Parallax View - part the thirty fourth

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   821
100 to 999 - 1,816

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,130. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

Well, what a difference a week makes. Today's data show that there are bridges between East and West along the north-south axis from North Dakota to Texas. Depending on how you trace, every state has at least one bridge of counties. I count 6. Yee Ha!! We'll soon have a third of counties at 100 cases. Considering the sparse populations in many of these states, bad, bad news.

Lowest two groups amount to only 33. The counties' total remains the same as last week, so, logically there is bigly climbing up the ladder. We all eagerly await the 'effect' of those millions who just had to have Turkey Day somewhere else.

Back To The Future - part the fourth

Way back in 2010, shortly after these endeavors began, was offered up this notion:

I had been thinking for sometime that always connected, sort of, devices on a network are semantically identical to the VT-220/RS-232/database/unix systems of my youth. In such a semantic, with appropriately provisioned multi-core/processor/SSD machines, BCNF databases with server-side editing of screens is perfectly, well, appropriate. Back to a future worth living (as opposed to the 3270 old future of the current web).

Well, now a decade later, I find this posting

But web browsers have become more capable, and cloud computing now enables a lot of sophisticated stuff to happen off the physical phone.

IOW, the device is a semi-dumb terminal, whether the PC or phone. The future looks wonderful.

Thought For The Day - 25 November 2020

How's this for a stinker?

With a limited supply of some number of vaccines in the offing, what will be the negative side-effect of this availability? What? A negative side-effect? How can that be?

Well, here's how. Those who do get the shot(s) will feel free to go about maskless, since they think (and some of the medical community, too?) that this 'protection' also means they're not infectious. Turns out, no one yet knows whether any of these vaccines turn out to be sterilizing, and that is what is needed to provide both protection and non-infection. Place your bets.

So what is worse, once these vaccines are out there, those with brains of a chicken and not vaccinated will take to not wearing masks. Faking protection. One could, and I will, predict a spike after vaccinations begin. You can bet the farm.

Parallax View - part the thirty third dot five

Another mid-week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   761 
100 to 999 - 1,808 

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,130. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024's perpetual lying.

There are now four routes from Sea to Shining Sea.

Another week where an unscheduled update begged for existence. Earlier in the week, one connection (they're all arrayed from Texas to Canada) was lost, so down to three. It looked like, as one might assume, may haps the Red states were getting with the program. Alas, no. Today there are five connections in the plains states. It's only a guess whether they'll stabilize, or whether one or two will drop below the threshold. I'd bet against that, of course. The pincer movement, from SoCal driving northeast and the Deep South driving northwest, mentioned many episodes ago has taken the territory (all but a handful of counties) at the 25 case threshold for some time. If it works at 100, well...

Given that all the red blooded Americans are 'headed home' for Thanksgiving, free to infect far and wide, what's your estimate of the odds more of those counties reach 100 within the next month? Yet more bridges to connect Covid from Sea to Shining Sea. With a little bit of luck, you could chose any interstate that your heart desires, and get across country in truly sick counties. Just don't stop to meet and greet the natives.

These connections are through, relatively, low population counties in low population states, modulo Texas, which has lots and lots of sparsely populated territory (Map 3); but more Big Blue Cities than the shitkicker folks would like. "Voters? We don't need no stinkin voters!!!" One can see how Texas is headed toward an intramural revolution in due time; shitkickers try to drive out the city slickers. But that's another episode. For these purposes, if all those counties, arrayed from south to north, reach the 100 count threshold, we's in big trouble Huck.

Parallax View - part the thirty third

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   740 
100 to 999 - 1,795 

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,130. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster ex-President AuH₂O 2020's perpetual lying.

There are now four routes from Sea to Shining Sea. Still no Deep South route. Note that the 1,000⁺ group has jumped, a lot. Enough that it dropped the 100-999 group. And, to boot, the two smallest groups continue to shrink. Going up the ladder, of course, from 56 last week to 43. The week before that was 82.

