It is difficult to write about COVID today without immediately hearing people’s intense often knee-jerk reactions. There are people pushing masking and almost every other kind of restriction. Others with an equal intensity oppose almost any efforts to brace the country for the onset of Omicron. I was reminded of this (as if I’d had much chance to forget) in various conversations about the public schools in New York City this week. I do not put these differing attitudes – or any of the gradations between them – on an equal footing. I lean more to the former category. And, to be clear, I am only talking here about people who are broadly in a reality-based universe: People who have gotten vaccinated and encourage others to do so. People who recognize the horrible toll COVID has taken on the country. But there is a common driver of intensity across that spectrum. Which is that people have reserves of hurt, fear and anger after two years living through a global pandemic. That gets channeled into these reactions. This doesn’t make sentiments any less true. But they’re all powered by an erratic emotional fuel which is a product of the last two years. If you open yourself to it, you can feel it. It’s palpable and not always pretty. Everybody is a bit broken by it, even if their physical health is more or less unscathed.

These numbers almost beggar belief. But here they are. According to a Monday CDC report, 73% of COVID infections in the US are now Omicron. Specifically, that was the percentage for the week ending December 18th. The rate of growth of new cases in the New York City metropolitan area has been mind-boggling. So extremely high percentages of Omicron here don’t surprise me at all. (I’ve heard informally that the rates here are roughly 90%.) But nationwide it almost beggars belief, even though we’ve seen comparable trajectories in the UK and Denmark.

Here’s the chart from the CDC …

Fox News host Tucker Carlson used his recent appearance at a Turning Point USA event in Phoenix as a barely-veiled soft pitch for his new “documentary” about Jan. 6, a highly produced mashup that nods toward nearly every conspiracy theory about that day festering in the far-right corners of the internet.

Carlson gave a speech at the conservative youth event, regaling the audience with a colorful anecdote about 26th U.S. President Teddy Roosevelt’s proclivity for going out to the White House lawn to speak with American citizens during his presidency … 120 years ago.