Month: March 2021

If herd immunity weren’t so important to stop COVID from mutating into something even more lethal than it already is or turn it into something that can evade the vaccines, I’d be tempted to say that I’m not really all that concerned about people who refuse to take the vaccine. Unfortunately, we do have to worry about them because they are willingly providing themselves as hosts for the vaccine variants and that’s dangerous for everyone.

Margaret, an 80-year-old retiree who lives outside Tulsa, has spent the past year living in fear of the coronavirus. She’s constantly worn masks, toted hand sanitizer and used drive-throughs to run her errands. Her age and preexisting health conditions — including heart failure, diabetes and blood clots — put her at elevated risk if she gets sick.

But unlike many at-risk Americans seeking safety and an end to the pandemic, Margaret refuses to get a coronavirus vaccine.

“There’s too many unanswered questions,” said Margaret, who agreed to be interviewed only if her last name was withheld because of concerns she might be harassed. Margaret also said she’s fearful of possible side effects, like the headaches that some people have gotten from the second shot. “I’d just as soon as not go through that,” she said.AD

Margaret is a Republican — a fervent supporter of former president Donald Trump — and polls have repeatedly found that nearly one-third of Republicans share her staunch resistance to the coronavirus vaccines, although for a variety of reasons. Some, like Margaret, worry they were developed too quickly. Others argue without evidence that many vaccines are unsafe or will make them sick. Still more echo Trump’s repeated contention that the coronavirus threatis overblown and simply don’t trust the government’s involvement.

“I had a slight fever of 99.5 for a day and a half,” said Steven Rousey, a 43-year-old aircraft mechanic in Georgia who describes himself as a “Libertarian Republican,” and said tests confirmed that he caught the virus in September. “I don’t think it was the boogeyman they made it out to be.”

While other groups have also been wary about the shots, for instance, communities of color, polling showsthat hesitancy has started to wane while GOP resistance to the vaccines remains relatively high. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll released last month found that 28 percent of Republicans said they would “definitely not”get vaccinated, and another 18 percent said they would “wait and see” before getting a shot.As a result, millions of Republicans could remain unvaccinated, a potential roadblock to efforts to achieve the high levels of immunity needed to stop the virus in the United States — an irony that isn’t lost on Trump officials who worked to end the pandemic.l

“It’s a little bit confounding,” said Paul Mango, who helped lead the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed initiative that sped coronavirus vaccines to market in less than a year. “I really don’t understand it, to tell you the truth. To me, this was the most spectacular medical development in our lifetimes.”

Some of that hesitancy is embodied by Trump himself, who spent years raising questions about vaccine safety, dismissed the value of flu shots while president and opted not to publicly disclose or televise that he was vaccinated against the coronavirus in January, shortlybefore leaving the White House.

The Post spoke with more than two dozen people about Republicans’ vaccine hesitancy, including Trump voters balking at the shots, analysts who have studied vaccine concerns, and health officials from the Biden administration, counties that voted forTrump and the de Beaumont Foundation, a public health group that has teamed up with longtime GOP political strategist Frank Luntz to win over vaccine skeptics.

“I’m determined to crack this code,” Luntz said, detailing his plans to bring together a focus group of Republicans this week, trying to craft messages to convince conservatives to get the vaccine. “Their decision affects everyone.”

But some of the Americans that Luntz and others are desperate to persuade say they’ve already made up their minds.

“If the coronavirus is supposed to kill you, it’s going to kill you even if you hide under a rock and wear a mask,” said Gary, a 73-year-old retired pipe fitter in West Virginia who voted twice for Trump, and who asked for his last name to be withheld so he could speak freely about his beliefs. “Personally, I don’t think it’s any worse than the flu.”

I lay this 100% at Trump’s door. If he hadn’t “downplayed” the virus and had pushed his own people to take it seriously this wouldn’t be happening.

Good luck to Frank Luntz. I don’t even know that Trump could change their minds now. After all, there are over half a million dead and they are still saying it’s nothing more lethal than the flu.

The red represents the Trump tax cuts. The blue represents the COVID Relief bill. Two very different visions of who the government is working for.