Hospitalizations continue to break records. But we're rounding the curve.

Fraud

So, who's the fraud? Listen to President Huey Long 2024 and it's just the Democrats. But if you believe that, then you have to believe that all those Trumpsters that gave him those 73 million votes (he got about 63 million in 2016) stood in line amidst the pandemic for an extra 10 million. Remember that Johnson and Stein voters, just as whacko, totaled nearly 6 million in 2016. So, one might infer, that Dear Leader Yo! Semite of Thigh Land actually underperformed to Trump+Whacko total of 69 million, since he didn't pull in a heap of new votes. Recall that the Democrat, so far (New York still hasn't cracked 80% counted) has 80 million against 66 million in 2016, for a growth of 14 million. Not a close horse race.

Turns out, there appear to be heaps of fraudulent mail in Batshit J. Moron votes, too.

One stat that is interesting, though, is that [in Pennsylvania] 84 percent of registered Democrats who have been sent mail-in or absentee ballots have returned them, compared with 74 percent of Republicans.

Of course, there's not yet (and may never be) an accounting of how many of those voters who didn't return ballots went on to vote in person.

40 Minutes

Last night's '60 Minutes' had two of three segments which gave one pause.

Geezers (aka, 65 and up) -

The report, a return to some 90⁺ folks first done in 2014, details what has happened to some of those in a study on aging. Much of the report centered on memory deterioration, in particular what is, and is not, Alzheimer's. Turns out that memory loss, aka dementia, may well not be mostly Alzheimer's, but other pathologies. We see bunches of brain sections, some with plaques and tangles and some not. Some with are from people who never demonstrated Alzheimer's symptoms. Some not, did have symptoms. And some reveal other memory deterioration, TDP-43 which looks like Alzheimer's in living patients.

That was all very interesting, but then the segment jumped the shark.

One of the researchers in the study tells Lesley Stahl that of the people born today, half with live past 100. Such bullshit, and from someone who ought to know better.

One need only look at the data. Pick some date in the past, such as 1932 (FDR's socialism begins) or 1900 (an arbitrary, but reasonable demarcation between 'old medicine' and 'new medicine') as your baseline and 2,000 as your endpoint. Now, ask yourself two questions: 1 - what has been the change in life expectancy at birth 2 - what has been the change in life expectancy at 65 (the Right Wingnuts claim that the age was chosen for Social Security because that was average life expectancy)

The answer to 1 is: multiple decades.
The answer to 2 is: a few years.

It's absolutely not that 'people are living longer', it's that if you don't die young, you're just as likely to get really old as you ever were.

What's going on here? Simple: from your baseline date to 2,000, medicine (and some public health programs) drastically reduced the mortality of folks younger than geezerhood. Move the center of mass of a distribution to the right, and you move the mean/average too. You may or may not move the median, depending on lots of things. Childhood mortality, in particular due mostly to vaccines, plummeted. Anti-smoking campaigns reduced the number of smokers, and thus lung cancer. Workplace deaths plummeted as well, Covid in meat plants today notwithstanding. And so on.

Look at life expectancy at 65 for both your baseline date and 2,000 and you'll see a tiny fraction of increase compared to at birth. It's OK for innumerate civilians to be gulled by this, but a professional aging researcher? Boy howdy.

We've made little progress, at the cost of many billions of dollars, in reducing the mortality of age-related disease in the geezer cohort: cancers and cardiovascular. In the main, you'll get a few months more, much of it hooked up to IVs.

Now, there is one way that the assertion might be partially correct: if more folks are healthier as they reach 65, due to ongoing progress with the younger folks, then the 65 and over cohorts will enter healthier and thus more will make it to 100. But that's not the same as prolonging the lives of those who pass 65.

Are there areas of medicine aimed at the younger than 65 cohort which have not yet been solved? It seems, to me, pretty much not. Cancers, modulo those treated with Gleevec, have not been, by any definition, cured. Diabetes is rampant. Cardiovascular therapeutics are not moving very rapidly. And so on.

