Pendejovirus

Political Cartoon is by Lalo Alcaraz at Pocho.com.

Early Voting Totals For Texas Democratic Primary

The chart above uses the official figures from the office of the Texas Secretary of State. It shows the total number of early voters in 15 of the largest counties in Texas. These counties contain 63.15% of all the registered voters in the state.

Note that the early voting totals for 2020 are far ahead of 2016. About 759,638 Democrats voted in 2020, while only 448,859 voted in 2016. I think it's pretty obvious that the total number of primary voters in 2020 will exceed that of 2016 after the March 3rd voters are figured in.

The only question is whether those voters will exceed the number of Democratic primary voters that voted in 2008, when a record number of voters participated (2,874,986). The chart below shows the total number of voters in the past four Texas Democratic primaries.

What Gives You The Impression?

Political Cartoon is by Clay Jones at claytoonz.com.

A Pandemic Is Coming - Is It The Coronavirus?

This scanning electron microscope image shows SARS-CoV-2 (yellow) among human cells (pink). This virus was isolated from a patient in the U.S. (Color has been added to the image to better show the virus and its environment.)

(Image: © NIAID-RML)

The image above of the Coronavirus is from livescience.com.

A worldwide pandemic is going to happen again. Scientists and medical professionals have been warning us about that for decades now. It will happen because most nations have not adequately prepared to deal with such and occurrence -- and that includes the United States.

The question we currently face is whether the Coronavirus is that pandemic. It might be.

Here is just a part of what the editorial board of The New York Times has to say:

In December, another new virus — SARS-CoV-2 — made the leap from animals to humans. It has now infected more than 83,000 people across more than 50 countries. Nearly 3,000 people have died, most of them in China where the outbreak began. Global health experts are once again sounding the alarm. It’s unclear how bad things might get this time around. Covid-19, the disease caused by this new virus, appears to be between seven and 20 times more deadly than seasonal flu, which on average kills between 300,000 and 650,000 people globally each year. But that fatality rate could prove to be much lower, especially if it turns out that many milder cases have evaded detection.

In the meantime, this much is not in dispute: SARS-CoV-2 spreads easily — more easily than SARS or seasonal flu — and is tough to detect. It’s the kind of virus that would be extremely difficult to contain even in a best-case scenario, and the world is hardly in a best-case scenario now. Rising nationalism, waning trust and lingering trade wars have undermined cooperation between global superpowers. Rampant misinformation and growing skepticism of science are imperiling public understanding of the crisis and governments’ response to it.

In the United States, a coming general election has politicized what should be a clear public health priority. On Tuesday, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned that a global pandemic was all but inevitable and asked the American public to brace itself for impact. That same day, her boss’s boss, President Trump, insisted that everything was well under control.

Mr. Trump has requested from Congress only $2.5 billion to address Covid-19 — far less than the $15 billion that experts say is needed. He has also made some curious personnel choices in recent days: putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the federal response, and muzzling Dr. Anthony Fauci, the long-serving director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Dr. Fauci has guided the nation through just about every outbreak and epidemic since 1984, and is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost authorities on managing such crises. As governor of Indiana, Mr. Pence badly botched the response to an H.I.V. outbreak, which resulted in hundreds of preventable infections.

There is still a chance that Covid-19 will prove to be more fire drill than actual fire. A global pandemic is all but certain, but there are many unknowns: Will the virus itself prove to be less contagious or far less deadly than is currently feared? Will it show a tendency to recede in warmer weather the way that seasonal flu does? Can a vaccine be made quickly available? (Dr. Fauci says that one may be ready for testing in as little as two months, and could be commercially available in about a year.) Any of these developments may yet break the global transmission chain, and the vortex of fear and market-tumbling anxiety in which the world now finds itself may yet pass.

If the next few weeks or months bring calm — and scientists increasingly worry that they will not — the world would do well to remember this time what it seems to have forgotten again and again. Another pathogen will emerge soon enough, and another after that. Eventually, one of them will be far worse than all its predecessors. If we are very unlucky, it could be worse than anything in living memory. Imagine something as contagious as measles (which any given infected person passes to 90 percent of the people he or she encounters) only many times more deadly, and you’ll have a good sense of what keeps global health officials up at night.

Here’s what is certain: Despite many warnings over many years, we are still not ready. Not in China, where nearly two decades after that SARS outbreak food markets that sell live animals still thrive and authoritarianism still undermines honest and accurate communication about infectious diseases. Not in Africa, where basic public health capacity remains hobbled by a lack of investment and, in some cases, by political unrest and violence. Not in the United States, where shortsighted budget cuts and growing nationalism have shrunk commitments to pandemic preparedness, both at home and abroad.

To be sure, some broad progress has been made in the past few years. Vaccine development and deployment now proceed faster than at any point in history. The World Health Organization has corrected many of the institutional shortcomings that thwarted its responses to previous outbreaks. Other countries, in both Europe and Africa, have stepped up to fill the global health leadership position that America appears to have vacated.

But, as Covid-19 makes clear, much more is still needed.

Opportunity

Political Cartoon is by Bob Englehart at Cagle.com.

The Pigs Rule

Imaginary

Biden Wins Big In The South Carolina Primary

Joe Biden needed a big win in the South Carolina Democratic primary -- and he got it. In a field of seven candidates, he got nearly half of the votes. That means he'll get the lion's share of South Carolina's 54 delegates.