It's a tale of 2 reconciliations. TCJA gave to the wealthy, the American Rescue Plan will give to those who really need it. On @Morning_Joe, I discussed why the 2020 election might be the most consequential election since FDR in 1932. pic.twitter.com/cbUsKF9Ezh

— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) March 8, 2021

The top 20% of households received 65% of the benefit from Trump’s tax cuts. The bottom 20% received 1%. On @Morning_Joe, I showed how the American Rescue Plan flips the script in favor of those closer to the bottom. pic.twitter.com/mAD7uO3XUn

— Steven Rattner (@SteveRattner) March 8, 2021

I really don’t want to hear any more about Trumpian “populism.” It’s only populist in the demagogic sense. On policy, they are just the same old plutocrats.

President Joe Biden and the Democratic Congress scored a huge victory this weekend with the passage of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill in the U.S. Senate. It is a major accomplishment that, if signed into law, gives the average family of four more than $7,600 right away, makes Obamacare more affordable for more people, provides $27 billion in rental assistance and much-needed help to cities and states, and finally establishes a child allowance of $3000-$3600, which will hopefully become permanent over time. Upon the package’s passage, none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt, gave this statement:

The American Rescue Plan is the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working people in the modern history of this country. pic.twitter.com/bRcOAqJwKG

— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) March 6, 2021

I’m still a little bit shocked that they actually made it happen considering how fraught these negotiations have always been in the past. Yes, there was the disappointment of losing the $15 an hour minimum wage provision and there was a last-minute delay of 10 hours as the Democrats had to soothe the sore feelings of Joe Manchin, D-WV, when he found out they failed to run a minor change by him. But when you look back on previous big pieces of Democratic legislation, such as President Clinton’s 1993 tax bill or President Obama’s 2009 health care bill, this one, with such a gigantic price tag, was passed relatively easily. And as with both of those earlier bills, no Republicans voted for it.

In 3/20, all the Senate Democrats voted for Trump's Covid stimulus/relief bill. In 12/20, nearly every Senate Democrat voted for Trump's second Covid stimulus/relief bill. In 3/21, no Senate Republicans voted for Biden's Covid stimulus/relief package. Asymmetric Polarization.

— Julian Zelizer (@julianzelizer) March 7, 2021

This is not a new phenomenon, which makes this New York Times headline laughable:

The NYT is broken. pic.twitter.com/Lajp2SISkP

— Tom Watson (@tomwatson) March 7, 2021

Bipartisanship has been dead for nearly 30 years, at least when it comes to Democratic initiatives. Yet Republican legislation rarely suffers the same fate.

Back in 2001, when the Senate was at 50-50, as it is now, 12 Democrats crossed the aisle to vote for George W. Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Perhaps some of you might remember the names John Breaux of Louisiana, Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Tim Johnson of South Dakota? There were currently familiar names, like Dianne Feinstein from California and Bob Torricelli from New Jersey, as well. Five Democrats just skipped the vote altogether and two voted present. In the House, 28 Democrats supported the bill, from states that included New York, California, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon and Washington, while another 29 House Democrats didn’t vote.

The vote was before 9/11 so it wasn’t driven by the compulsory “national unity” bipartisanship that ruled Washington for several years after the attacks. It was just the way these things always played out. Republicans would hang tough and all but one or two wouldn’t even pretend to negotiate in good faith on a Democratic proposal unless the government was shut down or a national security emergency was at hand. The Democrats, on the other hand, would always have a “gang” of some sort that would accept some shallow compromise in the name of bipartisanship, often led by a showboating diva who looked in the mirror and saw a president. It’s hard to know if Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are going to play that role in this Congress despite all the drama over the past few days.

Sinema had her moment when she ostentatiously gave a John McCain thumbs down tribute to the $15 an hour minimum wage plan, but it didn’t really sing since seven other Democrats voted with her. And Manchin pouted for a bit and demanded a token concession but he didn’t pull a full Joe Lieberman (the former Connecticut senator who single-handedly killed the Public Option in Obamacare) and fully gut an extension of federal unemployment benefits, a vital piece of the bill. But it’s pretty clear that the dynamics we saw last week in the Senate show how we can expect the rest of the agenda to play out if the Democrats manage to end or reform the filibuster.

And there is a bit of good news on that front.

It appears that 48 Democratic senators are now on board with some kind of reform. Senator Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, at one time a dependable “moderate,” explained to MSNBC on Sunday that’s he’s been radicalized on the issue:

Look, major changes to the filibuster for someone like me would not have been on the agenda even a few years ago. But I’m tired of it. The Senate does not work it used to. This idea of the Senate of old just doesn’t make any sense anymore. We’ve got an unyielding, partisan, ideological foe in the Republican party and they won’t allow major legislation to come forward.

