US COVID-19 Update for first 23 days of January 2021: January remains on track to be the worst month yet but may turn out to be a hump month

Total announced US COVID-19 cases, first 23 days of Jan 2021: 5,021,670 or 218,333 per day.

Dec 2020 cases per day: 206,809.

Nov 2020 cases per day: 146,872.

Self-reported mask compliance rates of 49% are probably still quite exaggerated. People who complain that health safety mandates don't work never contend with that fact. The virus wouldn't be spreading the way it is if it were really true that people are finally doing what's been asked of them. 

Total announced US COVID-19 deaths, first 23 days of Jan 2021: 71351, or 3102 per day.

Dec 2020 rate was 2516 per day.

Apr 2020 rate was 1961 per day.

Hospitalizations on Sat Jan 23: 113,609. Peak appears to have occurred Jan 6: 132,474.

Up-to-date charts for 2020:

Was QAnon started by this joker?

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths hit 410k

 

Trump clown show ends, Biden nightmare begins

US COVID-19 deaths plough right through 400k mark in Johns Hopkins data today

 This morning the figure was still 399,500 but this evening is already past 401k.

Think of it as Donald Trump's retirement number on his last full day in office.

Update for COVID-19 English-speaking world case fatality rates as of 1/19/21

 Per Johns Hopkins University (data changes slightly as we write):

Global totals:

deaths 2,044,445 / cases 95,703,104

Case fatality rate 2.13%

G-7 nations Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US, plus Australia and New Zealand:

deaths 713,992 / cases 36,041,142

Case fatality rate 1.98%

Rest of the world 2.23% 

Ten other nations with the largest English-speaking populations (India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh, Egypt, Ghana, Russia, Thailand, South Africa / data quality obviously varies):

deaths 295,121 / cases 17,399,153 

Case fatality rate 1.69% 

South Korea, not shown above, is a good example of how no matter what nations seem to do to stop the spread of the disease, case fatality rates everywhere seem to be ending up in the vicinity of 2%.

Early on South Korea was impressing with a rate well below 1%, but today it is at 1.75%. Japan is up to 1.33%. Much vaunted New Zealand is up to 1.10%.

Compared with Canada 2.51%, France 2.38%, Germany 2.32%, Italy 3.45%, the UK 2.61%, and Australia 3.16%, the good ole USA 1.657% is doing much better than the hysterical headlines would have you believe.

That said, in the US COVID-19 is still sixteen and half times more deadly than influenza. This is a serious crisis, the long term health effects of which are not known.

A recent long term study from May to November in the US showed an alarming rise in hospitalizations for COVID among children. Another study from the UK indicated an alarming rise in the death rate for individuals six months after recovering from COVID. The impact of the disease on the human vascular system is typically acute in the lungs, but remains a still not well understood threat to the rest of the body and its organs.

You don't want to get it. 24 million in the US already have, just 7% of the population.  

In past hits to full-time employment in the early 1990s, after 2000 and 2007, part-time usually soared, but it tanked in 2020 right along with full-time

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths climb to 390k, world deaths to 2m

 

Fred Upton, Republican chucklehead, MI-6, waits until the very last hours of the Trump administration to declare: "But it is time to say: Enough is enough”

What courage! What principle! What restraint!

Upton joined nine other Republicans in the US House, including my own freshman congressman Peter Meijer, Republican chucklehead, MI-3, and all the Democrats, 222 of them, to impeach Trump a second time 232-197. Four Republicans did not vote.

The roll call is here. Upton is quoted here.

Upton, 67, has spent his life as a useless heir to a Whirlpool fortune estimated under $10 million. Once an aspiring journalist with a B.A. in journalism, instead he became a staffer to the libertarian Republican Representative David Stockman in the late 1970s and followed him to OMB under Reagan in the early 1980s. He first ran for Congress in 1986, eleven years after graduating from the U of M. He has been a congressional pest ever since, aren't they all?, who has inflicted on the American people such things as lightbulb bans, eventually styling himself as a moderate.

Meijer, now 33, is embarking on a similar trajectory, but with a gappy resume. Reportedly worth $50 million from the Meijer grocery store chain, Meijer has landed in Congress also after a decade of searching for himself.