Long haulers -

The main takeaway, to me, was the possible explanations for why long haulers exist at all. Until they began banging a drum, "hey! we're here, dummies!", the received wisdom was that recovered meant immune and back to normal. Now we know that ain't necessarily so. And those who are long haul tend to be in the 20 to 40 cohort. One unsettling explanation for how long haul comes to be is that the immune system goes berserk.

Which leads me to wonder: these fancy, never before distributed technology, mRNA vaccines have short term 95% efficacy (I don't believe that number is the meaningful one, but that's for another episode). But what if that efficacy is the result of turbo-charging the immune system? Will we be trading some immunity for a swath of the population in long haul? Just askin.

Looser

The Left has been hawking the notion that Batshit J. Moron is pouting so stupidly because he's tasting public loss for the first time. Every time I hear that, I want to scream, since my lower brain stem memory is chock-a-block with bunches. Not the least being 6 (or 4 or 5, by some accounts) bankruptcies.

Rather than scouring the innterTubes for primary sources, I just asked, and came up with this top 10 list.

Then there's the spectacular losses from all those golf courses he just has to have. And, to no surprise, he cheats.

I Told You So - 21 November 2020

Way back in April I said (or speculated, but from logic) that asymps were key to transmission of Covid:

Given the length of contagion of asymps, low response cases, and ease of travel for such folk, the phat lady ain't even started to warm up those vocal chords. It'll be many months til she sings the first note.

The notion that, once we knew Covid was on the loose, even the uneducated morons in the Red states would cuddle up to sneezing, coughing, spewing sympomatics was ludicrous. Transmission this intense had to be hidden. It was. It is.

Well, boy howdy today CDC admits that asymps and presymps are key to transmission.

"Most SARS-CoV-2 infections are spread by people without symptoms," the agency said in a section of its website devoted to explaining the science of how to use masks to control the spread of the virus.

And, naturally

"Among people who do develop symptomatic illness, transmission risk peaks in the days just before symptom onset (presymptomatic infection) and for a few days thereafter."

Finally, for those morons who assert that the wee little critters float through the air all by their microscopic selves, and are asserted to flow through masks unabated, and thus masks are worthless

Cloth masks can stop people from exhaling the little globs of mucus or saliva that carry the virus.

(The NYT has a graphic that shows how masks work.)

The wee little critters ride side saddle on the droplets. Why wouldn't they? Why leave the nutrient rich, moist, warm, comfy lungs voluntarily?

Hey, Blanch!! Let's climb out and venture into the cold cruel world!! C'mon!! Do a swan dive of the tongue. It'll be fun.

They may be only partially cellular, but they ain't suicidal.

Sorry Dear, But I'm Sterile

One thing about the vaccines that has caused me some puzzlement: is it the case that being vaccinated, successfully, also mean that one never becomes infectious after exposure? Yes, we are told that the two vaccines about to be EUA are 95% effective in preventing illness in the person. But does that mean that the person never sheds virus to others?

That is the other question. Well, a recent piece from Bloomberg provides some answers. Sort of. And it is what I expected. The question boils down to: do these vaccines provide sterilizing immunity?

Immunity due to neutralizing antibodies is also known as sterilizing immunity, as the immune system eliminates the infectious particle before any infection takes place.

So, no infection in the person, ergo no shedding of infecting virus.

Rather than lots of quoting from the Bloomberg piece, just have a look.

By The Numbers - part the second

Can't wait for those snails in New York to finish counting, so let's go. All of the others are over 90%, and the vast majority are at 99%.

