Good morning. I'm James Holman from the Washington Post and this is the Daily

202 for Friday, December 4th. In today's news, the final draft of a bipartisan defense bill includes several rebukes of President

Trump. Tensions flare along Trump's border wall amid mounting local resistance, And a family in Arkansas got a racist

note after putting up a black Santa. Then something magical happened. But first, the big idea. Emily Allen is a registered

nurse at St. Joe's Hospital in St. Paul, Minnesota, where the night shift has become a revolving

door of increasingly sick COVID patients.

Emily says every single shift is now overwhelming and it never shuts off.

She says they can't get beds cleaned fast enough by the time they have another COVID

patient coming in. On the night shift, they've got two doctors for 50 patients

on ventilators, often having three or more of them crashing at the same time.

This is a split-screen moment in America. Progress on vaccines means people can

plausibly now talk about what they're going to do when the pandemic is over, but

it's not over and it won't be over for a while.

New infections yesterday topped 212,000.

Another daily record topping the previous record that was set on Wednesday. To date, at least 275,000 of our fellow

Americans have died of the virus, a toll that includes more than 2,700 deaths reported yesterday.

A new national ensemble forecast, an aggregation of 37 models sent to the CDC projects that between 9,500 and 19,500

Americans will die of COVID during the week of Christmas.

The fall wave of infections that began in September

in the Upper Midwest

and the Northern Great Plains

is now crashing across the country, including in the highest population

...