Florida hits Covid daily case record as Gov. DeSantis downplays outbreak

COVID-19 daily confirmed new cases in Florida, January 2020 - July 2021 (7-day moving average). Florida exceeded its previous peak in daily cases on 26 July 2021, as Gov. DeSantis downplayed the severity of the outbreak and told healthcare professionals that he will oppose any mask mandate for students. Graphic: Johns Hopkins University

July 27, 2021

Florida hits Covid daily case record as Gov. DeSantis downplays outbreak

27 July 2021 (Desdemona Despair) – Florida broke its COVID-19 daily-case record on Monday, exceeding the previous peak in January 2021. Hospitalizations hit the highest number since February 2021. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has downplayed the outbreak and told healthcare professionals that he opposes any mask mandate for students. Florida saw more than 18,200 new […]

Daily new Covid cases per 100,000 people in Florida, 20 July 2021. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday downplayed the recent spike in coronavirus cases in his state, and criticized public health officials who continue to push unvaccinated Americans to get Covid-19 shots. Graphic: Covid Act Now

July 20, 2021

Florida governor DeSantis downplays increase in COVID-19 cases after selling “Don’t Fauci My Florida” merch

By Max Greenwood 20 July 2021 ORLANDO, Florida (The Hill) – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Monday downplayed the recent spike in coronavirus cases in his state and criticized public health officials who continue to push unvaccinated Americans to get Covid-19 shots. “It’s a seasonal virus and this is the seasonal pattern it follows […]

Flames and smoke rise from the Bootleg fire in southern Oregon on Wednesday, 14 July 2021. The largest fire in the U.S. on Wednesday was burning in southern Oregon, to the northeast of the wildfire that ravaged a tribal community less than a year ago. The lightning-caused Bootleg fire was encroaching on the traditional territory of the Klamath Tribes, which still have treaty rights to hunt and fish on the land, and sending huge, churning plumes of smoke into the sky visible for miles. Photo: John Hendricks / Oregon Office of State Fire Marshal / AP

July 19, 2021

Can America save itself? Between the pandemic and climate change, the outlook is grim.

By Joel Mathis 19 July 2021 (The Week) – Is the pandemic akin to climate change? Back in March 2020, my colleague Ryan Cooper argued that it was, in an article that has haunted me ever since. “This is what an uncontrolled, exponentially-accelerating crisis looks like on the ground: first slow, then all at once,” Cooper wrote of […]

Screenshot from the video, “Honest Government Ad | We Make Everything Good Sh!t”, by The Juice Media, 2 July 2021. Photo: The Juice Media / YouTube

July 7, 2021

Honest Government Ad: We Make Everything Good Sh!t – Australia science agencies “infiltrated and hollowed” out by fossil fuel industry

2 July 2021 (The Juice Media) – Hello, I’m from the Australien government. In today’s episode of “We Make Everythig Good Shit”, we look at the CSIRO, your trusted science agency, which has earned a reputation for great inventions: wifi, space stuff, Aeroguard. Unlike gas companies, which have earned a reputation for poisoning aquifers, ripping […]

Senior ExxonMobil lobbyist on Capitol Hill Keith McCoy describes how ExxonMobil bribes U.S. Senators to kill climate policies in the U.S. During a secretly recorded interview 7 May 2021, McCoy names eleven U.S. senators who he says are “crucial” to ExxonMobil for sabotaging government action to save the planet: Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Senator Joe Manchin, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Senator Jon Tester, Senator Maggie Hassan, Senator John Barrasso, Senator John Cornyn, Senator Steve Daines, Senator Chris Coons, Senator Mark Kelly, and Senator Marco Rubio. Photo: Greenpeace / Channel 4 News

July 3, 2021

Revealed: ExxonMobil’s lobbying war on climate legislation – Senior lobbyist caught on camera, names 11 U.S. senators who are “crucial” to ExxonMobil attacks on climate policy

By Alex Thomson 30 June 2021 (Channel 4 News) – The explosive footage was obtained by Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative platform, who posed as head-hunters to obtain the information from one of ExxonMobil’s most senior Washington lobbyists. The recordings appear to reveal the secretive behind-the-scenes activities of a lobbyist for a company that claims in […]

