Today's US coronavirus / COVID-19 numbers in the US
From the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University
Confirmed US cases: 82,374,342
Confirmed US deaths: 999,298
A horrific milestone: Even though the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 tracker shows that the number of official US deaths is still just shy of the 1 million mark, the CDC says that number has been surpassed. And there is so much going on in our world, from the Jan. 6 committee subpoenas to Republicans' continued effort to corrupt the next elections to the war in Ukraine to the shortage of baby formula, this terrible marker has registered barely a blip on our crowded news radar screen.
What makes that number particularly painful is that just like heart disease and cancer, the two leading causes of death in the US (COVID is third), a lot of those COVID deaths were entirely avoidable.
In the case of heart disease and diet-related cancer, a Swedish study showed that changes in diet could prevent close to half of those deaths every year. Research by scientists from Imperial College London found that eating 10 portions of fruits and vegetables per day -- especially in place of meat -- could save 7.8 million lives worldwide every year. They concluded there would be significant risk reductions: 24 percent of heart disease, 33 percent of stroke, 28 percent of cardiovascular disease, 13 percent of total cancer, and a 31 percent reduction in dying prematurely.
And COVID? The great tragedy of our time is that so many of those 1 million lives could have been saved without nearly the kind of lifestyle changes that the reduction in heart disease and cancer require. Nope -- all Americans had to do was don a mask when leaving the house, stop having large gatherings for awhile, and as of early 2021, get vaccinated.
Not a heavy lift.
The Lancet Commission on Public Policy and Health found that 40 percent of COVID-19 deaths in the US that happened before vaccines were available could have been prevented with mask-wearing and distancing.
After vaccines were available, another 641,305 people died. And yet if every eligible adult had gotten the shot, 318,981 of those people would be alive today, according to researchers at Brown University and Microsoft AI Health.
But there's no accounting for ignorance and the insistence by conservatives that politics -- and owning the libs -- is more important than lives.
Think of the radius of grief created by each one of those 1 million deaths. The lifetime of regret felt by the adults who ignored warnings and held parties where their elderly parents caught COVID and died. The chasms in the hearts and souls of parents who lost kids. The incalculable damage to the kids who lost parents.
Millions of Americans will never be the same, and I worry about the long-term effect on our collective psyche, on our ability to handle this massive loss and still move forward successfully.
It's interesting how apoplectic conservatives are getting over the peaceful gatherings that pro-choice protesters are holding outside Supreme Court justices' houses (sorry, but private homes should be off-limits).
Yet conservatives find the deadly violence by the anti-choice crowd at medical facilities that perform abortions to be perfectly acceptable.
From 1977 to 2020, there have been 11 murders (including two women at two clinics in Brookline, Mass., in 1994), 26 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 194 arsons, and thousands of other crimes directed at abortion providers, according to the National Abortion Federation.
Haven't seen Mitch McConnell red with rage over that. But holding a sign outside Samuel Alito's house? Outrageous.
BTW, in my rundown the other day of the many GOP candidates who are on the ballot despite credible accusations of sex-related offenses, I forgot one guy: Andrew Wilhoite, a Republican running for a seat on the Clinton, Ind., Township Board.
To be fair, he's not accused of sexual assault. He won 60 votes in the Republican primary last week, and will advance to the final along with two other Republicans, while sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial for allegedly murdering his wife.
60 votes.
He's charged with hitting his wife in the head with a concrete, gallon-sized flower pot, putting her body in his car, and then dumping it in a nearby creek. Prosecutors say he confessed, but is claiming self-defense because we all know that women often overpower men and kill them.
If he's convicted, his name will be removed from the ballot.
60 votes.
So Abbott Labs says it is air-shipping millions of cans of infant formula powder to the US from its FDA-approved manufacturing plant in Cootehill, Ireland, to alleviate the nationwide formula shortage.
The company also has switched over its other liquid-manufacturing lines at its Columbus, Ohio, plant and has them making Similac liquid ready-to-feed instead.
It's the least Abbott could do, given that the FDA shut down its plant in Sturgis, Mich., because a bacteria got into the company's formula, killing two infants and sickening two others.
That shutdown, along with COVID-related supply chain disruptions, has caused the massive shortage that has parents scrambling. Many are switching brands, using whatever formula they can find. Pediatricians say babies, after some initial discomfort, will adjust. Just don't water down your formula to make it last longer, and don't try making your own. Both moves could deprive your baby of vital nutrients and do serious harm.
Harvard and MIT researchers were able to grab a picture of a supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, a phenomenon that scientists had long believed existed.
However, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis objected, claiming that calling the hole "black" was an insidious effort to inject critical race theory into science. He wants it called a really dark white hole.
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