Good afternoon, readers. I imagine that there’s a significant amount of readers who are focused on a certain election going on right now. That’s fine (and I’m not immune to that anxiety.) But we’ll still do our job and report on what’s actually happening, right now, in the reality of Americans’ lives as a pandemic continues to rage. And there are currently more than 234,000 people who have died from COVID-19, according to Johns Hopkins. And things are getting worse. The Associated Press reported on Thursday that coronavirus cases are climbing to some 86,000 more instances on average. That’s a surge of some 45{ce8ce7cc98bffdc4302011057a79600ea02c464c5536f1477c12acdb8bd79c00} compared to a few weeks ago.…