I stumbled across a draft of the following posting that was supposed to be published on 11 January 2021, five days after that awful day in the U.S. Congress when Donald Trump, still in office as president, was attempting to orchestrate a coup.  In a rare error of this type, it turned out I had no blog on 11 January 2021.  So I'm inserting it today unchanged.  Note: My optimism about this pandemic was unwarranted.  But the Delta variant, this B.1.617.2 strain, had not yet been detected.   Read this article , which indicates that the first notice was in India in February, with some speculation that it was more transmissible. I even went on to suggest that Congress would impeach Trump and the Supreme Court would concur.  Of course, this did not happen, which is slowly pushing the Republican party into someday fracturing.  Then again, perhaps I again might be too optimistic. The reason why I am posting this article today is that I recently woke up in ...