Meijer got in to West Point but ignominiously dropped out after one year, became an Army Reservist, and went to Columbia in 2008 where he salvaged himself with a B.A. in anthropology by 2012. He interrupted this period at Columbia with service in Iraq in 2010-2011 as a sergeant. Post graduation in 2012 he served with an NGO 2013-2015. He took a wife in 2016, and an MBA from NYU, apparently 2016-2017. Then there was a brief stint in 2018 with Ilitch Holdings of billionaire family fame as an "analyst" which ended in January 2019. When Justin Amash left the Republican Party in July 2019, Meijer announced his candidacy.

Just as Upton took up the occasion of the Capitol attack as a moment of historic gravitas which inspired him to rise to impeach Trump, Meijer similarly has over-dramatized it by relating it to the drama of his "combat" experience as an intelligence advisor in Iraq (insert smirk here). He also laughably pondered out loud the danger those in the order of presidential succession were in from the trespassers on January 6. He reminds one of no one so much as the ex-bartender become US Representative, AOC, who has similarly made it a point to appear distraught and blow everything completely out of proportion to the reality in keeping with her modus operandi everywhere. Think of red-lipsticked Alexandria at the border fence a while ago, clad in white, head in her hands, weeping, sporting her $600 wristwatch.

The lefty Michael Tracey has framed such over-the-top demonstrativeness as "unhinged threat inflation" in recent days, which is exactly what we're being subjected to for demagogic purposes. The manipulation of the American people is nothing new, it's just that these young people are probably less aware of it as a technique than they are themselves victims and mimickers of the technique.

No so with Upton. He is the old hand who is too grown up and knowing for this, who knows just when to say just enough in order to receive huzzahs as a statesman instead of the harangues for the seat-warmer he is in reality. 

Somehow the American people are content to let such people put us $28 trillion in debt. We chuckleheads have the chuckleheads we deserve.

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths climb to 380k

 

Climate Update for KGRR: December 2020 and 2020 Annual

 

Climate Update for KGRR: December 2020

Max T 53, Mean 53, Annual Max T 94, Mean 94

Min T 18, Mean 4, Annual Min T 4, Mean -7, tied for eighth highest on record with 2010 and 1911

Av T 32.4, Mean 28.4, Annual Av T 50.1, Mean 48.2, fifteenth highest on record

Rain 2.81, Mean 2.45, Annual 37.44, Mean 34.77

Snow 4.9, Mean 16, Snow season to date 5.3, Mean 22.7

HDD 1001, Mean 1128, HDD season to date 2277, Mean 2485

CDD Annual 832, Mean 694, Peak year was in 1921 at 1200

By average temperature 2020 was 3.9% warmer than the mean, not because the shorter summer season was especially hot but because minimum temperatures in the longer winter season moderated.

2020 was a disaster for full-time employment, wiping out eight years of progress, however anemic those were: 13 million full-time potential missing on average relative to 2006 peak at 52.3%

 

It took Reagan/Bush just six years to reach 52% after the early 1980s recessions, still unparalleled

LOL, Drudge shows Peter Meijer and orangutan

 

For some reason Peter Meijer, Justin Amash's replacement, feels the need to parade his combat cred, basically admits to mental illness: "fully uniformed", "parachute in ... not literally", "a through and through combatant"

Here, apparently because some people doubt it. He did, after all, bail out of West Point and will forever live with the stigma.

Read the whole thing and you'll see the freshman congressman is already psychoanalyzing his colleagues while admitting to the need for some himself.

Unbelievable. This is what we elect to Congress. A rich kid trying to be somebody.

There's a lot of things I respect about Rep. Amash. At the end of the day, you're going to be your own person. I think much of my approach is guided by my experiences overseas. I was fully uniformed, a through-and-through combatant in Iraq; I'd do intelligence operations. That gave me one vantage point. When I was working in disaster response efforts around the world, you—not literally, but kind of—parachute into an area, whether it was the Philippines or South Sudan, domestic response for tornadoes and hurricanes. You have to make a little bit of order out of the chaos. And then when I was in Afghanistan later for a couple of years, as a conflict analyst for the humanitarian aid community, that was a very different perspective, too. But I saw a sense of, how do things fall apart and how can they be rebuilt? ...

We've inserted ourselves into the middle of civil wars; we've taken sides. Sometimes those sides switch. In Iraq, we're backing the Sunnis one time, we're backing the Shia the other. In Afghanistan, it becomes a shifting set of alliances.

Ultimately I think that erodes something at the core of our national soul that we kind of paper over. That's something that I'll have to sit on a therapist's couch to better understand.