With 99% of the vote counted, here's how each candidate stood:

Biden..........255,666 (48.5%)
Sanders..........105,031 (19.9%)
Steyer..........59,814 (11.3%)
Buttigieg..........43,398 (8.2%)
Warren..........37,250 (7.1%)
Klobuchar..........16,588 (3.1%)
Gabbard..........6,740 (1.3%)

NOTE -- Tom Steyer has suspended his presidential campaign after not winning any delegates in the first four states. He had spent millions of dollars in South Carolina, and needed to win some delegates there. Steyer told his supporters that he no longer sees a path to winning the nomination.

The Trump Prescription Is Denial

Political Cartoon is by Clay Bennett in the Chattanooga Times Free Press.

There Are More Registered Democrats & Independents Than Republicans In The U.S.

There are 31 states and the District of Columbia where voters must register their party preference. Democrats have the most registered voters (39.66%), and they have for quite a while. Until recently, the Republicans had the second most registrants and Independents were third. That has changed.

For the first time, Independents (29.09%) now outnumber Republicans (28.87) slightly.

Democrats have dropped 2.53 points since 2004, and Republicans have dropped 2.92 points since then. Independents have increased by 5.94 points.

Note that there are not enough Democrats or Republican to carry an election. Both need to appeal to Independents to win. Democrats need to realize this -- and not nominate a candidate that scares those Independents (most of whom are moderates).

By A Microbe

Political Cartoon is by Ed Hall at Artizans.com.

Concern Over Coronavirus Grows In Spite Of Trump Lies

This chart is from the Morning Consult Poll -- done most recently between February 24th and 26th of a national sample of 2,000 adults, with a 2 point margin of error. The sample size and margin of error for the three previous polls are the same.

Donald Trump has told Americans that there's nothing to worry about, because his administration has taken steps to keep the Coronavirus out of the United States. But he has also said that the virus will magically disappear as soon and hot weather arrives. And last Friday night, he told a South Carolina crowd of supporters that the Coronavirus is a hoax (perpetrated by Democrats to damage his chance of re-election). In other words, he's just telling whatever lie he thinks will make him look good.

But the public doesn't need lies -- not for something as serious as a possible pandemic. It needs the truth. Sadly, truth is not something Trump does. Most people know Trump is dishonest, and they don't trust him to tell them the truth about this virus. That's probably a big reason why the concern is growing over the Coronavirus. Note on the chart above that concern over the virus is growing -- from 52% near the end of January to 69% a month later.

Fortunately, there are people willing to tell Americans the truth. One of them is Bill Gates. He and his wife have donated $100 million to fight this virus. Here's part of what he had to say in The New England Journal of Medicine:

In any crisis, leaders have two equally important responsibilities: solve the immediate problem and keep it from happening again. The Covid-19 pandemic is a case in point. We need to save lives now while also improving the way we respond to outbreaks in general. The first point is more pressing, but the second has crucial long-term consequences.

The long-term challenge — improving our ability to respond to outbreaks — isn’t new. Global health experts have been saying for years that another pandemic whose speed and severity rivaled those of the 1918 influenza epidemic was a matter not of if but of when. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed substantial resources in recent years to helping the world prepare for such a scenario.

Now we also face an immediate crisis. In the past week, Covid-19 has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about. I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume it will be until we know otherwise.

There are two reasons that Covid-19 is such a threat. First, it can kill healthy adults in addition to elderly people with existing health problems. The data so far suggest that the virus has a case fatality risk around 1%; this rate would make it many times more severe than typical seasonal influenza, putting it somewhere between the 1957 influenza pandemic (0.6%) and the 1918 influenza pandemic (2%).

Second, Covid-19 is transmitted quite efficiently. The average infected person spreads the disease to two or three others — an exponential rate of increase. There is also strong evidence that it can be transmitted by people who are just mildly ill or even presymptomatic. That means Covid-19 will be much harder to contain than the Middle East respiratory syndrome or severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which were spread much less efficiently and only by symptomatic people. In fact, Covid-19 has already caused 10 times as many cases as SARS in a quarter of the time.

National, state, and local governments and public health agencies can take steps over the next few weeks to slow the virus’s spread. For example, in addition to helping their own citizens respond, donor governments can help low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) prepare for this pandemic. Many LMIC health systems are already stretched thin, and a pathogen like the coronavirus can quickly overwhelm them. And poorer countries have little political or economic leverage, given wealthier countries’ natural desire to put their own people first.

By helping African and South Asian countries get ready now, we can save lives and slow the global circulation of the virus. (A substantial portion of the commitment Melinda and I recently made to help kickstart the global response to Covid-19 — which could total up to $100 million — is focused on LMICs.)

The world also needs to accelerate work on treatments and vaccines for Covid-19. Scientists sequenced the genome of the virus and developed several promising vaccine candidates in a matter of days, and the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations is already preparing up to eight promising vaccine candidates for clinical trials. If some of these vaccines prove safe and effective in animal models, they could be ready for larger-scale trials as early as June. Drug discovery can also be accelerated by drawing on libraries of compounds that have already been tested for safety and by applying new screening techniques, including machine learning, to identify antivirals that could be ready for large-scale clinical trials within weeks.

All these steps would help address the current crisis. But we also need to make larger systemic changes so we can respond more efficiently and effectively when the next epidemic arrives.

You can go here to read what long-term changes he believes is necessary to prevent future outbreaks.

Trump's CDC Hires

Political Cartoon is by Rex A. Jones at artistrexajones.wix.com/crazycartoons.com.

Religion