So far very few coronavirus cases from variants have been identified in the US, fewer than 3,500

 

Current hospitalizations for COVID-19 have dropped by about 11,000 between March 1-9, 2021 in the US

 

California (blue), Texas (pink), Florida (green), New York (gray)

Examples of US States back-filling death data from COVID-19 in recent days

Data from the following dates looks anomalous in the graphs, way out of proportion to daily experience. This has been a common phenomenon throughout the pandemic. It just sticks out more now. These aren't deaths all actually occurring on the dates indicated. I suspect that with the general decline in cases and deaths, states are both catching up on death investigations as well as finding this to be an opportune time to update the data. But in some states, like Missouri, the practice seems to be quite habitual.

Minnesota: 140 (Mar 9)

Kansas:        73 (Mar 3)

Oklahoma: 167 (Mar 9)

Missouri:    105 (Mar 9)

                   163 (Mar 3)

Virginia:     383 (Mar 3, the crescendo of 12 straight such days)

Ohio:          160 (Mar 9)

                   752 (Mar 5)

Daily new deaths nationwide are averaging 1,597 per day in the first 9 days of March. Sustained over the course of the month that would lead to fewer than 50,000 deaths and make March at the worst the 5th worst month for new deaths.

Daily new cases are averaging 62,914 per day. That would lead to 1.95 million cases if sustained over the whole month and make it at the worst the 5th worst for new cases.

About 18.4% of the population 18 and over has received at least one dose of a vaccine through March 9th. That is roughly 46 million people. That should add big momentum to the case declines, and eventually to the deaths. 

"As of March 3, the CDC has received reports of 97,458 adverse events with 1,381 deaths in people who have taken at least one dose of the approved COVID-19 vaccines"

 COVID-19 vaccine side effects & deaths: The lack of information on how, where to report

The list of adverse reactions to Pfizer's COVID vaccine in the US makes for interesting reading

Some reactions to Pfizer's COVID vaccine reported to US VAERS for 14,649 events through 2/26:

Blindness: 20

Blurry vision: 122

Chest pain: 361

Chest discomfort: 485 

Cardiac arrest: 70

Thrombosis/stroke: 30

Spontaneous abortion: 30

Facial paralysis: 199

Death: 475

Sense losses: touch (671), smell (129), taste (134)

Swelling: lymphatic (362), lips (182), throat (160), face (203), tongue (181), peripheral (206)

Severe itching: 787

Rash: 781

Hives/urticaria: 572

Tingling sensations: 873

Oral tingling: 418

Joint pain: 760

Tight throat: 315

Anaphylactic reaction: 143

Fever: 2,018

https://vaers.hhs.gov/data.html

Full-time employment in the US in February 2021 continues to SUCK

47.5% of the civilian US non-institutional population had full-time jobs in February 2021. The average level in 2020 was 47.3%.

Missing full-time in February relative to the 2019 average of 50.4% is 7.5 million.

Relative to the all-time high in 2000 at 53.6%, missing full-time is a whopping 15.87 million.

The price of gasoline has shot up 32% since Democrat Joe Biden was elected last November

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths reach 520k, and 21.5% of those are since Biden's inauguration

 

Daily new cases of coronavirus in Europe are headed the wrong way again

 

US COVID-19 update through Feb 2021

Daily new cases have dropped dramatically in February 2021, but still average 85,863 per day and remain higher than for any month before last November when the country was still in a fit of hysteria about the pandemic.

Daily new deaths had their third worst month in February 2021 and are still higher than in April last.

Hospitalizations have dropped dramatically in February to 48,871 on Saturday 2/27. Peak Saturday level was January 9th at 130,781. The Saturday peak last summer occurred on 7/25 with 59,301 hospitalized. The Saturday peak last April occurred on 4/18 with 57,761 hospitalized. 

The Covid Tracking Project at The Atlantic will unaccountably stop collecting such data on March 7th. I say unaccountably because the absolute low in Saturday hospitalizations after the April outbreak was 27,967 on June 20th and the October lows never matched that.  We're not even close to those levels yet. It's WAY too early to conclude that data collection should cease when the previous lows haven't yet been taken out. 

Meanwhile, the hospitalization data collected by the University of Minnesota continues to show the second wave still in decline at the end of February. The worst states (NY in gray, CA in blue, TX in pink, and FL in green) for hospitalizations are shown in the graphs. The declines are welcome, but levels remain elevated.

Daily new case data in a number of countries, e.g. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Czechia, France, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, Sweden, in recent weeks has turned upward to one degree or another. This could be a harbinger of a coming seasonal surge.

Meanwhile about 7.5% of the US is fully vaccinated, and 15% partially vaccinated. 

It remains to be seen how effective the vaccines will be against mutations, and how durable the vaccines will be over time.

