“The expression 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger' actually isn't usually true for human beings. It is for bacteria, however.”

-- Michael Lewis, “The Premonition,” his new book about how America was best-prepared to handle a worldwide pandemic and how we botched it worse than anyone. It's mostly about the amazing people who saw what was coming and were willing to make the hard decisions to save lives; who was listened to, who wasn't, and why. The book was published before the delta variant became too much of a thing, but this line anticipates it. In mid-June we were averaging 79k cases a week in the U.S., down from our high of 1.7 million cases a week in mid-January. We're now back up to nearly a million cases a week.