Although I received my second COVID-19 vaccine shot this morning, Merced County where I reside is still in California’s worse purple tier category as apparently the rest of the state seems to be finally getting out from under the coronavirus blanket — per the Merced Sun-Star last Tuesday:

Merced County has lagged behind others in the San Joaquin Valley and the state.
The only other county in the state, as of Tuesday, left in purple tier, is Inyo County.
There have been 30,906 cases of the coronavirus since the pandemic began, according to the county, and 442 deaths.

And the rest of the US for the most part also seems to be emerging from a horror of the pandemic, but there’s indications a new, fourth surge, might be coming for some parts of the country. Anthony Fauci warns of it — via CNN this morning:

“It’s almost a race between getting people vaccinated and this surge that seems to want to increase,” Fauci said, noting Europe is experiencing a spike much like the one experts worry about for the US.
The US is vaccinating people quickly, with more than 33-percent of the population — more than 112 million people — having received at least one dose of a vaccine, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. About a quarter of US adults — more than 66 million people — are fully vaccinated.
…
To fight the variant, Fauci urged Americans to get vaccinated and stick to preventative measures.
“Hang in there a bit longer,” he said.
“Now is not the time, as I’ve said so many times, to declare victory prematurely.”

According to John Hopkins University as of this afternoon, the US has experienced 560,993 COVID deaths off 31,077,529 reported cases so far in the pandemic — here in California we’ve had 58,593 deaths from 3,590,758 cases, and yet supposedly we’re doing good:

On one end of the spectrum — the sunniest end — is California.
“California now has the lowest positivity rate in the country,” Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted Monday, and he’s right: Just 1 percent of the state’s COVID tests are coming back positive at the moment, half the rate of the next closest state.

New cases (current average: 2,700 per day) have fallen to their lowest level since last June, and hospitalizations (current average: 2,500) are lower than they’ve been since last April, at the very start of the pandemic.
On Tuesday, Newsom announced that California — which has spent the last few months steadily advancing through a tiered reopening system while keeping its public mask mandate in effect — will “fully” reopen on June 15 if current trends continue.

A big ‘if‘ there as COVID has a short, torrid history of coming back strong after places reopen too soon, especially with assholes who won’t wear masks and won’t get vaccinated.
Not only do we face the medical/health issues of the pandemic, but also a shitty misinformation/bald-face lying aspect which makes getting a handle on the virus even harder, and in some cases maybe impossible. In the terrible total of more than half-a-million Americans dead, how many could have been saved (and we could perhaps be already ‘reopened’ and life be back to somewhat ‘normal’ by now) if the T-Rump had been half-ass compentent.
However, not only was he and his bootlickers/enablers way-inept, but sadistically cruel about the situation, too.

They just didn’t give a shit that people were dying:

It's not that I'm surprised, but it's still incredible that this happened and that accountability will likely be minimal despite the obvious cost in lives. https://t.co/aSP2QlMaYo

— Zack Ford (@ZackFord) April 9, 2021

Details from The Washington Post this morning:

Trump appointees in the Department of Health and Human Services last year privately touted their efforts to block or alter scientists’ reports on the coronavirus to more closely align with then-President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators.

The documents provide further insight into how senior Trump officials approached last year’s explosion of coronavirus cases in the United States.
Even as career government scientists worked to combat the virus, a cadre of Trump appointees was attempting to blunt the scientists’ messages, edit their findings and equip the president with an alternate set of talking points.
…
Pointing to one change — in which CDC leaders allegedly changed the opening sentence of a report about the spread of the virus among younger people after Alexander pressured them — Alexander wrote to Caputo, calling it a “small victory but a victory nonetheless and yippee!!!”
…
Many of the Trump officials clashing with government scientists had little or no previous experience in combating infectious disease.
Caputo, a GOP political communications consultant and longtime Trump ally, had not previously worked in public health before Trump installed him to oversee the health department’s communications in April 2020.

Alexander, who was not a physician but recruited as Caputo’s handpicked science adviser, had previously been an unpaid, part-time health professor at Canada’s McMaster University.
Atlas was a neuroradiologist and senior fellow at Stanford University’s conservative Hoover Institution who caught the White House’s attention after defending the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic on Fox News.
…
For instance, Alexander said he had won changes to the “key opening sentence” of an August report about a coronavirus outbreak at a Georgia summer camp.
The draft report’s opening line argued that understanding youth transmission of the coronavirus was “critical for developing guidance for schools and institutes of higher education,” according to Alexander’s email.
But that language was removed from the final report and a caveat was inserted to specify that there was “limited data” about spread of the virus among people under the age of 21.
The CDC said that the change had been made because of “thoughtful comments” from Alexander and the agency’s leaders.

And Fauci, too, came under fire for telling the truth:

In emails obtained by the subcommittee, Alexander and others also repeatedly took aim at Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious-disease expert, critiquing his statements about the coronavirus and complaining that Fauci’s calls to close schools last year were disproportionate to his more measured response to prior flu outbreaks that had led to more deaths among children.

“Dr. Fauci has no data, no science to back up what he is saying on school reopen, none … he is scaring the nation wrongfully,” Alexander wrote to 11 senior HHS officials on Aug. 11, arguing that Fauci was unnecessarily alarming parents.

Go read the entire piece, etc. It’s shitty as shit.
And as stated in the tweet above, there will be most-likely no accountability for these murderous actions, not only those cruel cretins named in the Post story, but the T-Rump himself.

Joe pointedly pointed:

Donald Trump knew.

He lied to us for months.

And while a deadly disease ripped through our nation, he failed to do his job — on purpose.

It was a life or death betrayal of the American people. https://t.co/WDmVUvmmJk

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 9, 2020

As pure a case of a crime against humanity as it gets (BBC):

“It goes through the air,” Mr Trump told the author (Woodward) on 7 February.

“That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things. Right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed.

“And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”

Later that month, Mr Trump promised the virus was “very much under control,” and that the case count would soon be close to zero. He also publicly implied the flu was more dangerous than Covid-19.

And a T-Rump companion from the past:

And here we are…