148,538 new cases yesterday. 1,537 deaths from Covid in Wednesday as we prepare to mark the 20th anniversary of 9/11, when 2,996 people died in a terrorist attack and the whole country mobilized and did whatever it took to prevent another one including, for some reason, going to war against Iraq and Afghanistan.  We haven't gone to war against Covid – at best, we've sort of tried to avoid it but  it was possible to eradicate the virus but that window has closed and now the World Health Organization says we're just going to have to get used to Covid being one of the leading causes of death .   If the world had taken early steps to stop the spread of the virus, the situation today could have been very different, WHO officials said. “We had a chance in the beginning of this pandemic,” Maria Van Kerkhove, the WHO’s technical lead on Covid-19, said Tuesday. “This pandemic did not need to be this bad. Well, that's water under the bridge now.  Only that water will be getting us wet for the rest of our now-shortened lives and we're about to run headlong into regular flu season, where every time you cough or sneeze you now end up thinking " Is this IT? "  That can be kind of stressful, don't you think?   652,699 people have died of Covid in the US so that's 1 in 500 and we'll have to " learn to live with it ," apparently.  Going back to school has, in the first month, led to 30,000 children being hospitalized with Covid in August and the North hasn't even opened yet.   Pediatric hospitalizations, driven by  a record rise  in Covid-19 infections among children, have swelled across the country, overwhelming children’s hospitals and intensive care units in states like  Louisiana  and  Texas .  “ It should concern us all that hospitalizations — indicators of severe illness — are rising in the pediatric population, when there are a lot of steps we could take to prevent many of these hospitalizations ,” said …