I'll get  to the pizza part later, but will begin with this pandemic, using a few graphics from the morning   New York Times : If you've forgotten how to read graphs, the results are clear.  Those states voting for Donald Trump are killing themselves by avoiding being vaccinated.  How serious is this?  Almost a factor of 5. Further from the  NYT : Since Delta began circulating widely in the U.S., Covid has exacted a horrific death toll on red America: In counties where Donald Trump received at least 70 percent of the vote, the virus has killed about 47 out of every 100,000 people since the end of June,   according to Charles Gaba,   a health care analyst. In counties where Trump won less than 32 percent of the vote, the number is about 10 out of 100,000 . How do these numbers compare with the world in deaths/100,000 population? U.S.  21 Hawaii  and Vermont  5  ( lowest in  nation--yet, Hawaii's governor still refuses to allow spectators at football games) Mississippi  3

 The morning  New York Times  provided the following graphics: To quote the  NYT ,  slowly getting less terrible .  Note that hospitalizations come a week after the infection, and deaths another week later.  Thus, the decline in new deaths has not yet occurred...but should. However, schools have just opened, people are packing football stadia and indoor entertainment is increasing.  I fear that new deaths will not drop much below 1000/day for the rest of the month or two and maybe more. Here is a  NYT  article on world vaccinations  you can actually read.   I'd swear the U.S. hit the 50% vaccination rate a month ago.  Well, we are seem stuck at 54% fully vaccinated.  If you glance at the full world table, we rank around #40.  The laggards in our country are the less educated and Republicans.  Another graph: There are other countries with much lower vaccination rates, but there doesn't seem to be any correlation with the deaths/million people rate ( right column ):     UAE     

You know how the U.S. has reacted to this Pandemic.  How do we compare with other parts of the world?  Let's look at  New Zealand, Japan and Australia , where they all initially well-handled this COVID-19 virus. New Zealand closed its border to non-residents and went into a protracted lockdown, eliminating COVID-19.  Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been praised for her leadership. It went months without a single locally spread case, and life returned to normal. But this month the Sydney outbreak spread to New Zealand by just one returning traveler Cases spread to 72 and 10,000 people exposed people were identified.   A total national lockdown was instituted, and widely supported by the populace. During the past two days they have had 24 new cases/day but no new deaths. Total deaths since the beginning amounted to 2873, or  5 per million population . Vaccination rate is only at 20%. Japan initially was successful because its citizens, mostly because of air pollution ( usually from