I live in a nice L.A. neighborhood and if I go out for a walk or to buy groceries I see zero people without masks. Zero. But I talk to friends in other states who tell me it's 50-50 where they live... fully half the people not wearing the masks that can help end the pandemic. They can't be arrested or shot like rabid dogs, even though they are preventing the rest of us from resuming our normal lives and killing hundreds of thousands of us. Worldwide, the pandemic continues raging-- over 35 million cases and over a million deaths. On Saturday there were nearly 300,000 new cases reported. The dozen worst impacted countries (along with cases per million residents):
• India +75,479 (4,733 cases per million residents)• U.S. +48,925 (22,928 cases per million residents)• Brazil +24,602 (23,042 cases per million residents)• France +16,972 (9,288 cases per million residents)• Argentina +11,129 (17,456 cases per million residents)• Russia +9,859 (8,253 cases per million residents)• U.K. +7,070 (7,061 cases per million residents)• Colombia +6,616 (16,623 cases per million residents)• Israel +5,523 (28,751 cases per million residents)• Mexico +4,775 (5,825 cases per million residents)• Ukraine +4,661 (5,092 cases per million residents)• Indonesia +4,007 (1,092 cases per million residents)
Israel, Brazil and the U.S., countries with incompetent authoritarian leaders, are doing the worst in the world, by far. In the U.S., Saturday's reports continued seeing new case loads diminishing in California, Texas and Georgia, staying around the same dangerously high levels in Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Iowa, Oklahoma, Utah and North Carolina and rapidly increasing into the danger zone in half a dozen states. New cases:
• Missouri +3,023 (22,234 cases per million residents)• Wisconsin +2,892 (22,464 cases per million residents)• Illinois +2,442 (23,898 cases per million residents)• New York +1,720 (25,601 cases per million residents)• South Carolina +1,706 (29,307 cases per million residents)• Minnesota +1,421 (18,226 cases per million residents)
Comparing the numbers of cases per million residents in the U.S. states to the number in foreign countries shows clearly how lacking effective America leadership in the pandemic has been. That largely accounts for the current state of presidential polling in the U.S.Unfit by Chip Proser Yesterday, NYC mayor Bill de Blasio announced he's re-closing schools and non-essential businesses in 9 Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods where the pandemic is spiking up again. These are neighborhoods filled with religious nuts-- Hasidics in this case but basically with the same primitive mentality as evangelicals or any religious extremists who can't, or refuse to, adapt to a post-bronze age world. The neighborhoods are Borough Park, Midwood, Gravesend, Bensonhurst and Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn and Far Rockaway and Kew Gardens in Queens. Did you notice the anger I expressed towards religionists who refuse to wear masks, with their crackpot "God will protect me" bullshit? (There I go again.) I saw a cute Washington Post column, I Was Tempted To Publicly Shame People Who Don't Wear Masks. I tried This Instead, I want to reproduce here as a kind of self-inflicted penance. It was done by Katie Wheeler, who began by noting "It’s so important during this pandemic that we stay open and clear in our communication with loved ones about mask-wearing. But what do we do about strangers out in public? Many have turned to the Internet to shame and 'out' people who don’t follow the guidelines, but is that actually working?"
