating and shouting racial and ethnic slurs at state and federal public health survey teams.

The CDC pulled its federal surveyors out of Minnesota this week following reports of verbal abuse and intimidation, including an incident in the Iowa border town of Eitzen, Minn., in which a survey team walking to a house was blocked by two cars and threatened by three men, according to state health officials. One man had his hand on a holstered gun.

Frustration with the state's pandemic response "is totally understandable," said Dr. Ruth Lynfield, state epidemiologist, "but that is distinctly different than taking out frustration on another human being who is trying to help and is especially galling when there is a taint of racism. There is no justification for this — the enemy is the virus and not the public health workers who are trying to help."

Surveyors had been fanning out to 180 neighborhoods this month — offering free diagnostic testing for active COVID-19 infections and blood antibody testing to identify prior infections — to understand the true prevalence of the coronavirus causing the pandemic.

Insults came at doorways, from angry people approaching the surveyors or just people walking their dogs on the other sides of the streets, said Stephanie Yendell, a state senior epidemiology supervisor.

The frequency of problems became clear last weekend when surveyors discussed their experiences, Yendell said. A Hispanic surveyor was called one slur "more in the last week than in her entire life," she said.

Most people were polite in all areas of the state, but there were "several" incidents and "a pattern emerged," said Dan Huff, assistant state health commissioner. The state ended the survey rather than continuing without the CDC workers, or sending only white surveyors in largely white rural communities.

"We found that our white teams had a very different experience, a much more positive experience, but I think from our perspective it's ridiculous for us to contemplate that," he said. "We choose who is doing this survey on their professional qualifications."

While samples were collected from 400 volunteers, that is short of what was sought for assessing COVID-19's presence in Minnesota. In a sad irony, health officials said that people who drove surveyors away due to frustration over state pandemic restrictions ended up short-circuiting a study that could have hastened the end to those restrictions.

Meanwhile, in Kandahar Province...
(I swear, the country's not supposed to be this way.)

State health leaders said it was disappointing for Minnesota and that CASPER surveys have been completed this year in Georgia and Hawaii and are ongoing in other states. The Hawaii study assessed joblessness amid the pandemic.
[...]
Incidents occurred mostly in central and southern Minnesota, rural areas where there has been pent-up resentment over the spring statewide shutdown, the indoor mask mandate and the bar and restaurant restrictions. Such measures were seen as overkill in small towns where virus transmission has been less prevalent.

In the past week in New York State we've inched marginally past a 1% positivity rate for the first time since perhaps the beginning of summer, and had the first day with more than 1000 cases since early June. Much of the uptick has been associated with surging infections in colleges and college towns attendant to on-campus residents; college openings have been a disaster all across the country, typically worse than we've seen in New York so far.

This comes as restaurants are slated to finally open in the city for indoor dining (at 25% capacity) at the end of the month, the last in the country to my knowledge. At least it's promising that restaurants in the rest of the state have been open to indoor dining to at least a degree since the end of June, and that went alright as far as I can tell. In-person school openings have been repeatedly pushed back for 3 weeks in a confidence-shaking ordeal of logistical and administrative chaos, though the other major school systems in the country have gone all-online and most students in the NYC school system will be all-remote anyway. But NYC schools will be opening for in-person (online has already begun) at the end of the month. Seems like a dumb and costly and dangerous way to go about it- the in-person instruction will be an expensive and disruptive "hybrid" experience that sucks basically everywhere it has been tried.

I hope we're not about to lose our hard-earned stability.


For a curveball, this Lancet study finds a very low proportion of Americans with SARS-2 antibodies by late July. I would have figured the contemporary proportion twice as high. Maybe someone who cares to read the study in depth could offer insight.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/healt...s-immunity-us/



Totally OT, but what is up with all the channels of South Asian villagers trying Western products that have emerged in the past months?

[Seamus Fermanagh]

Florida, with the exception of the greater Miami area, went Phase III with full restaurants etc.

I am sensing a lot of "the vaccine is gonna take way too long and I am done putting my life on hold" sentiment.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I am sensing a lot of "the vaccine is gonna take way too long and I am done putting my life on hold" sentiment.

Which is why we will probably see something in the vicinity of 300,000 deaths here in the US by the end of the year. This is "quietly" heading towards the 1918 level of severity in terms of loss of life. The White House has already undermined an already shaky confidence in vaccines, so that even if one of the current candidates proves to be at least reasonably effective, refusal to vaccinate will be widespread. Given that, and the "eff it" mentality you alluded to, by the time spring breaks in March, we could be approaching 500,000 deaths...

[Shaka_Khan]

Some people think that he's pretending to be infected in order to delay the elections, or to make an excuse for an exit. I don't believe it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out to be true.

I see a parallel:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...change-history

On the evening of April 3, 1919, in Paris, President Woodrow Wilson began to cough; he soon took to bed, feverish and unable to move. He had contracted what had become known as the Spanish flu, the President’s physician wrote confidentially to the White House, and it had made Wilson “violently sick.” By then, the influenza had rampaged around the world for more than a year and was on its way to killing at least twenty million people, including at least six hundred thousand Americans.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/04/...ing-great-war/

Scholars have debated for decades whether Wilson, who fell ill at the Paris peace conference in April 1919, was suffering from a stroke, the Spanish flu, or a bout of seasonal influenza. Cooper says the best current scholarship has concluded that Wilson’s Paris illness was due to a common flu, not the pandemic strain.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Yep. Poetic justice, or just another hoax?

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/a...uld-be/616576/

I'm just surprised it hasn't happened sooner.