Public-health statistics continued to head in the wrong direction for New Jersey today, a third straight day with more than 2,000 new cases reported and a new recent high set in those being treated for COVID-19 at hospitals in New Jersey.
200 cases or more were again reported in Essex, Bergen and Passaic counties, and more than 100 were seen in six others: Hudson, Middlesex, Union, Camden, Monmouth and Burlington.
Murphy again said officials were considering restrictions to help curb the spike in cases, but again gave no specifics.
“We’re working on making sure we got a right balance between strategic, scalpel-like actions and some broader actions that we will almost certainly take sooner than later,” he said today.
Texas Department of Public Safety State Troopers, wearing masks due to the coronavirus, check motorists at a checkpoint in Orange, Texas, near the
By Geoff Herbert, , Post-Standard
Texas is the first U.S. state to hit 1 million coronavirus cases, nearly double that of New York.
NBC reports Texas confirmed 1,000,589 cases of COVID-19 on Friday night, eclipsing California for the highest number of cases. Texas passed California, which has 968,000 cases as of Friday, last month; California is the most populous state with 39 million residents, and Texas is second with 29 million.
Florida is third with 833,000 cases, according to The New York Times.
New York is fourth with 527,000 cases, despite having the most cases in the nation at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
New York still has more coronavirus deaths than any other state with 33,664, according to John Hopkins University, but NBC notes New York City was especially hit hard early in March and April when testing was limited and scientists were still learning about the virus.
Texas has the second-most deaths from COVID-19 with 19,046 as of Saturday morning, followed by 17,938 deaths in California and 17,014 deaths in Florida.
NBC reports 91% of Texas deaths from COVID-19 have occurred since May, and deaths haven rise 10% over the past two weeks.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott previously paused the state’s reopening in June as Texas hospitals became overwhelmed with Covid-19 patients, but didn’t issue a statewide mask mandate until July. The El Paso Times reports hot spots like El Paso have seen intensive care units go over capacity this past week, forcing the county to shut down nonessential businesses.
Many states have seen a surge in coronavirus cases while America’s attention has been on the election. NBC reports new cases were up 40% in Texas and 31% in California over the past two weeks as the U.S. topped 100,000 new daily cases for the first time this week, reaching a record high of 122,365 cases Friday.
The networks are filling the airways with chaff, treating tiny developments like a major news. They should just tell us there’s nothing to see right now, and move on.
People watch a projection on the side of a building as poll reports begin to roll in on Election Day, Nov. 3, 2020 in Washington, D.C. | Samuel Corum/Getty Images
As Election Day 2020 coasted to a crawl and the West Coast voting precincts closed shop, the cable news networks were dazed to learn that even though the pollsters had predicted a flush, green, blossoming victory for Joe Biden, the presidential contest insisted on worming its way into the early a.m. hours, into the next morning, and maybe even beyond, pushing it into the sort of overtime periods and extra innings one associates with a sports event that refuses to end.
Surely the networks were prepared for such a contingency? But no, around the dial on Wednesday morning, the anchors and correspondents filled the air with journalistic chaff, noting incremental changes in vote totals in the contested states as new ballots were counted as if that were real news. It was enough to make the average viewer pray that the commissioner of baseball would take over the networks and decree that in the case of a tight election whose count threatens to go on forever, each candidate could place a metaphorical man on second at the beginning of their extra half-inning in hopes of hastening victory for one or the other.
But no such intervention has occurred. As I write Wednesday, the three major cable networks continue to cover the no-news of the protracted count. But instead of honestly conceding that there’s not much to report and won’t be for hours or even longer, they’re attempted to sustain a permanent state of excitement, fluffing their viewers with fancy finger-work on their big boards, zooming in to individual counties in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and elsewhere, zooming out, tapping the various in-play states on the map to create competing scenarios in which Biden or Donald Trump crest the 270 summit. Everybody in TV news is guilty of this crime, but nobody has a bigger rap sheet than CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, who can shout himself into a panic whenever a single county’s vote count inches upward.
If Americans can agree on one thing despite their deeply divergent political views, it’s that the past three days since polls closed on Tuesday evening have felt like years.
People are sleeping fitfully, waking up at odd hours to turn on their TVs or check their Twitter feeds and obsessing over minute changes in the number of votes counted in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Text message groups that had long fallen dormant have been reignited with nervous check-ins from friends and family. Google searches for the term “election anxiety” have spiked, according to the search engine. And although probabilities have shifted from favoring President Donald Trump’s re-election to a Joe Biden victory, the stress has not yet lifted — not with the result still uncalled and continuing legal challenges likely.
If Americans can agree on one thing despite their deeply divergent political views, it’s that the past three days since polls closed on Tuesday evening have felt like years.
People are sleeping fitfully, waking up at odd hours to turn on their TVs or check their Twitter feeds and obsessing over minute changes in the number of votes counted in Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Arizona. Text message groups that had long fallen dormant have been reignited with nervous check-ins from friends and family. Google searches for the term “election anxiety” have spiked, according to the search engine. And although probabilities have shifted from favoring President Donald Trump’s re-election to a Joe Biden victory, the stress has not yet lifted — not with the result still uncalled and continuing legal challenges likely.
“How am I dealing with it? It’s difficult,” Bennett said. “Half I’m keeping an eye on what’s going on in the country. The other half I’m working.”
