I'll get to more COVID-19 details tomorrow, but here is something from the AP: German Man Caught Trying to Get 90th COVID-19 Shot A 60-year-old man was caught at a vaccination center in Eilenburg in Saxony after trying to get jabbed for the second day in a row. The man, who was carrying several blank vaccination cards, allegedly received around 90 shots at vaccination centers across the state over a period of months. Police say he has been selling forged vaccination cards with real vaccine batch numbers to anti-vaxxers who crave the Covid passports that make access to public life in Germany much easier. It was not immediately clear what impact the 90 jabs — from different brands — had on the man’s health.   (Source:   AP ) On a slightly more serious note, China has totally locked down its largest city of Shanghai of 26 million. The country has jumped to 13,000 new cases, but this compares to 19K in the USA and 127K in South Korea, which is continuing to remove restrictions.  China

It has been 16 months since the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic.  Give the Trump Administration a gold star for rushing development of the those vaccines, although, as I reported earlier,   the previous two pandemics also delivered vaccines in four months .  Can you imagine how many more than 4 million would have died if these current Delta and Delta Plus variants were the first to infect humans? The  countries suffering the most deaths  are the U.S. ( 622,821 ), Brazil ( 532,949 ) and India ( 408,0 72).  You'd never guess it, but Mexico is #4 with 234,675 deaths.  #5?  Peru with 194,249. About Mexico, clearly, they are underreporting cases because their mortality rate is 9%.  The world figure is 2%.  Thus, instead of 2.5 million cases, Mexico most probably has had 12 million cases, raising them from #15 to #4 in the world. There is something important about freedom and our personal rights, but I continue to be dismayed by the Biden's Administration inability to get more Ame

  From the   New York Times   this morning: There is a political angle to these trends, of course. The places with the lowest vaccination rates tend to be heavily Republican. In an average U.S. county that voted for Donald Trump, only 34 percent of people are fully vaccinated, according to New York Times data. In an average country that voted for Joe Biden, the share is 45 percent (and the share that has received at least one shot is higher) . Remember  Polar Vortex , a term that was tossed about when it got abnormally cold?  Well, there is a new one for today:  Heat Dome.  Or, better yet,  Millennium Heat Dome , for what is happening in the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia is ten times worse than a 100-year storm, a designation applied when something really bad occurs from Mother Nature. It was terrible this weekend, and could get worse today.  Yesterday,  Lytton BC reached 116 F .   Canada today might become the hottest spot on Planet Earth.  When has that ever occurred?  Then

The New York Times this morning reported: Donald Trump insulted Senator Mitch McConnell as a “dumb son of a bitch”   at a retreat for Republican donors . The Times columnists Gail Collins and Bret Stephens   discuss sex scandals and Congressman Gaetz . Amazon defeated unionism in Alabama by paying all its employees at least $15/hour, more than double the current Federal minimum wage of $7.25.  However, $15/hour translates to $31,000/year, LESS than half of the U.S. median family income.   “The victory leaves Amazon free to handle employees on its own terms,”   The Times’s Karen Weise and Michael Corkery write . Hideki Maruyama became the first Japanese to win a major golf tournament, edging out Will Zalatoris, an interesting newcomer who shows promise to win a tournament this year, and Xander Schauffele, who could well prevail in another major this year.  He had a roller coaster round, with a triple bogey on the 16th hole.   Maruyama is rather reticent in his public statements, and al