One of the worse graphs for the nowadays — saw it early this morning (h/t BJ):

10 countries with recent covid surges.
1 going in the wrong direction. pic.twitter.com/WHDnDUXh5C

— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) November 17, 2020

Chart is much-more visual, and compelling off my iPad, you can zoom in — the United States, about mid-way (sixth country from the bottom),  only country angling upward, the rest of the world seemingly at least working to get the numbers down. We’re tanking down when winning is up. BJ’s daily early-morning COVID-19 updates — depressing, nerve-wracking but way-must-read important — nothing will work until the virus is brought under control,

Hopefully, the life-saving vaccines are coming, apparently way-needed game changers, and really the only avenue to success.  What we’re doing  currently sucks — a time known in future history books just simply as, ‘Days of the T-Rump Horror‘ — and as a strong, direct result, nearly half the country right now hates science, masks, social distancing, and way-most-likely hates to wash their hands. We’ll never do much to even slow the spread, so the vaccines do carry weight, though, sad to say.

In the academic side of the up-coming vaccines there’s a fairly-detailed view of the situation by organic chemist Derek Lowe at Science Translational Medicine this morning, though the piece is really science heavy, this small snip scripts the current scenario:

Epidemics are a matter of probabilities, and you can lower the chances of spread for a virus like this in any number of ways.
They surely vary in efficacy, but include keeping distant from other people and avoiding any crowding in general, wearing masks, avoiding indoor situations with people that you haven’t been exposed to (such as going to the grocery store when it’s not so crowded), minimizing the time you spend in any higher-risk situation in general (getting those groceries in an organized fashion and getting back outside), and more.
The fewer people there are around shedding infectious particles, the better (obviously), but the worst case for a weakly effective vaccine might be that it could actually raise that number for a while by creating more asymptomatic cases rather than having the infection make people aware that they need to stay the hell inside.
But I don’t think we’re going to see that. I think that the efficacy levels we’re seeing are indeed going to be epidemic-breaking if we can get sufficient numbers of people vaccinated.
Right now we’re up around the efficacy of the measles vaccine, which is very effective against a virus that is far more infectious than SARS-Cov-2. . .if enough people take it. (Believe it, if the current coronavirus were as infectious as measles is, we would be hosed).

If we can bear it til then, especially with the T-Rump not doing one fucking thing.

And if not:

‘Yeah, my blood’s so mad, feels like coagulatin’,
I’m sittin’ here, just contemplatin’,
I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation,
Handful of Senators don’t pass legislation,
And marches alone can’t bring integration,
When human respect is disintegratin’,
This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’,
And you tell me over and over and over again my friend,
Ah, you don’t believe we’re on the eve of destruction…‘

Silly, and scary…mainly because it’s not 1965…

(Illustration: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here)