1. Covid's Mysterious Two Month Cycle
Since the pandemic began, Covid has often followed a regular — if mysterious — cycle. In one country after another, the number of new cases has often surged for roughly two months before starting to fall.
2. The Delta variant, despite its intense contagiousness, has also followed this two-month pattern.
After Delta took hold last winter in India, caseloads there rose sharply for slightly more than two months before plummeting at a nearly identical rate.
3. In Britain, caseloads rose for almost exactly two months before peaking in July. In Indonesia, Thailand, France, Spain and several other countries, the Delta surge also lasted somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 months.
4. And in the U.S. states where Delta first caused caseloads to rise, the cycle already appears to be on its downside. Case numbers in Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Missouri peaked in early or mid-August and have since been falling:
5. Experts cannot explain it. “We still are really in the cave ages in terms of understanding how viruses emerge, how they spread, how they start and stop, why they do what they do,” Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, said.
6. Whatever the reasons, the two-month cycle predated Delta. It has repeated itself several times in the U.S., including both last year and early this year, with the Alpha variant, which was centered in the upper Midwest.
7. There have been plenty of exceptions to the two-month cycle around the world. In Brazil, caseloads have followed no evident pattern. In Britain, cases did decline about two months after the Delta peak — but only for a couple of weeks. Cases there have been rising again.
8. In the U.S., the start of the school year could similarly spark outbreaks this month. The country will need to wait a few more weeks to know. In the meantime, one strategy continues to be more effective than any other in beating back the pandemic: “Vaccine, vaccine, vaccine.”
9. The vaccine is so powerful because it keeps deaths and hospitalizations rare even during surges in caseloads. In Britain, the recent death count has been less than one-tenth what it was in January.
10. In a few countries, vaccination rates have apparently risen high enough to break Covid’s usual two-month cycle: The virus evidently cannot find enough new people to infect. In both Malta and Singapore, this summer’s surge lasted only about two weeks before receding.
The End
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1. The Fearsome Tabulator
The ballot tabulator in mail-in vote processing centers in America is the most fearsome machine invented by man, as it determines the winner of the highest office in the most powerful nation in the world. Allow me to explain.
2. Imagine what happens to a mail-in ballot in a vote processing center. Allow me to illustrate the journey of a mail-in ballot envelope inside a vote processing center. The first key step is to open the envelope and log it.
3. On the outer envelope there is name and address of the voter who mailed the ballot. So the log will indicate that a ballot was received from an identifiable voter (identified by a name and address).
Closing of American Mind
The university has made intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs are race, gender, victimhood and whose only outputs are grievance & division. bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-universit…
Students at Portland State are not being taught to think. Rather, they are being trained to mimic the moral certainty of ideologues. Faculty and administrators have abdicated the university’s truth-seeking mission and instead drive intolerance of divergent beliefs and opinions.
Questions from faculty at diversity trainings that challenged approved narratives were instantly dismissed. Those who asked for evidence to justify new institutional policies were accused of microaggressions.
For the vaccinated, Covid resembles the flu and usually a mild one. Society does not ground to a halt over the flu. nytimes.com/2021/09/07/bri…
2. One in 5,000
How small are the chances of the average vaccinated American contracting Covid? Probably about one in 5,000 per day, and even lower for people who take precautions or live in a highly vaccinated community.
3. Or maybe one in 10,000
The chances are surely higher in places with the worst Covid outbreaks (e.g. Southeast). But in places with fewer cases — like the Northeast, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco areas — the chances are even lower, probably less than 1 in 10,000.
Putin and his cartel reject a White House request.
Despite very favorable policies from the White House, Russian President Vladimir Putin still doesn’t feel like doing U.S. President Joe Biden a solid. 1/
You may recall the bizarre episode last month when Mr. Biden, who is pushing expensive taxpayer-funded policies to reduce oil production, suddenly urged Russia and its allies in the international energy cartel to increase oil production. 2/
The news then was that Biden didn’t believe in forecasts of climate doom enough to run the political risk of high gasoline prices. The news now is that cartel members don’t seem that eager to collude with him. 3/
WSJ: President ‘Perception’
Sometimes survival requires more than PR.
Historians may spend years trying to understand how President Biden could have so mismanaged the exit from Afghanistan. A new report suggests Biden was focused on appearances rather than reality. 1/
Reuters has published what it calls excerpts from a July phone call between President Joe Biden and Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani. According to the Reuters transcript, Mr. Biden said: 2/
What good did it do to present a false picture of success? Mr. Biden was publicly presenting such a false picture in July and it seems to have served only to deceive American civilians and our Afghan allies into thinking they had more time before they had to flee. 3/
The President even had the ill grace to blame Americans for not leaving Afghanistan sooner, and Afghans for not fighting. But his own government clearly felt no urgency, as the U.S. Embassy had to frantically destroy documents in the final hours.
As for the Afghans, he demeans the sacrifice of the 66,000 who died fighting the Taliban, often next to Americans. They collapsed when they lost air support as the U.S. contractors left and after the military abandoned Bagram Air Base in the dead of night.