As here on Thursday morning, the COVID-19 virus is still in the surge mode, with no end in sight even with the roll-out of a vaccine — yesterday, the US average number of daily cases across a week was 215,729 (more than three times what the daily case average was during a summer peak in July), and yesterday, too, a single-day record 247,403 cases. We also averaged 2,569 deaths daily across the last week, highest average yet, and again, yesterday’s total deaths of 3,656 was another one-day high.

Meanwhile, here in California it’s also getting worse (Mercury News): ‘For the first time of the pandemic, California is averaging more than 35,000 new cases and 200 fatalities per day over the past week, figures that dwarf those from the beginning of November, when the state was averaging just over 4,000 cases and about 45 deaths each day. Just in the past two weeks, California’s average daily cases have soared by 137-percent and its average daily death toll by even more: 205-percent.‘

Meanwhile, from our Grifter-Mass Exterminator-in-Chief’s office (h/t Susie):

Back in Sept I asked @PressSec about herd immunity. She said, "herd immunity, so-called theory, was something made up in the fanciful minds of the media."@ddiamond reports a top Trump appointee advocating for exactly that: https://t.co/SigFeO3XuR

— Meridith McGraw (@meridithmcgraw) December 16, 2020

Bitch-liar! Via CNN this morning:

Former Health and Human Services senior adviser Paul Alexander repeatedly urged his colleagues at HHS and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to pursue a herd immunity strategy amid the Covid-19 pandemic.
One example is when he wrote in an email on July 3 that Americans “must go on with life.”

“So the bottom line is if it is more infectiouness [sic] now, the issue is who cares? If it is causing more cases in young, my word is who cares…as long as we make sensible decisions, and protect the elderely [sic] and nursing homes, we must go on with life….who cares if we test more and get more positive tests,” he wrote.

Further: ‘“Allow the nation to develop antibodies. Infants, kids, teens, young people, young adults, middle aged with no conditions etc. have zero to little risk… So we use them to develop herd… we want them infected,” Alexander wrote in the email, which was obtained and published by Politico.‘

An excellent, readable understanding of ‘herd immunity’ can be found at StatNews this morning — using algebra beyond my comprehension, Zach Nayer, makes it work. Ugly main point:

Using the herd immunity threshold, the base prevalence, and the monthly infection rate, it’s possible to calculate the number of months (m) to achieve herd immunity…

If the virus is left to spread at its current rate with no vaccine, it would take 55 months from October 2020 to achieve herd immunity.
That means May 2025.
Even if I had assumed an R0 of 3, it would still take 48 months to reach herd immunity.

This white-knuckle approach would consist of several years of misery, morbidity, and mortality, not to mention continued economic hardship.

Nayer reports, however, with a vaccine a proper less-shitty herd immunity:

With just 39-percent of Americans getting a government-approved vaccine, the time to herd immunity is 19 months, meaning December 2022.

Nineteen months is no walk in the park.
If 17.7-percent of Americans are already immune by May, and another 39-percent would readily get a Covid-19 vaccine, that leaves about 43-percent of the population who are vulnerable to infection but skeptical of vaccination.

Convincing roughly half of these skeptical Americans to take the shot, boosting Pv to 60.7-percent, shortens the time to herd immunity to two months, meaning July 2021.

Convincing just a few more, hitting a critical mass of 63.7-percent, would let us achieve herd immunity as soon as the second wave of vaccinations has been completed.

Much better. The T-Rump, one remembers, asked Dr. Anthony Fauci in April: “Why don’t we let this wash over the country?”
Legacy of the T-Rump will be mass death, there’s no other way to view the terrible consequences from the last four years. A rat-pack of cold-hearted monsters with an orange-coated monster-in-chief.
Most-likely the best examination of the T-Rump’s COVID failure was at Slate from last August, which goes into lengthy detail how T-Rump consciously fucked-up the virus response, allowing hundreds of thousands to die, and millions to get bad-off sick — go back in time and read the whole piece, it’s way-infuriating, but this an overall capper:

Trump has always been malignant and incompetent.
As president, he has coasted on economic growth, narrowly averted crises of his own making, and corrupted the government in ways that many Americans could ignore.
But in the pandemic, his vices — venality, dishonesty, self-absorption, dereliction, heedlessness — turned deadly.
They produced lies, misjudgments, and destructive interventions that multiplied the carnage.
The coronavirus debacle isn’t, as Trump protests, an “artificial problem” that spoiled his presidency.
It’s the fulfillment of everything he is.

What an amoral clusterfucker…

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Self Portrait Facing Death‘ (June 30, 1972), was originally found here).