COVID update

(1) Both cases and death totals in the USA are moving sharply upward again. We’re at around 1,200 deaths per day in terms of the moving seven-day average, which is pretty much exactly the daily average since March of last year, when Richard Epstein used his Special Legal Reasoning Skills ™ to estimate the pandemic’s death total in the USA would be around 500 deaths, total, and then turned around and claimed a few days later that whoops he had meant 5,000.

(2) Early returns continue to suggest that the Omicron variant is much more transmissible than the Delta variant, but less — perhaps much less — likely to produce serious illness. The picture in regard to the latter point will be much clearer in another few weeks. We’re going to need a lot of luck in that regard, because the just in time structure of the ICUs of the Best Medical System in the World ™ are already on the verge of getting overwhelmed.

(3) 200,000 Americans have officially died of COVID since July 1st of this year, which is a reasonable date for when it would have been realistic to have vaccinated essentially all American adult population. This means around 190K to 195K of those deaths have been a direct product of the GOP’s very successful effort to prolong the pandemic, in order to hurt Democrats electorally-speaking (omelet, eggs, etc.).

(4) Another reminder that the Atlantic magazine published a piece this week by an extreme reactionary, arguing that COVID was no big deal and should not be treated as being one. This was then characterized by various Even the Liberal types as nothing but a benign ethnographic observation about the folkways of Real Americans, i.e., conservative rural white people.