In other news, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell all but said he would block any Supreme Court nominee if he becomes the majority leader again.
Meanwhile, some Senate Democrats say they won't vote for an infrastructure bill that leaves out climate change provisions. There's not much risk of that happening, though.
Finally, the United States coronavirus death toll has formally crossed 600,000.
The number of lives lost, as recorded by Johns Hopkins University, is greater than the population of Baltimore or Milwaukee. It is about equal to the number of Americans who died of cancer in 2019. Worldwide, the COVID-19 death toll stands at about 3.8 million.
The real totals in the U.S. and around the globe are thought to be significantly higher, with many cases overlooked or possibly concealed by some countries. [...]
With the advent of the vaccine in mid-December, COVID-19 deaths per day in the U.S. have plummeted to an average of around 340, from a high of over 3,400 in mid-January. Cases are running at about 14,000 a day on average, down from a quarter-million per day over the winter.
I remember when projections from last November said we would see this many deaths. And they were ultimately right because Trump committed to killing as many people as possible in his final two months. A lot of deaths were baked into the total over the winter from that surge of infections. We had a backlog of death leftover from Trump.