Once again, it's coming down to whether the national poll was right, and certain state polls were wrong. All things considered, it's just as likely that ex-President AuH₂O 2020's friends in the election machine industry (Georgia, Georgia the whole vote through) boosted his total (ES&S is not Dominion that Batshit J. Moron whined about and got the Georgia contract, in case anyone's interested). Not so outlandish. Consider the numbers. 2020, as of today at 1:27 PM

2016  Trump -   62,984,828
      Clinton - 65,853,514
      Whackos -  5,946,559

2020  Trump - 73,250,931
      Biden - 78,913,328

estimated additional margin from New York - 1,176,501
(they're lollygagging at just 76% counted, and calculated with current share %-ages)

The major takeaway from these numbers is simple: Trump in 2020 did a smidgeon better than Trump + Whackos in 2016. In round numbers:
2016 69,000,000
2020 73,000,000

The Democrats, on the other hand, blew the top off with 14,000,000 more votes.

The Biden margin is 6,838,898. Not a can of creamed corn, that. And it could reach 7 million without a whole lot of effort.

Of course, the question is, is it reasonable to infer that 2016 Whackos have gone all in on Trump this year? Certainly the Johnson folks would. The Stein, possibly a tad less, but more likely than for Biden. Nearly 7 million margin's a landslide anyway you dice it.

And, of course, not even the MSNBC Snowflakes have the brains to consider the numbers. Sad.

Parallax View - part the thirty second

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   618
100 to 999 - 1,803

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,125. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster ex-President AuH₂O 2020's perpetual lying.

What's most noticeable this week is that the 'feeder' groups, the bottom two, have fallen to 56. That's it, given the total has been pretty much static for a while. There's nowhere to go but up. And we have a winner for the Covid Sea to Shining Sea Memorial 100+ Trophy Dash southern route. The connection is from Gray county, TX to Hutchinson county. The Deep South route continues to be blocked in southwest New Mexico.

The Covid Tracking Project has a similar map, which displays a per capita number. And the highest numbers run from the Deep South to the Northern Plains. Here in the pointy headed snowflake New England, things are much better, and we had to endure the initial onslaught without much help from anyone or knowledge about what works. We got things back from the brink. And many of us said that those western Red states ought not to be smug. Your time will come. And it has, in spades.

By The Numbers

There is, again, a bunch of weeping and wailing about the 'polls' being totally screwed up this time around. All things considered, it's just as likely that ex-President AuH₂O 2020's friends in the election machine industry boosted his total. Not so outlandish. Consider the numbers. 2020, as of today at 12:24 PM

2016  Trump -   62,984,828
      Clinton - 65,853,514
      Whackos -  5,946,559

2020  Trump - 72,640,768
      Biden - 77,958,009

The major takeaway from these numbers is simple: Trump in 2020 did a smidgeon better than Trump + NotTrump in 2016. In round numbers:
2016 69,000,000
2020 72,000,000

Of course, the question is, is it reasonable to infer that 2016 Whackos have gone all in on Trump this year? Certainly the Johnson folks would. The Stein, possibly a tad less, but more likely than for Biden. The polls, once again at the national level, will be well within the margin of error. Last estimate of final margin for Biden is ~8,000,000. That's a landslide anyway you dice it.

And, of course, not even the MSNBC Snowflakes have the brains to consider the numbers. Sad.

D'oh!

Sometimes I lose respect for 'business reporters', who appear to be totally divorced from even Econ 101. This has come up before, of course, during the Great Recession, but it bears repeating. The housing market is driven by the population's net earnings. If people's real net income goes up, housing sellers can charge more. But, as always, there's a catch. That Catch-22 is that, to a home buyer, neither the house price nor the mortgage rate is the defining restriction. The defining restriction is the monthly mortgage payment. Some lenders check the potential buyer's financials, and have a maximum percentage of that net position as the limit on how much house that buyer can have.

The thing is: the monthly nut is a function of both price and interest rate. As a result, when one goes up, the other goes down because the slackening of the one leaves more room in the monthly nut for the other to fill. And there's no way the bank or the seller is going to leave even a buck on the table. Way back in the Stagflation of the mid-70s one could get a house really cheap since the mortgage rate was well above 10% (not the most unbiased source, but what the hell).

So, today brings this report; quel fromage!! House prices go up just when interest rates are at their ebb. Who wooda thunk it?