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths rise to 370k

 

Rush Limbaugh reverts to the status quo ante Trump, reads Ben Domenech article on the air caricaturing Capitol MAGA

Here's Domenech, the husband of Megan McCain, daughter of John:

An apolitical viewer of the summer of 2020 would learn one distinct lesson: If you want to be heard, if you want to be listened to, you need to go into the streets, make a ruckus, set things on fire, and tear down icons of America. This disrespect will be welcomed, hailed, and supported if your cause is just and your motives are righteous.

Just about everyone who showed up on Capitol Hill yesterday believed that about why they were there . . ..

Anyone remotely familiar with the sequence of events on Wednesday January 6 recognizes that while Trump was still speaking at 1:07pm, and boring the huge crowd to death far away on the Ellipse, a smaller faction was already over at the Capitol breaking in at 1:03pm. The Blaze's Elijah Schaffer was there documenting the whole thing, and frankly, inflaming the situation as "revolution" when what it was was a juvenile stunt. Just look at the left's similar reaction to the event. This is an elementary playground squabble by grown-ups who never grew up, elevated to national importance by the children running the media and the Democrat Party.

We are not a serious country. But I repeat myself.

The bios of some of these flamboyant mental cases whose pictures you have probably seen after they broke into the Capitol reveal them to be anything but Trumpists, yet Domenech, and Limbaugh, are as content to lump them all together as the GOP House and Senate is to ignore the efforts of Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to investigate Election 2020 improprieties.

Business as usual. The left and the media caricature the right, and Con Inc. joins right in.

The left wins because the right eats it own. Every. Damn. Time.

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths hit 360k

 

Thanks to the fools in the GOP and in MAGA, you can kiss your country goodbye as both US Senate seats in Georgia flip Democrat

8:30am Wednesday

 

11:00pm Tuesday

Both Republicans in Georgia US Senate contest in the lead with 90% reporting at 11:07pm

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID-19 deaths hit 350k just before midnight

 

US COVID-19 Summary for 2020 plus Jan 2021 death projection

Cumulative cases 20.026m

Cumulative deaths 0.346m

case fatality rate 1.73%

(us-covid-tracker.com, data subject to revision)

Cumulative hospitalizations 686,158

Cumulative deaths 336,779

percent dead 49.1% (not all deaths were hospitalized, obviously)

Peak Saturday for hospitalizations was 12/26 with 117,344

(covidtracking.com, data values last revised 1/2/21 and also subject to change)

Worst months for deaths:

Dec 78,016 (2,516/day)

Apr 58,836 (1,961/day)

May 41,239 (1,330/day)

Nov 37,513 (1,250/day)

Aug 29,610 (955/day)

(us-covid-tracker.com)

Nov cases 4.406m

Dec deaths 78,016

cfr 1.77%

Dec cases 6.4111m

Projected new deaths for Jan 2021 at 1.7%: 108,988

Michael Savage from his last radio broadcast: "You'll never be disappointed in fearing the worst"

 Catch the podcast here: https://michaelsavage.com/

US COVID deaths at Johns Hopkins roared right through 342k this evening from just under 339k this morning

 

Everyone's a phony, except for Nathaniel

Even if everyone else is a liar, God is true.

-- Romans 3:4

Jesus saw Nathan'a-el coming to him, and said of him, "Behold, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" 

-- John 1:47

 

Speaking of phony, between 49% of you and 74% self-report mask-wearing compliance

 There's no way in hell that's anywhere close to true with coronavirus cases soaring by 10 million in two months.

You're all lying through your teeth.

If the Christians exaggerate their church contributions by between 51-115%, it's impossible any of this mask-wearing data is reliable anymore than was the polling data for Biden.

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/11/06/us/contributions-to-churches-are-studied.html

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1132-9

https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america?view=mask-use&tab=trend

Once you realize the phoniness of China's coronavirus numbers, other things it reports, like GDP, only remind you of the same thing

 

CNN: Wuhan coronavirus cases more like 500k not 50k

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/29/asia/china-coronavirus-seroprevalence-study-intl-hnk/index.html?utm_medium=social&utm_term=image&utm_source=twCNN&utm_content=2020-12-29T09%3A30%3A05

China has been lying about everything for a long time, like a rug.

Its coronavirus statistics flatlined long ago.

95k cases total to date? Fewer than 5k deaths? C'mon man!

The infection rate quoted in the article implies 260k infections in Hubei apart from the 500k in Wuhan.