While both Manchin and Sinema have said they will not vote to eliminate the filibuster altogether, according to Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo, Sinema indicated in a letter to a constituent that she may be open to reviving the talking filibuster because today’s “virtual” version makes it just too easy. And this weekend Manchin seemed to indicate the same:

He repeated a version of this on every show he was on which indicates that he is looking at one of the “mend it don’t end it” arguments that will allow the recalcitrant senators to say they are actually preserving the filibuster for the future even as they make it at least possible to pass legislation over an obstructionist Republican party.

According to this piece by Ian Millhiser at Vox, which lays out a number of proposals for filibuster reform, this return to the “talking filibuster” was proposed in 2012 by Sen. Jeff Merkley to ensure that “senators who feel that additional debate is necessary would need to make sure that at least one senator is on the floor presenting his or her arguments.” If no senator is present who wants to continue, the presiding officer of the Senate would rule that the debate was over and would schedule a simple majority vote for cloture. There are a number of other tweaks to this idea that could be enacted as well.

If you think that the Republicans would simply take to the floor to read the entire Dr. Seuss oeuvre, as they seem to be doing on a regular basis these days, you might be right. But the process that we just went through with the Covid relief bill was actually a bit of a dry run on this concept. Reconciliation allows for what they call a “vote-o-rama” allowing endless amendments to the bill, similar to the filibuster. As you can see, it didn’t take long for Republicans to lose interest. The bill passed in a couple of days. The “vote-o-rama” was a dud because they are always duds. Republicans love to pull the stunt but they never follow through. And frankly, I don’t think they will follow through with talking filibusters either.

In fact, we may be coming to an end of this era of obstruction to a time when they literally do nothing when they are in the minority. Why? I think they are sure they have the Supreme Court in their pocket for the next generation so now they can spend all their time ranting about Mr. Potatohead and just let their Supreme Court majority do their dirty work for them. Why even bother to filibuster at all?

Salon

Here’s the New York Times trying to call the relief plan a swamp-fest because it saved some working people from penury in their old age:

Tucked inside the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill that cleared the Senate on Saturday is an $86 billion aid package that has nothing to do with the pandemic.

Rather, the $86 billion is a taxpayer bailout for about 185 union pension plans that are so close to collapse that without the rescue, more than a million retired truck drivers, retail clerks, builders and others could be forced to forgo retirement income.

The bailout targets multiemployer pension plans, which bring groups of companies together with a union to provide guaranteed benefits. All told, about 1,400 of the plans cover about 10.7 million active and retired workers, often in fields like construction or entertainment where the workers move from job to job. As the work force ages, an alarming number of the plans are running out of money. The trend predated the pandemic and is a result of fading unions, serial bankruptcies and the misplaced hope that investment income would foot most of the bill so that employers and workers wouldn’t have to.

Both the House and Senate stimulus measures would give the weakest plans enough money to pay hundreds of thousands of retirees — a number that will grow in the future — their full pensions for the next 30 years. The provision does not require the plans to pay back the bailout, freeze accruals or to end the practices that led to their current distress, which means their troubles could recur. Nor does it explain what will happen when the taxpayer money runs out 30 years from now.

Yeah well, we have time to figure it out and the workers won’t have to live in the gutter in the meantime.

Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio who has been leading the charge to rescue the ailing pension plans, said that including the provision in the relief bill is a “really big deal” for both the retirees who depend on the money and the employers now being crushed by promises they cannot afford to keep.

“It goes back to the fact that these workers didn’t do anything wrong,” Mr. Brown said in an interview on Thursday. “They have earned these pensions.” He added that the pandemic had worsened the crisis facing the plans.

The tone of this story is that it’s some kind of corrupt giveaway to people who don’t deserve it. That’s buillshit. The workers should not have to pay for the fact that our retirement system is screwed up beyond measure when they paid in for years in good faith. This is the right thing to do.

Republicans are having a fit, of course. So much for that newfound right wing populist commitment to the working class.

Those $1,400 checks could go out in days once President Biden signs the final covid relief package (Reuters):

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With plenty of practice sending coronavirus relief payments to Americans, the federal government should be able to launch the delivery of $1,400 checks almost immediately once Congress finalizes the new aid bill and President Joe Biden signs it, tax experts say.

Some Americans might see direct payments as soon as this week if the bill passes the House of Representatives on Tuesday as expected, compared with several weeks’ lag in April 2020. Nearly 160 million households are expected to get payments, the White House estimates.