While mortgage rates remain at record lows, home prices are rising in more areas across the country.

Yeah, no shit Sherlock. Damn. And these knuckleheads get paid to write his drek.

I Told You So - 10 November 2020

It was just a few days ago when you read this in a missive:

Sleepy Joe has to order the release of the unredacted Mueller report and the full audio of every contact between Russians (and their surrogates)

In other words, once again, out the bastard to shut him and his lemmings up. Well, on today's Nicole Wallace MSNBC show she asked Frank Figluzzi why ex-President AuH₂O 2020 was behaving erratically and made that point, and went a step further, which I've also considered but not voiced in these missives, that I recall. Ex-President AuH₂O 2020 is fully capable and willing to sell out all that intelligence he disregarded. Now that's it worth a few bucks, he'll sell. Based on reporting, he ain't got a pot to piss in nor a window to toss it out of.

That should keep you awake at night. Stuffing DoD with idiots may, just may, portend a coup. That will keep you awake tomorrow night.

Parallax View - part the thirty first

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   498 
100 to 999 - 1,783 

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,126. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster ex-President AuH₂O 2020's perpetual lying.

Still no direct southern route, but you can get there once you're past South Dakota and dive down to Arizona, and thence onto California. Once in SoCal, you can wend your way up to the Canadian border. Just don't try to cross into BC. No, no, no!!

The number of counties in the two bottom groups is down to 82, which means, of course, that nearly the entire country is up to its sphincter in Covid. These are in low population areas, so getting to 100 current infections in such counties would mean rather considerable devastation. We already know that populated rural areas are nearly out of hospital space, ICU or not.

The Pfizer/German vaccine reported data today, claiming 90% immunity. Color me skeptical. There's 0 evidence that an mRNA vaccine can be so effective. Previous attempts with mRNA vaccines haven't been so hot. May be the tenth time's the charm. Or not. The duration of immunity measured in the trial may well not be long enough to get from Patient 0 to Patient 70% (or whatever). Without that level of durability, it's just a case of a dog chasing its tail. Here's a somewhat more measured report.

Keep in mind what that 90% is actually measuring: of the Covid cases naturally occuring, 90% were in the placebo group, NOT that 90% of the vaccine group did NOT get infected when exposed to the same level of Covid in the same environment etc., whether in placebo or vaccine. In stat terms, are both groups balanced with respect to factors of disease? Figures don't lie, and all that. Based on reports, we have no idea what the incidence of Covid exposure is in either group.

Or, as a paid pundit puts it:

"When the trials started there were a lot more cases in the U.S. at that time," said Dr. Vamil Divan, an analyst at the bank Mizuho. "That's a key unknown. How many of these participants are enrolled in hotter areas versus New York or Boston?"

And so on for numerous factors, known and unknown.

These Boots Are Made For Walking

Trump has made no public indication that he plans to concede or recognize the legitimacy of Biden's victory, and CNN has reported that his campaign is planning a messaging blitz to fuel its argument -- unsupported by any evidence to date -- that the President's second term is being stolen from him through corrupt vote counts in battleground states. -- CNN/9 November 2020

Martial law is on the way. Time to get your jackboots on.

He's Melting

The wicked witch is dead. One had hoped for a Tuesday Blue Tsunami, but the actual event might well be more satisfying.

Like Mussolini, ex-President AuH₂O 2020 was, metaphorically, strung up by his heels in the town square. And fileted, ever so slowly, in tiny pieces until only the fat and bones remained. Took four or five days, depending on when you started counting. Satisfactory.

Sleepy Joe currently leads the popular vote by more than 4,000,000; the newscritters see the possibility that he hits a total of 80,000,000 and margin in the vicinity of 8,000,000. Not quite AuH₂O territory, but it will do.

