Debra Schrishuhn for PDA National Staff

* Russia surpasses Turkey in number of cases.

** Germany surpasses Spain in number of cases.

***Source: Johns Hopkins

**** Now 51 countries report more than one million cases of COVID-19, with the remainder being Argentina, Iran, Colombia, Mexico, Poland, Netherlands (surpassing Ukraine and Indonesia), Indonesia, Ukraine, South Africa, Philippines, Peru, Belgium (surpassing Czechia, Malaysia, and Canada), Japan (surpassing Czechia, Malaysia, and Canada), Czechia (surpassing Malaysia and Canada), Israel (surpassing Thailand, Malaysia, and Canada), Canada, Malaysia,  Portugal (surpassing Australia and Thailand), Australia (surpassing Thailand), Thailand, Romania(surpassing Vietnam and Iraq), Switzerland (surpassing Chile, Vietnam, and Iraq), Chile  (surpassing Vietnam and Iraq), Vietnam  (surpassing Iraq), Sweden (surpassing Iraq), Iraq, Greece,  Austria (surpassing Bangladesh), Denmark (surpassing Pakistan, Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, and Bangladesh), Bangladesh,, Serbia, Slovakia, Hungary, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Jordan (surpassing Ireland), Georgia (surpassing Morocco and Ireland), Ireland, Morocco, Cuba , and newcomer South Korea.

Top Ten states with COVID-19 cases:

• California+       8,615,053

• Texas               6,351,228

• Florida             5,629,602

• New York         4,827,018

• Illinois              2,962,497

• Pennsylvania   2,697,242

• Ohio                 2,608,055

• N. Carolina       2,470,404

• Georgia            2,334,292

• Michigan++      2,289,269

 Top Ten states with COVID-19 deaths:

• California            81,272

• Texas                  80,872

• Florida                66,279

• New York            65,013

• Pennsylvania      41,524

• Illinois                 35,157

• Ohio                    34,217

• Michigan             32,835

• Georgia               32,109

• New Jersey+++   31,948

+California tops 8M cases; Texas tops 6M cases;New Jersey tops 2M cases, but is surpassed by Michigan, topping 2M cases.

++Still 25 states post more than 1M cases, the remainder being New Jersey, Arizona, Tennessee, Indiana(surpassing Massachusetts), Massachusetts Virginia, Wisconsin, South Carolina, (surpassing Missouri), Missouri,  Washington (surpassing Colorado and Minnesota), Minnesota, Colorado, Alabama, Kentucky, and Louisiana.

+++Now 29 states with more than 10K COVID-19 deaths, the remainder being Arizona, Tennessee, Massachusetts, Indiana, North Carolina, Missouri, Alabama, Virginia, Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Colorado, Mississippi,  Washington, and newcomer Connecticut.

The Hill, 2/5:The White House is preparing to pivot on the pandemic — but with a different approach than the July 4 celebration last summer that some have subsequently criticized as premature, Said one Democratic strategist: “No one wants a repeat of last July.” New evidence is now emerging that gives the White House and plenty of others hope that the nation is veering out of the pandemic.

Wall Street Journal, 2/5:“The world is living through a unique moment: In the past five or six weeks, the Omicron coronavirus variant has likely gotten more people sick than any similar period since the 1917-18 flu pandemic, according to global health experts. While Omicron infections have peaked in many places, February is likely to see similar case loads as the variant continues to spread before it flames out, causing worker shortages from hospitals to factories and spurring debate about Covid-19 restrictions, particularly since Omicron appears to be causing less serious illness.”

Washington Post, 2/5: Delta Air Lines has asked the Justice Department to help set up a national “no-fly” list of unruly passengers that would bar them from boarding any commercial air carrier, amid a surge in “air rage” incidents during the pandemic.

Wall Street Journal, 2/5: “Police in Ottawa, Ontario, are weighing military help or a court order to bring an end to a weeklong protest against vaccine mandates that has forced businesses to close, frayed residents’ nerves and strangled swaths of the city’s core. The protests, led by truckers and their supporters, have clogged Ottawa traffic and disrupted residents’ daily lives. Police said this week their intelligence indicates that more truckers and citizens, perhaps in the tens of thousands, are headed toward Ottawa this weekend. City politicians say the protest, which began Jan. 28, has morphed into an occupation.”