At a current global case fatality rate running to 2.18% and 1.75% in the US, you're talking deaths anywhere between 17k and 13k, not 4,777. But honestly, even that is low-balling it. China has 1.4 billion people in it. 17k deaths there compared with 337k in the US? Seriously? 

The biggest joke here isn't China's numbers. It's the people who believe them.

Big news of the day: Russia admits its COVID deaths aren't 54k but are a much higher 186k

The new calculation is based on an evaluation of excess death data compared with current projections for deaths based on prior years of death data. The US' CDC does the same routinely and that data confirms that US COVID death data is close though underestimated. 

Places like China, Iran and North Korea however will never tell the truth.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/28/russia-admits-to-world-third-worst-covid-19-death-toll-underreported

Follow the (gullible) science lol:

Vasectomy in 2018, full snip snip in 2020: An Eunuch for thee, but not for me

 

After holding out for $2k/person, the vote for which was supposed to be tomorrow, instead of the $600 in the current COVID relief bill waiting for him to sign, true to form Trump folds like a cheap suit and signs the thing anyway, warts and all

 Along with the inability to appoint the right personnel from the beginning, Trump's inability to negotiate for what he claims he wants has to be the biggest tell that THE ART OF THE DEAL was purely aspirational for him, kind of like following what THE BIBLE says is merely aspirational for Christians.

He's the biggest phony we've seen in a long time, and appropriately now the biggest loser.

Sad!

Shall we dispel the COVID is just the flu myth once and for all?

 Cumulative announced US COVID cases through 12/26/20 = 19,023,776

Cumulative announced US COVID deaths through 12/26/20 = 332,011

That works out to 1.745% of all COVID cases dying.

In any given year in the US, 30 million people get the flu. 

If 1.745% of 30 million died, that would come to 523,500 deaths, about 17 times worse than the average reality of 30,000 flu deaths annually.

That's the difference between 0.1% and 1.745%, which Rush Limbaugh could never figure out.

US COVID-19 deaths are exploding in December 2020 because cases exploded by 126% in November and 178% in December compared with October 2020

 

Drudge soft-peddles the Biden stories, distorts the Trump stories

 Did Trump say Afghanistan was "better than the US" as Drudge claims? Nope. Trump said their elections were better run than the US election in 2020.

Was a "White House" counselor's brother recently hired by Amazon as a lobbyist? Depends on which "White House" you mean. Certainly not the current one. The "White House" counselor is Joe Biden's counselor, and his brother conveniently was just recently hired by Amazon to lobby for it.

When I don't have Rush Limbaugh to kick around anymore, I'll always have Drudge.

Johns Hopkins US COVID deaths hit 330k mark Christmas Day

 

US COVID current hospitalizations on 12/23/20 hit a record 119,463 with California, Texas and New York worst hit in the nation in that order

 California's situation (blue in the graphs) is now mimicking New York's troubles (gray) in the spring, but not on a population-adjusted basis. Percent of hospital beds dedicated to COVID in California is also rising sharply.

Texas (pink) is reprising its experience in the summer in all categories.

Pennsylvania (not shown) is having a similar experience right now to number three New York.

Systems which find themselves under pressure from the pandemic have lattitude to refrain from performing elective procedures to free up beds. Doing so, however, comes at a cost to hospitals which depend on those procedures to remain profitable.

US COVID deaths in the Johns Hopkins data blew right through the 320k mark today

 The total was 319k+ this morning and this afternoon is already 321k+

Current hospitalizations for the disease hit a new all-time high for a single day yesterday of 115,351

US COVID daily new deaths made a new high of 3,668 on 12/16/20 in the Johns Hopkins data

 

December 2020 is going to set a record for US COVID-19 deaths

 US COVID deaths have averaged 2,488 per day in the first twenty days of December 2020. Projected through the 31st that will result in over 77,000 deaths.

April 2020 had been the worst month for deaths to date with 58,836.

That's pretty shocking: US adds 10k COVID deaths in 3 days in Johns Hopkins data set, total has now crossed 310k

 

US COVID deaths hit 300k in the Johns Hopkins data this evening

 A couple of days earlier than I had expected.

Drudge headline saying Alabama is running low on hospital beds is total BS, linked story doesn't say that, data shows only 15% of hospital beds in Alabama are occupied by COVID patients

 

The basic premise of the Election 2020 fraud proponents is completely mistaken

 The basic premise is that Trump was winning on election day, only to lose overnight as a flood of fraudulent ballots washed away his lead.

This is completely mistaken.

It is now clear that just 54% of voters voted "in person", either early or on election day. 46% voted by mail/absentee.