Fortunately ex-President AuH₂O 2020 is on the way out. Unfortunately, I am reminded that one of the talkinghead critters had the gonads (a couple of months ago) to say what I've been thinking since longer ago than that: ex-President AuH₂O 2020 is perfectly willing to sell to the Russians and/or Chinese and/or North Koreans and/or Any Tinpot Dictator all the intelligence material that only he is privy to (modulo the agents who collect it). Not that there's no precedent for him doing that; the Russians in the Oval Office might give you a clue. Hope that helps you sleep.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Sleepy Joe has to order the release of the unredacted Mueller report and the full audio of every contact between Russians (and their surrogates) and ex-President AuH₂O 2020 (ditto) at 12:01 pm 20 January. Out the bastard full and complete. Only then can the sane folks, particularly those who were gulled by the Ghoul, finally understand what the last four years were all about. If he were only a useful idiot (not chatting directly with Russian agents, for instance) rather than a conspirator, that would be a smidgeon of evidence in his favor. I doubt it, but I won't ignore the possiblity.

Count on Me

The Trumpians continue with the canard that all votes must be counted by the end of election day. Needless to say, but I will anyway, for at least the first hundred years (from ancient American History class memory), the first 'automated' way to vote was some form of retained paper ballot.

Voting is the cornerstone of American democracy, but the United States Constitution doesn't say exactly how Americans should cast their ballots in elections. Article 1, Section 4 simply states that it's up to each state to determine "The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections." Over the past 200 years, the mechanics of voting have evolved from open-air "voice votes" to touch screen digital consoles.

So when did sort of machine voting happen? According to this piece:

In the late 19th-century, Jacob H. Myers invented his lever-operated "Automatic Booth" voting machine, an engineering marvel that would come to dominate American elections from 1910 through 1980.

Another source has this to say:

By 1934, about a sixth of all presidential ballots were being cast on mechanical voting machines, essentially all made by the same manufacturer.

While I can't find a document with a date, it appears that 'instant' voting tabulation wasn't possible, nation wide, until WWII or even later.

So the Trumpians are fools, once again. What they choose to ignore: 1) 'calling' the election by AP (almost always) is based on recorded votes and expected results from unreported precincts (i.e., precinct Q in state Y has always voted Democrat, so the remaining votes will likely be Democrat) and 2) votes aren't certified by the states until weeks later (mostly) anyway. It's only the certified vote that determines who's President, not a loser concession speech. Certification dates are all over the calendar, from (in 2020) Nov. 5 to Dec. 11.

And we're still not done. The 'electors' vote on Dec. 14. That's what determines who won. So put on a pot of coffee and set a spell.

By George!

For such a long time, I've been wracking my brain to figure out how a Big Blue City Plague managed to find its way into God's Country of the upper Midwest and Northern Plains. I mean, those places don't take kindly to city slickers from Back East. Don't tarry too long in Fargo.

Then, the Fog parted. By George!! I've got it. And so, I have a modest proposal. George Soros is a well known Jewish billionaire terrorist, and knows perfectly well that New York City is having a growing problem with Brooklyn Hasidim spreading Covid liberally within that community. Well, the solution is simple for a guy with that much money. Pay a few hundred of the infecteds to clean up to look like normal New Yorkers, and send 747s loaded with them to all those dinky cities out West. They only need to stay a few days to spread the plague widely, hanging out in saloons and salad bars and Dew Drop Inns. In no time at all, God's Country is Hell on Earth. A perfect plan.

I hope I figured it out first. I must act Swiftly. Wouldn't want to be lagging behind QAnon.

I Told You So - 5 November 2020 [update]

Very early on, I puzzled and mused on the most important factor at issue in this election: what's going to happen with the Johnson voters from '16? So far as I could tell when I first mentioned it in these missives, and ever since, not one of the many pundits who weighed in mentioned this in any way. (Turns out, long before the campaign started, there was this missive.)

My take was that these 4,489,341 voters were going to go to ex-President AuH₂O 2020. One could raise a similar question about Stein's 1,457,218 as well. (numbers from the wiki.) I concluded that Johnson voters were in Trump's pocket and Stein's would stay home smoking weed ("drinking Merlot" earlier). In other words, the Democrat would start out with at least a 4 million vote deficit.