“I’ve been glued to the TV and my phone,” said South Florida Democratic activist and political consultantEvan Ross. “I’m following the smartest data people in the country and it’s making me feel better. I’ve been trying to simplify and relay information to friends and family so they can feel better.”
“Idon’t feel like getting out of bed,” a friend texted me the morning after the 2016 election, so bereft was she at the outcome. Her disbelief was mixed with sadness, anger, and fear.
She had plentiful company in her misery. “‘Post-election Stress Disorder’ Sweeps the Nation,” PBS NewsHour reported. Within weeks of the election, “post-election anxiety and depression” had entered the mental-health lexicon, with some professionals offering treatments including cranial electrotherapy stimulation and aromatherapy.
I don’t know what treatments people ended up pursuing, or if they were effective. But I do know a therapy for post-election depression that beats them all: winning the next election. Millions of Americans are still waiting today to see if they will benefit from this therapy, as the presidential election between Donald Trump and Joe Biden remains in limbo—an excruciating uncertainty for our nation.
But even if Biden wins, and my friend’s unhappiness is cured, that will not mean suffering has ceased. It will simply have migrated to new sufferers on the other side. Some might argue that this is inevitable in a nation with a system of adversarial, competitive politics. Post-election suffering for the losers is just a cost of doing business, right?
Perhaps it is. But you don’t have to play that game. If your guy ends up losing, you can lessen your suffering with a few straightforward practices. And if your guy won, you have it within your power—if you so choose—to show grace and make things easier on your friends and neighbors who voted the other way, thus making American life a little better for all of us. As we nervously wait for the final result, it is worth making a happiness plan—for ourselves and others—in either contingency.
As election anxiety floods social media, so do the memes
“It’s a lot of young people very nervous about what’s happening and they’re trying to cope through jokes,” said first-time voter Riley Reed.
By Kalhan Rosenblatt, NBC News
As the presidential election results stretched into Thursday, the internet turned to memes to cope with the ambiguity surrounding the next president of the United States.
With the national spotlight on states such as Nevada, Arizona and Pennsylvania, where a winner had not been declared as of Thursday morning, memes about them had begun to make their way onto social media streams.
And many meme makers and young voters said they relied on those memes to make them laugh when their anxiety about the future of the nation was at an all-time high.
“We all know that once someone reaches 270, people are going to get combative, so we have this period where we’re in limbo where we can try to just find humor in it all to deal with feeling anxious,” first-time voter Niamh Harrop, 20, a student at the University of Central Florida, said.
On social media, people joked about the candidates’ responses to the results, mocked states that were taking the longest to finish counting ballots and relied on traditional formats to joke about how certain states had flipped since the 2016 election.
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Some memes, like those on TikTok, have been entirely unique to the election, while, in other cases, like those on Twitter, traditional meme formats have been used to express the turbulence of waiting for the results.
One example of a traditional meme format is the use of the “distracted boyfriend” to classify the election results. In one example, the “boyfriend” in “distracted boyfriend” is Michigan looking at Democratic nominee Joe Biden passing by, while President Donald Trump looks at the Michigan-boyfriend in disgust.
Another is the “woman yelling at cat” meme, which has been used to mock Trump’s tweets saying “stop the count.” In this example, Trump’s face is imposed on the yelling woman’s face, while in the frame in which the white cat would normally appear, Count von Count from “Sesame Street” appears.
Matt Schimkowitz, senior editor at Know Your Meme, said the post-Election Day internet feels like one big group chat, in which people are using memes to vent their anxieties about the future through humor.
“The internet has such a cynical and sarcastic sense of humor, things that would normally maybe be off-kilter in normal speech or wouldn’t seem as heightened in normal speech … so I think that a lot of people get out their frustration and anxiety and their general stress about not knowing what’s going on online,” he said.
On TikTok, the primary target of that anxiety has been Arizona and Nevada, where the national attention had turned Wednesday and Thursday as the world waited for the outcome of the election.
In one video, user @Nolan_Meister pretended to be all the states frantically tabulating vote counts intercut with him dancing in front of labels, some of which read, “Arizona,” and “Nevada,” and throwing mock ballots in the air. The video ends with @Nolan_Meister holding up a sign that says “We have no f-ing clue” under the label “Georgia.”
How about you? Click the ‘comment’ link below and tell us how this seemingly endless election has affected your life. Is the election outcome preying heavily on your mind? How’s your family life? Performance at work? Watching more television than ever before? Do you have new favorite commentators? Some you detest? Are you working on a coping plan if your candidate loses? Or wins? We’d love to hear from you. Share away!
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden speaks during a campaign event in Scranton, Pa., on Nov. 3, 2020. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
By Philip Bump, National correspondent, Washington Post
In the weeks before Nov. 3, millions of mail-in ballots were submitted by voters in every county in Pennsylvania. On Election Day itself, millions more voters went to polling places to cast ballots weighing in on a slew of political contests, none receiving more scrutiny than the race for president. It seems almost certain by now that more of those votes will have been cast for former vice president Joe Biden than President Trump, handing Biden a victory in the state.
Given the allegations being made by Trump in his desperate bid to hold power, it’s important to reiterate this point. It’s not that Biden on Friday morning moved into the lead in the state; it’s that the counting finally caught up with reality.
#BILLYPENNGRAM OF THE DAY Thursday night outside Philly’s vote counting operation (photo by @imagicdigital) Want to see your photo here? Tag #billypenngram on Instagram
