The dark cloud hanging over all of this Covid-19 optimism
CNN
In his speech marking the one-year anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States, President Joe Biden offered these words of encouragement: "There is hope and light and better days ahead."
And he's, largely, right! As CNN's Ryan Struyk noted Friday morning: "The United States is now averaging 1,482 deaths per day from coronavirus, the lowest daily death toll since November 30, according to data from CNN and Johns Hopkins University." Struyk also calculates that the 7-day rolling average of cases is at 53,494 as of Thursday, less than half the total we were seeing in the United States just a month ago. All of the trend lines are going in the right direction. Biden's pledge to allow everyone to sign up for a vaccination by May 1 and his promise of a return to semi-normalcy by July 4 are consistent with the science which suggests that we are moving very much in the right direction.Senate Democrats have confirmed some of President Joe Biden’s picks for the federal bench this week in the face of President-elect Donald Trump’s calls for a total GOP blockade of judicial nominations – in part because several Republicans involved with the Trump transition process have been missing votes.
Donald Trump is considering a right-wing media personality and people who have served on his US Secret Service detail to run the agency that has been plagued by its failure to preempt two alleged assassination attempts on Trump this summer, sources familiar with the president-elect’s thinking tell CNN.