Well, lo and behold, we get this reporting today from the NYT (Baker and Haberman)

He received at least 68 million votes, or five million more than he did in 2016, and commanded about 48 percent of the popular vote, meaning he retained the support of nearly half of the public despite four years of scandal, setbacks, impeachment and the brutal coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 233,000 Americans. [one need only (re-)read Fromm's "Escape From Freedom" to know why.]

Note: that's, sort of, on the front page of my dead trees version. Sort of, because my copy of the paper (printed hours and hours ago) says, "at least four million".

I told you so.

Parallax View - part the thirtieth

Another week's up, so here are today's numbers:

  >= 1,000 -   417
100 to 999 - 1,698 

(New) grand total of counties reads at 3,125. While I've not gotten into an argument with the Topo folks over this re-definition of 'affected' counties, it certainly looks like a move to bolster ex-President AuH₂O 2020's perpetual lying.

The northern route for the Memorial Trophy Dash remains in place. The southern route is nearly connected, if only a laggard teeny (by Texan standards) county would just get to work.

Carnac Predicts - part the fourth

It is very hard to predict, especially the future.
-- Niels Bohr (or may be Yogi Berra or Mark Twain or ...)

Thus encouraged, let's game some scenario about the outcome of Election Day, not so much as to who'll win (Biden in a landslide if the fiddling by the Trumpicans is sequestered), but what might come of the Covid pandemic. The two situations are connected, alas.

Here's what we 'know'.

1 - Democrats have chosen mail-in voting much greater than Trumpicans.

Trump supporters are more than twice as likely as Biden supporters to say they plan to vote in person on Election Day (50% vs. 20%).

Thus we should expect the pre-election day infections to continue pretty much on the same course in Blue areas following election day, while Red areas should spike even higher. Thanksgiving won't be giving much thanks in Red areas. We 'know' that congregant activities, less so outdoors than in, lead to more infection. In-person voting is a mix. That 50% level seems kind of squishy support for ex-President AuH₂O 2020, don't you think? Shouldn't it be closer to 90%? Shouldn't they be following Batshit J. Moron faithfully? Covid isn't a problem? May be they're not all as dumb as a sack of hair?

2 - The CDC now says that 15 minutes of contact with an infected, and need not be continuous, is sufficient to lead to infection. In-person voting in Red areas is most likely to be among the mask deniers, and thus conducive to spread. Bigly.

3 - There were spikes, albeit small-ish and localized, following primaries earlier in the year.

4 - Since some states ban mail-in vote counting before election day, it's likely that early results from such states will have ex-President AuH₂O 2020 in the lead; unless the Blue Wave is a Total Tsunami, of course. And see 6, below.

5 - Some evidence/reporting that rallies do lead to localized Covid spikes. As you would expect, ceteris paribus.

6 - The determining factor: what effect will the evident nationwide spike over the last weeks have on the Trumpican preference for in-person voting? What we know today is somewhat dated and from polling.

A - They'll do it anyway, thus leading to an initial ex-President AuH₂O 2020 vote lead and subsequent spike in Covid in Red Areas. They'll feel like they won; by dying.
B - They'll see the grim reaper waiting at the polling place door, choose self-preservation, and go home instead. The Blue Wave becomes a Blue Tsunami.

I'm not about to predict whether A or B will dominate, but keep in mind that the average Trumpican is old, white, barely educated, sick, and rural; not the sort of folk who'll do well if struck with Covid. Not that most of them understand that, given their predilection for attending those rallies.

Carnac isn't willing to stick his neck out, too much, with regard to the election outcome, but whatever the outcome, a spike-upon-the-spike is pretty much a slam dunk in Red areas. They don't believe in Covid, it's all a Left Wing Hoax, so let's not send them any resources to support their (soon to be) overrun hospitals. Seems fair to me.