Now that half the Catholic twitterverse has given its opinion on Nancy Pelosi getting heckled at a Rome church, let me interrupt to say: It didn’t happen.

The actual “security issue” was in fact, um, the water cannons and tear gas used in an anti-Green Pass protest yesterday. It’s probably spitting into a fire, trying to correct the record. But now that I’ve spent an afternoon doing actual journalism (which in this case meant nothing more than trying to determine if an Incident On The Internet happened)… why not?

Italy recorded 627 covid deaths yesterday, a stunning number for a country 3+ months into its vaccination campaign. Then, another 487 today. Part of the reason? It has been giving too many doses to the wrong people, leaving the elderly still vulnerable. wapo.st/3uCThP5 Italy’s death rate is no different than it was on “V-Day,” Dec 27. There are many different factors. At this point, it’s a race between variant and vaccine. Lockdowns are also part of the equation. But let’s just take a closer look at vaccine factor...

Incredible scene right now: Pope Francis praying in the middle of an empty St. Peter’s Square. “Thick darkness has gathered over our squares, our streets and our cities. It has taken over our lives, filling everything with a deafening silence.”

Data on the first 803 coronavirus deaths in Italy:

* two of those people were younger than 50
* zero younger than 30
* virus is proving deadlier for men than women
* for people in their 80s, the fatality rate is 16.6 percent.

see more here: Some more:

My coronavirus rule of thumb is that at any point, if you look back on life three days earlier, it is unrecognizable. That has been true in Italy for about three weeks. It’s terrifying to project it forward.