COVID19 Update - Day 204

US Tests: 100,150,948*

US Cases: 7,198,589*

US Deaths: 198,929*

Worldwide Cases: 33,880,896*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,012,964*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

As expected, everyone is talking about the debate.  However, in my humble opinion, this is the only takeaway that matters (yes, I'm quoting my own tweet.  It's my blog; I can do what I want):

With 'stand back and stand by', Trump made the choice in this election agonizingly clear.

Either you're on the side of mob rule by white supremacist vigilantes.

Or you're on the side of democracy.

Vote accordingly.

— David Bailey (@drgdave) September 30, 2020

However, since this post is supposed to be about #COVID19, I guess I should say something about that.  So in addition to my own corrections of Trump's #COVID19-related lies that I made last night, here are some more that I missed:

That’s why many experts believe the vaccination process could take well into 2021 — and potentially 2022 or 2023. That means the Covid-19 pandemic could be with us for up to years, even after if we get a vaccine, and could remain a significant problem until the next round of elections.

Covid-19 “will continue to come up as an issue in the next midterms,” Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, previously told me. “It’s not going away.”

It would be one thing if Trump had done anything to assure the American public that he has the pandemic under control. Maybe that would have earned him some faith in how he and his administration will roll out a vaccine.

But Trump has done the opposite, repeatedly blundering his response to the coronavirus: He’s deliberately downplayed the pandemic, demanded states reopen too quickly, punted problems with testing and tracing down to local and state governments with more limited resources than the federal government, mocked masks, and tried to politicize public health institutions instead of letting science lead the response.

As a result, America has more than 200,000 deaths from Covid-19 — by far the highest recorded death toll in the world. When controlling for population, the US hasn’t had the highest death rate for Covid-19, but it’s among the top 20 percent of developed nations, and has seven times the death rate of the median developed country. If the US had the same Covid-19 death rate as, say, Canada, more than 120,000 more Americans would likely be alive today.