We won’t know for sure until we get their decision. But it sure seemed like a majority of the appellate panel that heard Michael Flynn’s objections to his judge’s recent conduct were okay with letting the judge do the things he has planned in the case for the next month.

2020 has been a rough one for everyone.

Way, way back on March 11th, I wrote that we appeared to be entering onto a months’ long period of COVID whack-a-mole: a new normal across the country, an outbreak in this city or region followed by a lockdown until the spread abates, with the cycle repeated over and over indefinitely over time until science and medical research come to the rescue. The reality turned out quite different. The New York City metro was on the cusp of catastrophe. Four days later the state would report its first three fatalities. Just under one month after that post the daily statewide death toll would peak at 799. What slowly became clear was that New York wasn’t the first to be hit. It was a unique and devastating scale of outbreak for the whole United States, indeed on par with the worst in the world.

Today we finally seem to be in the midst of that whack-a-mole model we discussed three months ago. For the moment at least New York seems to be one of the most COVID-controlled regions in the country. The state has more than double the rate of national testing and the percentage of positive tests has been consistently under 2% since the beginning of June. Meanwhile cases are growing steadily across the South and in much of the West.

Momentarily, President Trump will head out to the White House Rose Garden, parading out a group of families whose loved ones were victims of police violence, and announce a set of executive order reforms that will do little but appease the police.

Another bizarre incident in the evolving story of New York and its relationship with the NYPD. Last night three NYPD officers went to a Shake Shack in Lower Manhattan, got shakes and then became ill after drinking the shakes. They either went to or were taken to the hospital, treated and then released. This quickly led to suspicion that the officers had been intentionally poisoned by one or more Shake Shack employees as part of the purported left-wing, Antifa, civilian “war” on the NYPD. An investigation was commenced. But before anything was established the NYPD’s police unions went into overdrive accusing one or more Shake Shack employees of attempting to assassinate the officers.

I have spent a lot of time analyzing the New York COVID epidemic both because it was the center of the storm in the United States and because it affects me, my loved ones and coworkers so directly. The graphed shapes of the New York outbreak and the nationwide outbreak are quite different. The former rockets upward and falls down again at a slower but still comparable arc. Nationwide it’s quite different. The numbers rocket upward and then basically plateau. It’s not a proper comparison. The epicenter of an outbreak has different dynamics than the more rolling spread of contagion in less hard hit areas. This is why the proper comparison is not New York vs the United States or the United States versus any European country, all of which are dramatically smaller than the US, both in geography and population. The proper comparison is the United States (~330 million) vs the EU (~440 million). This brings together hotspots and peripheries, urban and rural and all the mix of population densities into one. As you can see here the progress has been very different and not at all good for the control of the epidemic in the United States.