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

202 for Thursday, November 19th. In today's news, Donald Trump maneuvers to

delay the final vote count in order to sow doubts about his loss.

The Lame Duck President enacts rules to allow mass logging in national forests without environmental review,

potentially jeopardizing our water supply.

And a former Green Berets guilty to spying for Russia. But first, the big idea. Later today, the United States

will pass 250,000 confirmed deaths from the coronavirus. Still, little has changed since we crossed

previously painful milestones. More than 3 million people in our country right now are estimated to be

contagious with the virus. The number is significantly larger than the

official case count, which is based solely on those who have actually tested positive.

To put the 3 million plus figure in perspective, Joel Ockenbach notes that it's about 1% of the population.

It's about equal to the number of public school teachers in the entire country or the number of

truck drivers. If the University of Michigan's football stadium were packed with a

random selection of Americans, about a thousand of them would be contagious

right now. Columbia University epidemiologist Jeff Schaman

says his model estimates that 3.6 million Americans are infected and shedding enough

virus right now to infect others.

Many don't know it. That's a 34% week-to-week

increase that followed a 36% increase in the previous week. The estimate from

shaman does not include an approximately equal number of latent infections among people who have caught

the virus in recent days and can't pass it on yet because it's still incubating but they still

will.

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