The Treasury Department’s Internal Revenue Service will have new challenges on its hands, though, thanks to the $1.9 trillion relief bill. Incarcerated people, those with non-citizen spouses and relatives of those who died in 2020 will be eligible for payments.

The bill also includes an expanded Child Tax Credit of up to $3,000 per child, paid monthly starting in July, essentially forcing the revenue collector to act as benefits administrator for the rest of the year

It won’t cure COVID-19, but it couldn’t hurt.

Dan Pfeiffer reminds Democrats not to expect the rescue package to sell itself: “Democrats will only get credit for doing the right thing, and Republicans will only get the blame for doing the wrong thing if people know about it.”

That’s more challenging than it sounds, he adds. So far, few Americans know anything about the plan. It is up to us to make sure they do, Pfeiffer says and offers some tools:

Here are some assets to share on social media to help flood the zone with the good news of the American Rescue Act:

• A video from President Biden discussing the provisions of the American Rescue Plan.
• A chart from the Center for American Progress breaking down what’s in the bill.
• A graphic from Senator Bernie Sanders to share with your progressive friends and family dissatisfied with the final outcome.
• A lot of research from the 2020 cycle showed that the more specific the information the better. This thread from Eric Levitz of New York Magazine has a lot of good information about the impact of the bill.
• A lot of people are sharing images and news about their family and friends getting vaccinated. Let’s include a thank you to President Biden and Democrats and use the moment as evidence that elections matter.

I spent much of 2009 and 2010 banging my head against the proverbial wall because not enough people knew about how Barack Obama had helped prevent the economy from tumbling into a second Great Depression. Let’s not do that again. The dominance of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms since that time has mostly been a disaster for the world. But the one upside is that all of us now have the ability to help Joe Biden spread the word about the American Rescue Plan.

The Republicans and Right-Wing media are going into overdrive to change the subject with apocalyptic tales of gender-neutral potatoes and bigotry about the undocumented and trans community. They have a huge megaphone and may succeed if we pat ourselves on the back and move on. Selling this bill is essential and it’s not just Joe Biden’s job.

My friend Dave Johnson has one, teensy little tweak to add:

On the checks, in BIG LETTERS, print: "EVERY REPUBLICAN VOTED AGAINST SENDING YOU THIS CHECK!"

And then, above where they sign it, they have to write out "Every Republican voted against sending me this check" to make the check valid. https://t.co/mSzJzR3blX

— Dave Johnson (@dcjohnson) March 7, 2021

It couldn’t hurt.

By now, Dear Readers, you may have heard of the effort by Georgia Republican electeds not only to eliminate Sunday “Souls to the Polls” voting promoted in Black communities, but to prohibit volunteer efforts to help people stay in line to vote when wait-times run long:

Limiting Sunday voting would affect Black voters beyond losing the assistance of the church. It would inevitably lead to longer lines during the week, especially in the Black community, which has historically been underserved on Election Day.

The bill would also ban what is known as “line warming,” the practice of having volunteers provide water, snacks, chairs and other assistance to voters in line.

That particular food-and-drink provision (based on my quick scans) seems to have been dropped in the legislative sausage-making (maybe shame still holds somepower). Still, it was there in the original Republican bill. Anything to make voting more of a burden for voters who tend to vote Democrat. Or even for Republican voters, for that matter. The GOP treats its own as acceptable casualties when laying land mines and erecting barbed wire to hamper its opponents. They play the percentages. So long as barriers to ballot access hurt their opponents more than their own, it’s all good.

Especially if their own are women, as I noted before, in the case of photo IDs:

The Republicans’ argument is since voting restrictions in their majestic equality prevent rich and poor, Republican and Democrat alike from participating as full citizens without presenting IDs, nothing is amiss in passing and enforcing them.

But in professing concern for “election integrity,” fearful, white Republican politicians are playing percentages, displaying scorn not just for their opponents but their own supporters. They are willing to sacrifice the franchise of thousands, potentially, as acceptable casualties in elections, if that is what it takes to win, including their own sisters, wives, and daughters.

It’s simply a matter of fine-tuning people’s ability to exercise their rights.

Kentucky Republicans are preparing for Sen. Mitch McConnell’s eventual retirement (or death) if he does not serve out his full term (he was reelected last November). McConnell, 79, has prepared a short list of “heirs.”

