It's tough to focus on politics right now, in the middle of a viral pandemic that is sweeping the country. But it's also necessary to step away from the coronavirus news from time to time, so I thought it might be useful to take a look today at where the race for control of the Senate stands.

The current makeup of the Senate is 53 Republicans, 45 Democrats, and two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. This means to wrest control away from the GOP, Democrats will have to pick up at least three seats if Democrats win the White House, or four if Trump wins a second term. Luckily for them, the map is a lot more friendly to Democratic chances than it was in the last cycle. Only a third of the Senate is up for re-election in any one election, but the makeup of that third is crucial -- and this time it will mostly be Republicans playing defense, not Democrats.

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It might sound like a strange question, coming from a Californian, but I do have to wonder why California seems to be doing so well in fighting off the coronavirus pandemic, compared to other states. If this is a real difference, it would behoove others to study why we've been so successful, but there is another possibility -- that we just haven't realized how hard we've been hit yet. Either way, the question of why we're doing so well would seem to be an important one to answer.

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We're number one! Well... number one hundred thousand and climbing, at any rate....

Yesterday, the United States of America took the lead on the world stage, but not in a good way. We're now the most-infected nation on the planet, and are now the number one epicenter of the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak. Today, the number of cases in this country surpassed 100,000 -- a grim milestone indeed. We still have a ways to go before we are the country with the most deaths from the disease, but at the rate we're going that won't be long either.

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The Department of Labor just announced a rather staggering number -- almost 3.3 million new unemployment insurance claims nationwide in the past week alone. That sets a grim new record for this one-week statistic, far outpacing any previous spike (it's never even gone above one million before, ever). But this record is almost certain to be a huge undercount, which means that next week could be much worse. And by the time they get around to releasing the adjusted numbers (which usually takes a few months) which show the actual reality of the situation, we'll all have moved on.

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Tracking the spread of the coronavirus is tough to do on a real-time basis because of several inherent instabilities in the data, and also because of the built-in lag time. We'd all do well to remember this in the next few weeks, when considering when lifting all the social distancing restrictions. President Trump is already leading the charge to get the country back to normal, so this pressure is obviously only going to grow.

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President Donald Trump is well known for flat-out lying to the American public. Indeed, he does it so often it has become a defining trait. But what hasn't gotten a lot of attention in the whole White House coronavirus crisis response fiasco is how much Mike Pence is also lying to us all, on the specific issue of the availability of coronavirus tests. We haven't even gotten close to the point where Pence promised us all we'd be at eleven days ago, in fact -- which shows the true magnitude of his lies. In fact, we're only a little over five percent of the way there (from numbers provided by Mike Pence himself, mind you).

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I am not a macroeconomist. In fact, I am not an economist of any type whatsoever. I begin with these admissions because what I'm about to write is probably wrong in some major way, and/or impossible to accomplish, and/or would have some sort of counterproductive effect that I just haven't thought about. In other words, any real economist could probably shoot this idea full of holes without even breaking a sweat. But I feel I have to at least toss it out there for the purposes of discussion.

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We're kidding, of course. Neither of these stories -- which, in normal times would have been covered extensively by the media -- even caused a blip on the radar this week. Because the nation is gripped in the midst of a viral pandemic and we've got the Keystone Kops running the response. Which, admittedly, is a much bigger story to focus on.

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It's time for Bernie to make an exit from the Democratic presidential nomination race. I don't say this lightly, as I'm actually a Bernie supporter myself. I voted for him this year and back in 2016 as well. I feel free to now say this because I never admit to my own preferences while I think the race is still up in the air -- my own way of attempting to limit my bias in my writing. But I do feel free to say it now, because the race is now essentially over.

Joe Biden is going to be the Democratic nominee this time around. At this point, barring any completely unexpected and drastic changes in circumstance, it is realistically impossible for Bernie Sanders to catch him in the delegate race. This was not true until the final weeks of the 2016 campaign, but it is true now. Which is why Bernie needs to concede this reality.

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The coronavirus outbreak is going to change the fabric of American life in many ways. "Social distancing" is just one of them; one which might last a lot longer than anyone now fully realizes. The coronavirus could be successfully fought this spring, and could be brought under some semblance of control by summer -- but then still come raging back next fall, even worse than before. That's precisely what happened with the Spanish Flu, one hundred years ago. Everyone thought it was over, but in fact the worst was yet to come. This is a very real danger, even though most people haven't even begun to focus on it yet.

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