Gizmodo, 2/5: Spotify pulled down at least 70 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience from its archives on Friday. However, the disappeared episodes don’t have much to do with the platform’s ongoing controversy over covid-19 misinformation.

Political Wire, 2/5:More than 900,000 Americans have now died since the start of the pandemic. The death toll is the highest confirmed count of coronavirus casualties of any nation in the world.

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 2/4: Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin have introduced several bills aimed at barring health care providers from withholding unproven treatments for Covid-19 such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

CBS News, 2/4: After a recent internal review, the Biden administration decided to maintain a pandemic-era order put in place under former President Donald Trump that authorizes the rapid deportation of migrants from the U.S.-Mexico border, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) told CBS News Thursday.

Since March 2020, the Trump and Biden administrations have expelled migrants over 1.5 million times without affording them the opportunity to request U.S. asylum, citing a series of CDC orders that argue the expulsions are needed to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 in border processing facilities.

The latest order authorizing the border expulsions, signed by CDC Director Rochelle Walensky in August 2021, instructed public health officials to evaluate the need for the policy every 60 days. Two reviews last fall led the agency to keep the order in place.

 The Hill,2/4: Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says he plans to subpoena Dr. Anthony Fauci’s records if Republicans retake the Senate in November’s midterm elections and he becomes chairman of a committee. Said Paul: “If we win in November, if I’m chairman of a committee, if I have subpoena power, we’ll go after every one of his records. We’ll have an investigator go through this piece-by-piece because we don’t need this to happen again.”

CNBC, 2/4:“Payrolls rose far more than expected in January despite surging omicron cases that seemingly sent millions of workers to the sidelines. Nonfarm payrolls surged by 467,000 for the month, while the unemployment rate edged higher to 4%. The stunning gain came a week after the White House warned that the numbers could be low due to the pandemic.”

New York Times, 2/4: “A broad and bipartisan group of senators is coalescing around legislation to create a high-level independent commission, modeled after the one that examined the Sept. 11 attacks, with broad powers to investigate the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and the response across the Trump and Biden administrations.” 

Washington Post, Aaron Blake, 2/4:For more than a hot second after the emergence of the omicron coronavirus variant, there was a major backlash from the right against President Biden having labeled our current state of affairs a “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The reason: The omicron variant rendered the coronavirus vaccines significantly less effective at stopping the spread. “What’s the point of vaccines or vaccine mandates?” a bunch of powerful people asked. They did so while deliberately ignoring both the vaccines’ continued assistance in slowing the spread (albeit at a reduced rate) and their continually strong performance in keeping people alive and out of the hospital.

It was shortsighted at the time, and it’s looking increasingly so now.

New data shows that on those same measures — literally the most vital ones — the gap between vaccinated and unvaccinated Americans remains stark. In fact, when you compare unvaccinated people to those most protected by the vaccines, the gap has grown….

Where the gap has not really closed — and indeed has arguably increased — is when you focus on the most serious cases, and when you compare the unvaccinated to those who have taken the most advantage of the vaccines. Back in September, we got a big new data download from the CDC. It showed that during the spring and summer, unvaccinated people had been 10 times more likely to be hospitalized with the coronavirus and 11 times more likely to die. Those were big numbers that placed the importance of vaccination in stark relief. After the introduction of boosters, we now have yet another category to compare to the unvaccinated: the boosted. And the gap is greater still.

The Los Angeles County data showed that at the tail end of the period in which the delta variant was predominant, unvaccinated people were 83 times more likely to be hospitalized than boosted people. Once omicron became predominant in early December and cases rose, the gap shrank. But it was still a 23-fold difference — greater than the gap in the larger study from earlier in the year….

It’s gotten to the point where people who are vaccinated and boosted dying in a given week is apparently about 1 in a million — even less than dying in a car crash, as the New York Times’s David Leonhardt wrote. As Leonhardt also noted, this is also hardly the first data to suggest a growing gap in outcomes between the unvaccinated and everyone else. Data from Seattle and New York City point in the same direction.

Des Moines Register, 2/3:“Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) will soon end the public health disaster proclamation that Iowa has operated under since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic nearly two years ago. In the early days of the pandemic, she relied on the proclamation to close businesses, limit large gatherings and encourage other pandemic responses like limiting nonessential surgeries and — briefly — requiring masks to be worn in certain indoor settings.”