But there is a snag. Under Kentucky law, naming a replacement under the circumstances above would fall to Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear. Republicans can’t have that. So it’s time for the GOP-controlled legislature to rewrite the law, the Intercept reports:

The new legislation, Senate Bill 228 — dubbed by some inside the state Legislature as the Daniel Cameron Election Bill — was filed on February 10, 2021, during the Kentucky General Assembly’s 30-day “short” session. The bill alters current state statute that allows the governor to appoint a replacement in the event of a vacancy to the U.S. Senate. If the bill becomes law, the appointment to fill a vacancy will be selected from a list of three names submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the senator who held the vacant seat. According to the bill, the appointee from that list will then serve until a successor has been elected by voters. The legislation goes on to list instructions on when elections take place in the event of a vacancy.

Republicans in North Carolina leading the charge on this kind of thing, that is how it works in my state now. The GOP-controlled legislature in charge here since 2011 made those changes in steps between 2013 and 2018, with the “list of three names” provision passed into law in 2018 without Gov. Roy Cooper’s (D) signature.

It’s how they roll.

Republicans really have no ideology anymore but for decades they fervently believed in the trickle down theory that insisted putting money into the hands of their rich friends was the best way to stimulate the economy. Tax cuts were their preferred method simply because it would also cause the government to fall short of revenue and then, presumably, be unable to offerany safety net programs for the middle and working class, which they insisted encouraged laziness and dependency. Progressive Democrats believed that putting money in the hands of working people and the poor would not only be a better economic stimulus it would also provide material support to people who need it — a win win.

The Democrats are almost always charged with cleaning up GOP messes and this time is no different. But they are doing it the progressive way this time with no delusions that they can somehow leverage the moment into some kind of “Grand Bargain.” They just passed the policy they think will do good, with very little compromise:

To jump-start the ailing economy, President Biden is turning to the lowest-paid workers in America, and to the people who are currently unable to work at all.

Mr. Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief package, which cleared the Senate on Saturday and could be headed for the president’s signature in a matter of days, would overwhelmingly help low earners and the middle class, with little direct aid for the high earners who have largely kept their jobs and padded their savings over the past year.

For the president, the plan is more than just a stimulus proposal. It is a declaration of his economic policy — one that captures the principle Democrats and liberal economists have espoused over the past decade: that the best way to stoke faster economic growth is from the bottom up.

Mr. Biden’s approach in his first major economic legislation is in stark contrast to President Donald J. Trump’s, whose initial effort in Congress was a tax-cut package in 2017 that largely benefited corporations and wealthier Americans.

It’s a huge bet on progressive, Democratic ideology. It will be exciting to see how it works.

They love him, they really love him. (Telegram, by the way, is the Russian sponsored social media platform for wingnuts.)

Here’s what Tucker said:

Followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory are “gentle people waving American flags”, Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed on Friday night – two months since many joined a mob that stormed the US Capitol seeking to overturn Donald Trump’s election defeat, a riot in which five people died.Biden’s FDR moment? President in New Deal-like push that could cement his legacyRead more

“Do you ever notice,” Carlson asked his primetime audience, “how all the scary internet conspiracy theorists – the radical QAnon people – when you actually see them on camera or in jail cells, as a lot of them now are, are maybe kind of confused with the wrong ideas, but they’re all kind of gentle people now waving American flags? They like this country.”

Yeah. Remember this gentle soul? We’re coming for that bitch. Tell fuckin’ Pelosi we’re coming for her, fuckin traitorous cunt … we’re comin’ for all of you!

And this one:

BREAKING: Feds arrest Cleveland Meredith for his role in the US Capitol chaos. Investigators allege Meredith texted others that he would be "putting a bullet" in Speaker Nancy Pelosi's head pic.twitter.com/QcaNuIb9Ov

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) January 10, 2021

Five people died as a direct result of the Capitol attack, one a police officer struck with a fire extinguisher, one a Trump supporter shot by law enforcement. The Trump supporter, Ashli Babbitt, was reported to have followed internet conspiracy theories including QAnon.

Another rioter, Roseanne Boyland, was trampled by the mob while holding a Gadsden flag, a revolutionary era symbol of a snake and the legend “Don’t tread on me”. A friend said she had “watched her decline and go on these rabbit trails … this all really fucked with her head – the QAnon conspiracy theories, the elections, the unrest, the violence”.