  

California last week joined Ohio and Indiana in the COVID death backfill phenomenon with over a thousand added on 2/24

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID-19 deaths hit 510k, 101k dead of COVID since Biden became president

Very impressive.

Despite non-stop recruitment propaganda, the LGBT share of the US population rises to only 5.6%, and most of that is bi, and most of that is female

5.6% of US adults are LGBT, up from 4.5% in 2017.

3.1% of Americans identify as bisexual, 1.4% as gay, 0.7% as lesbian and 0.6% as transgender.

Gallup.

The rise in Americans saying they are bisexual is driven by women:

[O]ver 3% of US adults say they are bisexual (a sexual identity in which someone is attracted to people of their gender or other genders). This is up from just over 1% in 2008. (The GSS allowed individuals to self-classify as “heterosexual or straight,” “gay, lesbian, homosexual,” “bisexual,” or “don’t know.”) An analysis of the GSS data by the sociologists D’Lane Compton and Tristan Bridges shows that the change has been almost entirely due to an increase in the number of bisexual women . . .. 

Tiger Woods' father groomed him for golf, but inserted a self-destruct device in the training

Tiger Woods was 'agitated and impatient and almost hit another car as he sped out of five-star resort' on his way to country club just 15 minutes before horror LA crash that shattered his right leg and left him needing surgery :

"A close family friend said Woods learned his philandering ways from watching his father have sex with blondes in a Winnebago RV that he parked next to golf courses when they practiced in his childhood."

Remember when Trump said if we stopped coronavirus testing, the number of cases would go down? He was rightly mocked, but that's exactly what Biden appears to be doing.

 

Johns Hopkins: US COVID deaths reach 500k

 

Hospitalization data from the states worst affected by COVID-19 show two distinct waves of the pandemic, the second more severe in California and Texas and less severe in New York and Florida

Florida, Texas and California all lagged the outbreak in New York, but the experience of all four coincide in the second wave, which is clearly now receding.

The Spanish Flu pandemic had three waves.

1918 Pandemic Influenza: Three Waves

New York (gray), Florida (green), California (blue), Texas (pink)

LOL, The Atlantic has declared the pandemic over and will stop collecting data on March 7, 2021

It's good to be a Democrat.

Meanwhile through Feb 20 2,802 people in the US have died of COVID-19 every single damn day in February, the second highest daily death rate measured monthly since the beginning of the pandemic.

Everyone thinks the recent big drop in cases means it's over? What a joke.

New cases in Feb just through 2/20 total 1.873 million, far exceeding May 2020's 1.799 million. The country went into SHUT DOWN mode with far fewer new cases in March 2020: 188,461. In April when so many Americans perished there were just 1.075 million new cases.

It's way too early to stop collecting data, unless of course you have an axe to grind, like the neo-cons did when Goldberg at The Atlantic insisted Iraq had WMD.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Now that Rush Limbaugh is dead, The Daily Beast fills the gap with a chopadickoffame story

 Inside the World of Backstreet Castrators, Cutters and Eunuch-Makers :

Some people born with penises and testicles want to keep the former, but lose the latter—though some choose to keep their empty scrotums. (There is a dedicated Reddit forum for the latter group to share photos of their genitals: Empty Sacks, “for those who had the balls to give theirs up.”) Others want to keep the genitalia they were born with and add new genitalia on top. ... (Mexico and Thailand have both been hot spots for quick-and-easy but largely unregulated clinical castrations, penectomies, and similar procedures for at least a couple of decades now.) ... the greater availability of open and official care—far more than horror stories and crackdowns—has led to a drastic decline in demand for cutters, which means there are now fewer of them practicing than there were five or ten years ago. 

Peggy Noonan has second thoughts, recalls with fondness the crabbed public square of Fairness Doctrine infamy

What a shock, right? Roman Catholic from Brooklyn thinks Methodist hick from Missouri should have been shut up long ago.

Rush Limbaugh’s Complicated Legacy :

By the 1980s it was being argued that the doctrine itself was hurting free speech: It was a governmental intrusion on the freedom of broadcasters, and, perversely, it inhibited the presentation of controversial issues. There were so many voices in the marketplace, and more were coming; fairness and balance would sort themselves out.

In 1987 the doctrine was abolished, a significant Reagan-era reform. But I don’t know. Let me be apostate again. Has anything in our political culture gotten better since it was removed? Aren’t things more polarized, more bitter, less stable?

I’m not sure it was good for America.

Imagine if religion were similarly circumscribed.

From 17 distinct religious groups in 1776 and about 3,200 congregations, today there are north of 300 groups and 300,000 congregations.

The lack of unanimity surely bothers devout believers in one or the other, some of whom are certain everyone else is going to hell, and something should be done to stop it.

I suspect the one true church of Peggy Noonan feels the same way, except its liberalism has invented the half-way house of Purgatory to roast malefactors until ready for Valhalla.

Deal with it, Peggy. It's still a Protestant country.