The war in Ukraine – Transitioning from pandemic to endemic phase – Evening statistics
There is little news today of importance—or much, depending one’s point of view, for the war in Ukraine is being waged as fiercely as ever and its ramifications are likely to upset the nations of Europe for several months to come. The Russians are already feeling the effects of the sanctions; the ruble has gone down by a quarter of its value and interest rates have been set to 20% to keep it stable. At least half of Russia’s estimated $640 billion hard currency stockpile is now frozen. The Russian public has made a rush to withdraw their savings and all flights to European nations, Canada, and the U.S. have been canceled, since Aeroflot has been banned from these nations’ airways. Even Switzerland, which prides itself upon its neutrality and its willingness to accept capital of the dirtiest description imaginable, has joined in the European sanctions, including those against the personal accounts of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and of Putin himself. A sensible man under such conditions would have cut his losses and retreated from his belligerency, which has brought him nothing but opprobrium and already has cost the lives of many Russian soldiers. But Putin is not a sensible man; he is fixated on his dream of restoring the Russian empire, and the re-absorption of the Ukraine is the first step in the process. The fact that a mere 44 million Ukrainians violently oppose such a measure is, of course, a trifle beneath his consideration. It is possible, moreover, that he has been overdosing on steroids and that his mental health has been affected accordingly. A certain recent puffiness of face and his insistence on extreme isolation (steroids can make one more susceptible to infectious diseases, including COVID) makes such a supposition probable.
But as the war abroad intensifies, COVID is beating a retreat. The number of new infections today in the U.S. was barely over 32,000 and the death toll was little over 700 – a startlingly low figure after what we have been seeing just a few weeks ago, when we were losing over 2000 per day.
The Biden administration has shown a reluctance to declare victory over the pandemic at this point, quite an understandable reluctance in view of the upsurge of the delta variant shortly after Biden announced “independence” of the virus on July 4th of last year. But health experts seem to be in agreement that we are transitioning towards the endemic phase. The American public is visibly less worried about the disease than it has been for many months. Nearly a month ago Biden offered 500 million free testkits to be available for Americans, at the rate of 4 per household. As of this date, more than half of them have not been claimed.
This means that, when we are definitely in the endemic stage once and for all, the journal will wind down, possibly in a matter of weeks. As is the case of many journals of this nature, it will leave several questions unanswered. Will Donald Trump’s elaborate web of chicanery and treachery unravel at last? Will the narrator’s goal of completing the Virginia and New Jersey portions of the Appalachian Trail this year be realized? Will our political parties resolve during the upcoming elections to inject some new blood into their organizations and revitalize those two geriatric clubs that currently constitute the two house chambers? Will Rudy Giuliani obtain a bottle of hair dye that is truly colorfast?
All of these pressing issues, I fear, will have to be left to reporters in the future once the journal comes to an end. I began logging my impressions on March 20, 2020, when the virus was just beginning to emerge and it seems possible that the pandemic will be a pandemic no longer by as early as the second anniversary of that date. The pandemic will undoubtedly leave its mark and certain aspects of national life will be impacted for many years to come. But it appears that we are slowly and painfully returning to normalcy at last.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide:436,871,790; # of deaths worldwide: 5,967,624; # of cases U.S.: 80,647,343; # of deaths; U.S.: 975,150.