Times of London, 2/3: “New Zealand is reopening to the world after shutting its borders almost two years ago in one of the strongest and harshest defenses against the pandemic.” 

Politico,2/3: “Emboldened by falling case counts, the Biden administration is plotting a new phase of the pandemic response aimed at containing the coronavirus and conditioning Americans to live with it. The preparations are designed to capitalize on a break in the monthslong Covid-19 surge, with officials anticipating a spring lull that could boost the nation’s mood and lift President Joe Biden’s approval ratings at a critical moment for his party. Biden and his top health officials have already begun hinting at an impending ‘new normal,’ in a conscious messaging shift meant to get people comfortable with a scenario where the virus remains widespread yet at more manageable levels.”

Washington Post, 2/2:The U.S. Army said Wednesday that it would immediately begin removing soldiers who have refused the coronavirus vaccine.

Politico, 2/2:Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said the wide availability of highly effective vaccines means the U.S. mentality needs to evolve. Said McConnell: “It’s time for the state of emergency to wind down… What exactly are we doing here? Where are the goalposts? What’s the end game?” He added:”Consider if this variant were its own separate virus that we were just meeting for the very first time without the scar tissue from the prior two years. Nobody would accept anywhere near this much disruption to fight the virus that we’re actually facing right now.”

AP, 2/2: “Soaring tax revenue and billions in pandemic aid from the federal government have left many states with an unusual problem — too much money. The result is one of the most broad-based movements in recent memory toward giving consumers and taxpayers a break. In red states and blue, lawmakers and governors are proposing to cut taxes and fees, create tax credits, or delay tax and fee hikes that had been planned before the Covid-19 pandemic struck.”

WUSF, 2/2:“Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have concluded that lockdowns have done little to reduce COVID deaths but have had ‘devastating effects’ on economies and numerous social ills,” 

The Bulwark, A. B. Stoddard, 2/2: “A pandemic Republicans have eagerly prolonged has pummeled Joe Biden’s presidency and he can no longer fight depravity with good will. There are no more marginal vaccine holdouts to be wooed. No more lives of people who just don’t know any better to be saved. It’s time for Democrats to stop worrying about alienating the unvaccinated and start explaining to the rest of the country how the unvaccinated—and the Republicans who coddle and truckle to them—have screwed the rest of us. To win this culture war, Biden and the Democrats have to actually fight it. Otherwise, the Republican Covid radicals are going to clobber them.”

New York Times, 2/1:“Two years into the pandemic, the coronavirus is killing Americans at far higher rates than people in other wealthy nations, a sobering distinction to bear as the country charts a course through the next stages of the pandemic. Some of the reasons for America’s difficulties are well known. Despite having one of the world’s most powerful arsenals of vaccines, the country has failed to vaccinate as many people as other large, wealthy nations. Crucially, vaccination rates in older people also lag behind certain European nations. The United States has fallen even further behind in administering booster shots, leaving large numbers of vulnerable people with fading protection as Omicron sweeps across the country.”

AP, 2/1: Denmark scrapped most pandemic restrictions as the Scandinavian country no longer considers Covid-19 “a socially critical disease. Officials say the reason for the Danish move is that while the omicron variant is surging in the country, it’s not placing a heavy burden on the health system and Denmark has a high vaccination rate.”

New York Times, 2/1: “As the Omicron variant of the coronavirus personally touches or swirls around so many individuals, vaccinated and largely protected families are strained by varying comfort levels. It is much the same the world over, especially where significant portions of the population have been vaccinated, like Italy, which now has one of the highest rates in the world. Initially slammed by the virus, Italy today holds the promise of a near future where the schism in society is no longer between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated, or the socially responsible and the scofflaws, but between the risk takers and the risk averse. For many with booster shots, life has become a constant negotiation between those who want to resume dining in restaurants, those still reluctant to accept deliveries and those who just want to get the virus already and get their mandatory quarantines over with.”

Washington Post, 2/1: “Coronavirus vaccines for children younger than 5 could be available far sooner than expected — perhaps by the end of February — under a plan that would lead to the potential authorization of a two-shot regimen in the coming weeks.” 