The QAnon conspiracy theory holds that Trump is America’s true leader against a cabal of satanic liberal child-killers and paedophiles. He is not. No such cabal exists. Nonetheless, the theory has proliferated – even finding a sympathiser in Congress, the Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene.

On 6 January, before the Capitol riot, Trump told supporters to “fight like hell” to overturn the election, which he claims was the result of massive electoral fraud, a lie repeatedly thrown out of court. He escaped conviction in an impeachment trial, on a charge of inciting the riot. But federal authorities have made more than 300 arrests.

Carlson spoke a day after the US Capitol was closed, as law enforcement agencies warned of a threat from rightwing groups around the QAnon theory that Trump would return to power on 4 March. He did not. No attack materialised.

Carlson mocked reactions by Democrats and media coverage of the closure, adding familiar racially loaded provocation.

“By the time night fell and the city remained quiet,” he said, “except, of course, in the poor neighbourhoods where people are still shooting one another in ever-growing numbers and no one is noticing, MSNBC had decided that, in fact, they had saved the day.”

Carlson also said QAnon followers were “not torching Wendy’s. They’re not looting retail stores. They’re not shooting cops. No, that’s not them, it’s the other people doing that.”

No, they didn’t torch a Wendy’s or loot a store. They sacked the US Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power and threatened to kill the Vice President. Because “they like this country.”

In some quarters, the Fox News host is seen as a contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, if Trump does not run again. Carlson’s comments about QAnon believers echoed remarks by Trump, who last August told reporters: “I’ve heard these are people that love our country. So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.”

At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida, Carlson scored 3% in a straw poll regarding the next presidential pick – way behind Trump but ahead of Mike Pence, the former vice-president some in the Capitol mob said they wanted to hang. QAnon followers promise that fate for many of Trump’s opponents.

Gentle people like this fellow:

It is entirely possible that Carlson is simply trolling CNN and other mainstream media with this embrace of QAnon. He is that petty, that snotty and that immature.

On the other hand, he may be thinking of running for president if Donald Trump drops dead. Seriously.

I find it almost incomprehensible that people are prematurely opening up around the country again. Apparently, it’s simply impossible to learn from experience in this country:

With each day and each vaccination, the US inches closer to the finish line of what has been a brutal battle against Covid-19.But it’s not over just yet.Infection numbers, after weeks of declines, now seem to have plateaued at high levels. The US has averaged more than 60,000 Covid-19 cases daily in the past week. More than 41,000 people remain hospitalized with the virus nationwide, according to the COVID Tracking Project. And an average of more than 1,700 US Covid-19 deaths were reported every day for the past seven days.

And highly contagious variants that are already circulating have experts worried another Covid-19 spike could be just weeks away. More than 2,700 cases of variants first spotted in the UK, South Africa and Brazil have been reported in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — but the agency has cautioned that’s not the total number of cases in the country, but rather those that have been spotted with the help of genomic sequencing

Spring break could be a perfect storm for spreading coronavirus variants. Don’t let that happenThe vast majority of these cases — at least 2,672 — are the more contagious variant known as B.1.1.7, first spotted in the UK. The variant has been found in 46 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC.”That strain is increasing exponentially, it’s spiking up,” infectious diseases specialist and epidemiologist Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN Saturday. “So we are probably right now on a tipping point of another surge.”

Speaking on the dangers of that variant, Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, warned CNN on Friday, “that virus is about to take off in the United States.”The variants are a big reason why experts have repeatedly warned that now is the time to double down on measures that work to curb the spread of the virus — and not ease Covid-19 restrictions.

“There are so many reasons why you don’t want to pull back just now,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN late last week. “You want to plan that you will be able, within a reasonable time, to pull back. But not at a time when we have circulating variants and when you have what looks like a plateauing of the decline in the cases.”

I will never understand this nihilism and cruelty. As an older person who is not old enough to get the vaccine for quite some time where I live, I feel more frightened by this virus than I have since the beginning. The idea of anyone getting COVID-19 now, ending up in the hospital and dying is just unbearably sad to me. I can’t understand why people won’t hold out for just a little while longer so that we don’t have thousands and thousands of unnecessary deaths.

We are on the cusp of having vaccines available for everyone, making it possible for all of us to be safe, but we just have to continue to stay vigilant for the next few months. These people who are having little kids burn their masks and insisting that businesses stop following the guidelines before we get to that point is just mindless contrariness that’s going to kill far more people over the next few months.

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/1368615433163653120

And yet it never sinks in!