66% of Trump's vote was "in person", but only 42% of Biden's. That's why it appeared that Trump won on election day.

Most of Biden's vote, 58%, was counted after the polls had closed into the next day(s) because it was absentee/by mail. He had a larger reservoir of his voters to draw on than did Trump, whose post-election day reservoir was only 34% of his vote.

There were doubtless more fraudulent votes cast this election because so many of the ballots were absentee/by mail, and so many more people voted and voted this way. The problem has been proving it, and proving it was large enough to flip places like Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona.

Absentee/by mail ballots typically post high rejection rates for voter noncompliance reasons: failure to sign the envelope, failure to return it on time, failure to mark the ballot correctly, failure of the signature to match the record, failure to show a return address matching the file, and much more. These rates typically exceed 1%, often by quite a lot. The problem is rejection rates in this election are coming in much lower than 1%, which, contrary to the Democrats, is a huge red flag.

Investigation of these problems should have been Team Trump's number one objective in challenging this election. Unfortunately and characteristically it got side-tracked by craziness and laziness, the hallmarks of the Trump era. Pieces of paper are evidence. Fanciful theories using computer "data" are not. Courts are not interested in jeopardizing their claim to impartiality by facilitating fishing expeditions for one political party against another. Either you've got the goods, or you don't.

It's sad Trump is such an incompetent and wasn't ready for this, but it is what it is. All the "shouldas wouldas and couldas" in the world ain't gonna fix it.

Buh-bye.

US Coronavirus update through 12/12/20

 Deaths per day from COVID by state since Jan 22 through Saturday 12/12/20:

NY  122

TX  80

FL  69

CA  65

NJ  62

IL  47

PA  44

MI  40

MA  36

GA  34

OH  27

LA, IN  24

AZ  23

NC  20

CT, TN  19

MD  18

SC, MO  17

VA, MN 16

MS, AL  15

CO, WI  14

AR, IA  11

WA, NV, KY  9.

Deaths per day from COVID monthly have leapt from 763 in October to 1,250 in November to 2,496 in the first twelve days of December. If the current December rate per day is sustained it will top April's 1,961 and May's 1,330.

Current hospitalizations for COVID were approximately 30k at the beginning of October, 47k at the end of October, 92k at the end of November, and at a new high of 108,487 on 12/12.

Mask-wearing and social distancing, where practised, have been insufficient by themselves to stop transmission since the lockdowns, where implemented, have been lifted. The entire US strategy hasn't been worthy of the name under Trump, and it won't be under Biden, either.

What was required was: temporary lockdowns to slow the spread, and then a permanent regime after opening of 1) mask-wearing, 2) social distancing, 3) universal testing, 4) isolation of the infected, and 5) tracing the contacts of the infected, followed by testing, isolation and tracing for an indefinite period until transmission became minimal and a vaccine became available.

This was the program enunciated by Dr Michael J Ryan of the World Health Organization on March 13. It has hardly been followed but for a few countries. And it's a scandal that the American CDC and NIH haven't insisted on this.

COVID-19 remains the 3rd leading cause of death in the US behind heart disease and cancer.

The compound daily growth rate for COVID deaths measured weekly is threatening to return to spring levels:

 

Peak US daily deaths from COVID in the Johns Hopkins data to date occurred on 12/11/20 with 3,309 which was 25.6% of the total global deaths from COVID on that date of 12,921

 

Climate Updates for KGRR: October and November 2020

 October 2020 Climate Update for KGRR

Max T 79, Mean 79

Min T 25, Mean 28

Av T 48, Mean 51.3

Rain 2.67, Mean 3.03

Snow Tr, Mean 0.4

Heating Degree Days 527, Mean 424

Cooling Degree Days 0, Mean 9

Cooling Degree Days to date 829, Mean 700

 November 2020 Climate Update for KGRR

Max T 77, Mean 66

Min T 22, Mean 17

Av T 44.3, Mean 39.1

Rain 2.27, Mean 2.84

Snow 0.4, Mean 6.3

Heating Degree Days 614, Mean 772

Cooling Degree Days 3, Mean 0

Cooling Degree Days to date 832, Mean 700

Average Temperature Year to date 51.7, Mean to date 50: 2020 average temperature is running 3.4% above the mean.

Peak average annual temperature since 1898 occurred in 2012 at 52.8 degrees F, 9.5% above the mean average annual temperature of 48.2.

So it's been warmer than normal in 2020 to date, but nothing record-setting.