Wall Street Journal, 2/1: “Federal authorities estimate that 987,456 more people have died since early 2020 than would have otherwise been expected, based on long-term trends. People killed by coronavirus infections account for the overwhelming majority of cases. Thousands more died from derivative causes, like disruptions in their healthcare and a spike in overdoses. Covid-19 has left the same proportion of the population dead—about 0.3%—as did World War II, and in less time.”

Associated Press, 2/1: “It’s no surprise that unusual steps are taken to protect any president. But the strict precautions could also threaten to undercut the Biden administration’s own efforts to tell Americans — especially those who are vaccinated and boosted — that they can get on with something closer to their normal lives in the face of the omicron wave. And it’s emblematic of the messaging challenges surrounding the administration’s approach to Covid-19 as the virus becomes endemic, familiar and somewhat controlled but still menacing, with hard-to-follow guidelines often unevenly implemented. For months, Biden aides have fretted that the people who are most protected against Covid-19 remain the most cautious, a dynamic they view as a drag on the nation’s economic and psychological recovery.”

Politico, 1/31: “The silence from the former president is not coincidental. Within Trump’s circles, there is a growing sense that encouraging vaccines too aggressively could carry political risks. Like much of the rest of the GOP, the current calculation has been to rail against vaccine mandates but keep quiet on the push for the vaccines themselves. Once relegated to corners of the internet, the anti-vaccine movement has emerged as a force within Republican politics — encouraged by some of the most prominent figures in conservative media and top operatives in the MAGA movement. Their growth has come despite overwhelming evidence that individuals are far less likely to have severe illness or die from Covid if they’re vaccinated and boosted.”

New York Times, David Leonhardt, 1/31: “The CDC has begun to publish data on Covid outcomes among people who have received booster shots, and the numbers are striking… As you can see, vaccination without a booster provides a lot of protection. But a booster takes somebody to a different level. This data underscores both the power of the Covid vaccines and their biggest weakness — namely, their gradual fading of effectiveness over time, as is also the case with many other vaccines. Once you get a booster, your risk of getting severely ill from Covid is tiny. It is quite small even if you are older or have health problems.”

Political Wire, 1/31:A new Monmouth poll finds 70% of Americans agree with the sentiment that “it’s time we accept that Covid is here to stay and we just need to get on with our lives” – including 78% of those who report having gotten Covid and 65% of those who say they have not been infected. The main difference in the sense that it is time to move on is due to partisanship – ranging from 89% of Republicans and 71% of independents to 47% of Democrats. Just 34% feel the country will get the outbreak under control and return to normal by the end of the year and 28% now believe a return to normalcy will never happen, which is up from 22% who felt this way in September and just 6% who were similarly pessimistic exactly a year ago.

New York Times, 1/31: “The Omicron wave is now receding in states where the extremely contagious variant arrived later, and some governors are saying it’s time for pandemic-fatigued Americans to try to restore a sense of normalcy and learn to live with the virus. Said New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D): “We’re not going to manage this to zero. We have to learn how to live with this.”

Washington Post, 1/31: “White House officials have grown so frustrated with top health official Xavier Becerra as the pandemic rages on that they have openly mused about who might be better in the job, although political considerations have stopped them from taking steps to replace him. Top White House officials have had an uneasy relationship with Becerra, the health and human services secretary, since early in President Biden’s term. But their dissatisfaction has escalated in recent months as the omicron variant has sickened millions of Americans in a fifth pandemic wave amid confusing and sometimes conflicting messages from top health officials that brought scrutiny to Biden’s strategy.”

Political Wire, 1/30: Spotify CEO Daniel Ek issued a statement saying the streaming giant would add “advisory labels” to some content after Neil Young and Joni Mitchell pulled their music from the service over podcaster Joe Rogin’s spreading of Covid-19 misinformation. 

WSOC, 1/30:A North Carolina man who desperately needs a new kidney is rejecting a transplant because the hospital requires him to be vaccinated against Covid-19. Said Chad Carswell: “No sir, I was born free. I will die free. I’m not changing my mind. He added: “I’ve had conversations with my family and everybody who is close to me and they know where I stand and there will not be a situation that occurs where I’ll change my mind on this topic.”

Truck Protest Against Pandemic Measures Spreads

February 6, 2022 at 7:23 am EST By Taegan Goddard 59 Comments