Covid data from U.S. states plotted from 8 regions, as defined by the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Surge patterns were independently examined for each of the 8 regions; epidemic patterns were similar and could be merged as shown, except a bimodal pattern in the Great Lakes region was distinctive and plotted separately. Negative excess deaths were plotted as zero. Between 1 March 2020, and 2 January 2021, the US experienced 2,801,439 deaths, 22.9% more than expected, representing 522,368 excess deaths. The excess death rate was higher among non-Hispanic Black (208.4 deaths per 100 000) than non-Hispanic White or Hispanic populations (157.0 and 139.8 deaths per 100 000, respectively); these groups accounted for 16.9%, 61.1%, and 16.7% of excess deaths, respectively. The US experienced 4 surge patterns: in New England and the Northeast, excess deaths surged in the spring; in the Southeast and Southwest, in the summer and early winter; in the Plains, Rocky Mountains, and far West, primarily in early winter; and in the Great Lakes, bimodally, in the spring and early winter. Graphic: Woolf, et al., 2021 / JAMA

June 20, 2021

U.S. excess deaths rose a staggering 23 percent in 2020 – “They said they were opening early to rescue the economy. The tragedy is that not only cost more lives but actually hurt their economy by extending the length of the pandemic.”

By Mary Kate Brogan 2 April 2021 (VCU News) – Extended surges in the South and West in the summer and early winter of 2020 resulted in regional increases in excess death rates, both from COVID-19 and from other causes, a 50-state analysis of excess death trends has found. Virginia Commonwealth University researchers’ latest study […]

Map showing Federal government estimates of Covid-19 vaccine hesitancy in the U.S., estimated percentage of adults who may be hesitant to get the vaccine by county. Data: Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. Graphic: The New York Times

May 1, 2021

Least vaccinated U.S. counties have something in common: Trump voters – “It’s terrifying to think that this may never end. So much hinges on these vaccinations”

By Danielle Ivory, Lauren Leatherby, and Robert Gebeloff 17 April 2021 (The New York Times) – About 31 percent of adults in the United States have now been fully vaccinated. Scientists have estimated that 70 to 90 percent of the total population must acquire resistance to the virus to reach herd immunity. But in hundreds […]

A forest defender counts the rings in a recently cut old-growth cedar tree in the mountains above the Caycuse watershed Cowichan Lake west of Duncan, British Columbia. Photo: Jesse Winter / The Guardian

April 11, 2021

“War in the woods”: activists blockade Vancouver Island in bid to save ancient trees – “If we want our planet to be sustainable, we have to protect these ecosystems”

By Jesse Winter 9 April 2021 (The Guardian) – Hundreds of activists are digging in at logging road blockades across a swath of southern Vancouver Island, vowing to stay as long as it takes to pressure the provincial government to immediately halt cutting of what they say is the last 3% of giant old growth […]

Michael Caputo, enigmatic Republican political consultant and international PR man who served as campaign manager for Carl Paladino and fills in as radio talk show host on WBEN. This was in his East Aurora office on Tuesday, 19 January 2016. Caputo also served as propagandist with Oliver North for Ronald Reagan’s illegal war on Central America. Photo: Robert Kirkham / Buffalo News

April 11, 2021

Trump officials celebrated efforts to change CDC reports on coronavirus, emails show – Political appointees also tried to blunt scientific findings they deemed unfavorable to Trump

By Dan Diamond 9 April 2021 (The Washington Post) – 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 President Donald Trump’s more optimistic messages about the outbreak, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators. […]

COVID-19 daily cases per 100,000 population in India, 4 April 2021. On 3 April 2021, the Indian Ministry of Health and Family Welfare confirmed 93,249 new cases, the highest single-day tally since mid-September 2020. The country’s daily case counts have been rising exponentially since early March 2021. Graphic: 91-DIVOC

April 5, 2021

India sees “alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” – 47,913 new cases reported in a single day in Maharashtra, “which is more than double its earlier peak”

By Morgan Winsor 5 April 2021 LONDON (ABC News) – India has seen “an alarming rate of growth of COVID-19 cases and deaths” in recent weeks, the prime minister’s office said Sunday. More than 12.3 million people in India have been diagnosed with COVID-19 so far and at least 165,101 of them have died, making India one […]