In the past, I’ve blogged somewhere between six and eight blog posts about the coronavirus pandemic that say “things are bad and getting worse” but with new details swapped in every time. This is because things are always bad when it comes to covid in the United States, and they’re unfortunately always getting worse it seems.
Still, I’m just a lady who blogs here for no healthcare two days a week, so this time I’m going to hand the mic over to an official with the incoming Biden administration to see what he has to say. Are things actually fine? Could they even be getting better soon?
“The virus is going to get worse before it gets better,” said Ron Klain, Pres.-elect Joe Biden’s White House chief of staff, on CNN, per The New York Times.
So much for that.
Elsewhere in the interview, Klain predicted that half-a-million Americans will have died from covid-19 by the end of February. The covid death toll in the U.S. was 394,495 as of noon today, according to the latest data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That expected surge of cases can be attributed to the new, more transmissible variant of the virus that has traveled stateside from the United Kingdom, which CBS News reports will become the dominant strain in the U.S. by March. Thankfully, experts expect the vaccines to be just as effective on this variant as well as the equally concerning one observed in South Africa, per the Associated Press—if only a meaningful amount of us could expect to get vaccinated any time soon!