The top stories of the day start with our pandemic: The world is set to reach a quarter billion COVID-19 cases tomorrow.  This means that slightly more than 3% got infected with this virus. Today, the world experienced five million COVID-19 deaths.   This represents 1 death for every 1500 people. Traffic deaths, in the same 20 month period, showed 1 death for 3350 people. Or, during this pandemic, you are about twice as likely to have died from COVID-19 than in a traffic accident. This means the mortality rate is 2%. The U.S. mortality rate is 1.6%. Experts remain uncertain, but the best available info today indicates that  40-50% of those infected don't show any symptoms .  Amazingly enough, there were  28 studies  on this subject by early this year, and the asymptomatic rate ranged from 1.4% to 78.3%. Say the asymptomatic rate is 50%, then the world mortality rate is 1%. The mortality rate of the seasonal flu is 0.1%. But the asymptomatic rate...

Is Delta Airlines being hurt by the Delta variant?   For one, they don't mention that strain by name.  CEO Ed Bastian indicated they haven't seen any impacts for this unfortunate similarity.  He also indicated that 72% of their staff is vaccinated, and the vast majority of passengers likewise. A coming book by two  Washington Post  reporters, Carol Leonnig and Phillip Rucker,  I Alone Can Fix It:  Donald J. Trumps's Catastrophic Final Year , reveals fully expected, but still shocking news.   A CNN report  on how top U.S. generals planned on ways to stop Trump.  At the top, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley is quoted to say:   They may try, but they're not going to f---ing succeed . On 4 January 2021 I said: I've long felt that his Hail Mary would be to get his Department of Defense ( after all, he is Commander in Chi ef ), to support him in just taking over the government if everything else fails....

Before I get into miracles, something more on this pandemic: I regularly show two graphs produced by the World Bank about COVID-19.  Their number of cases look high because they somehow include asymptomatic cases, still a relative unknown about how many there are.  Turns out that whether it's the seasonal flu or venereal disease or this mutating coronavirus, seems like they all have around 50% asymptomatic cases. The number of world deaths from Worldometer is 1.85 million ( USA 0.36 million ).  From the World Bank ( WB ), 1.86 million ( USA 0.34 million ).  The WB shows deaths continuing to increase into April, no matter what happens: For both the World and U.S., universal ( 95% ) mask-wearing would make the most difference in reducing deaths.  This is not occurring.  The projected deaths are linked to rapid rollout of vaccination.  Easing of the economy significantly increases projected deaths ( in millions ):            ...