Sunday, November 8, 2020

COVID19 Update - Day 243

US Tests: 136,654,665*
US Cases: 9,761,481*
US Deaths: 229,238*
Worldwide Cases: 50,313,694*
Worldwide Deaths: 1,255,185*

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

Sorry, but for the next 8 weeks, I'm probably going to be a bit of a broken record about this:
In one respect, President-elect Joe Biden faces a grim Jan. 20: an additional hundred thousand could be dead of COVID-19 between now and then, with case rates and hospitalizations skyrocketing around the country as the President copes with his loss by playing golf.

And to address the problem, the President-elect faces a bleak political landscape. Absent a double Democratic victory in Georgia Senate runoffs in January, Biden could face a serious roadblock — in the form of Mitch McConnell — constraining parts of his COVID-19 agenda.

Biden’s COVID-19 response plan focuses on seven areas, which would address portions of the Trump administration’s response to the virus that have been alternately disastrous or uncoordinated.

Portions of the Biden plan offer new approaches to combatting the virus that the Trump administration eschewed, including extensive use of the Defense Production Act to alleviate PPE shortages and huge investments in contact tracing and local public health services.

But other portions of it, like calls to heed scientific advice and leave career professionals at the FDA and CDC unhindered, may warm the hearts of the scientific and medical communities but leave others somewhat skeptical and worried about the limits of what the President-elect can accomplish.

Tell your friends, tell your family (especially if they live in Georgia): We REALLY need to elect Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate! 

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