Grand Rapids, MI is forecast to receive its first sub 20 degree F temperatures of the season this week.

US COVID deaths blew right through the 290k mark this morning in the Johns Hopkins data

 Deaths were approximately 289.5k early this morning, but blew right through that in short order to get almost to 292k tonight.

107,258 are currently hospitalized.

The difference between 47.6% of population with full time jobs in Nov 2020 and 52% is 11.5 million

 Think of each of those 11.5 million full-time units forming a household, buying a house, buying a car, buying a washing machine, raising some kids, paying taxes for good schools to which to send them, etc.

That's what's missing.

Sad! 

Just a reminder that the harrowing nature of full time employment in the United States hasn't changed much as of Nov 2020

 As a percentage of population, full time in Nov 2020 remains in the basement digging holes at 47.6%, reminiscent of the historic lows pre-Reagan and the double Reagan recessions of the early 1980s.

Full-time never recovered after the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, if you mean a return to pre-GFC1 levels. Under Obama and continuing under Trump full time after eight long years finally clawed its way up to 50.4% in 2019 on an average annual basis, only to be felled again by a lousing, stinking virus.

But don't make the mistake of blaming the virus. Conditions were long too weak to support pre-GFC1 levels of full time employment. Contrast this with the vigor of the Reagan/Bush surge in which full time went from 47.3% to 52.2% in just six years.

That missing vigor is the irreducible fact of the present economic malaise now in its twelfth year which very few acknowledge let alone understand.

  

It's remarkable that this video from 2018 documenting Biden's self-confessed 2016 malfeasance in office to this day has fewer than 1 million views

 Congress allocated the spending Biden threatened, unlawfully, to withhold, but Trump became the bad guy and Biden was elected instead of Trump.

Simply amazing.

If Mark Levin ever figures out that Abraham Lincoln was a progressive, there might be hope for America

US COVID deaths crossed the 280k mark today in the Johns Hopkins data

 Current hospitalizations through yesterday were 101,276 at covidtracking.com

Looks like Brad Parscale, formerly of the Trump Campaign, and Anita Dunn of the Biden Campaign were on the exact same page in Election 2020

As was Chris Irons of QTR Research on Feb 26, here.

This isn't rocket science. This isn't "mastermind" level stuff. It didn't take a genius to predict that Trump would lose to a virus. All it took was paying attention and being honest. 

From an important story with an hyperbolic title by Edward-Isaac Dovere for The Atlantic, "The Mastermind Behind Biden’s No-Drama Approach to Trump", here:

' [M]any Democrats stressed over the campaign’s decision to ignore most of Trump’s daily diversions in favor of focusing on the coronavirus pandemic. Dunn’s plan, and Biden’s, ended with a win. ... “Those of us who had worked in the White House, and Joe Biden, who had been vice president of the United States, had a much better understanding of why the Trump strategy that everyone was panicked about, the daily press conferences, would not work unless they actually did something” about the pandemic, Dunn said. “All those people who were saying, ‘Oh my gosh, he’s doing daily press briefings. He’s all over. He’s dominating,’ were missing the bigger point, which is unless he actually does something to deal with what is a genuine catastrophe, then it doesn’t matter how many press briefings he does.” '

 

Attorney General Barr appoints John Durham special counsel to continue criminal inquiry into FBI post-Trump

Democrats are already fuming. 

Reported here:

"An order making Durham special counsel, which was revealed on Tuesday, provides the federal prosecutor further protection against the prospect of President-elect Joe Biden trying to shut down the criminal inquiry into the origins and conduct of the FBI's investigation."

Former Trump Campaign manager Brad Parscale says Trump lost in the suburbs because he went with opening the economy instead of public empathy over COVID fears

 I agree.

His basic perception about the public was right. They were, and are, afraid.

Whether they should have been or should be now is irrelevant. They were, and Trump failed to play to that fear, which is exactly what Biden did.

About 16 minutes in.

US COVID deaths hit 270k in the Johns Hopkins data to begin the month of December

 

Current hospitalizations on Dec 1 soared to 98,691.

Total hospitalized in Nov soared to ~95k from ~67k in Oct.

These hospitalization levels are way above the 59k high water marks established in April and July. 

About 1,250 people died of COVID everyday in Nov compared with 763 per day in Oct, clocking in at third worst month yet for deaths. The Oct level was the lowest level so far since the peak in April at 1,961. The May level was second highest at 1,330 deaths per day on average.