Another Monday

Another new term caught my eye last week in one of the many editorial cartoons that are floating around  the Web: Banana Republicans.  Has a nice ring to it, rolls off the tongue and, in this troubled election year, seems very apt in my opinion.  There doesn't seem to be a lot of energy around this contest; we might all be numb to the supposed foregone conclusion that it's going to be a race between Biden and Trump.  Or is it?  As the days go by it looks like Trump is starting to go off the rails with his comments and tweets in a descent into madness, reminding me of Humphrey Bogart's character in The Caine Mutiny.  Instead of strawberries Trump can't get Obama out of his mind.  And what's the deal with Biden, is he losing his grip?  He seems to be disconnected at times, not sure of where he is or what he's doing.  Are these the two worst possible presidential candidates this nation has ever had?

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Has Old Dog been following this.  Does he have any ideas?

Oh, yes.  Well, not any good ideas but I have been following it.  I was fooling around with a calendar and seeing which days the highs and lows fell upon.  The low death days are usually Sunday and Monday, with the high death days being Tuesday through Thursday.  There are some exceptions but it looks like a regular, repeating pattern to me.  Your guess is as good as mine as to the cause of any apparent pattern.  Maybe it's the food that hospitals serve later in the week.

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NBC News has a good site for pandemic info, including some nice charts.  Here's a comparison of the daily death rates of Illinois and Michigan.

Michigan had some terrifying numbers for a while but now it looks like they are over the hump.  Illinois, however, is slowly and steadily getting worse, at least according to my tired eyes.  I don't know what the states are doing differently or why there is such a variance.  It seemed to me that they were implementing the same kind of mask and self-isolation protocols, and maintaining the same kind of social distancing.  This could all be moot if we are only in the first of many waves of this pandemic.  The Spanish Flu of 1918 had three waves and I don't think we are ready for something like that.