MY EDMONDS NEWS Posted: February 9, 2021 796 There is reason for optimism this week in the worldwide battle against the coronavirus as critical metrics continue to go down for the third week in a row. But this is tempered by a stern warning from experts that the emergence of new mutant variants has the potential to wipe out these gains. The COVID Tracking Project has been reporting on the pandemic from the start, and sums it up as follows: “The good news…continued this week, as new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths all dropped. For the seven-day period running January 28 to February 3, weekly new cases were down more than 16 percent over the previous week, and dropped below one million for the first time since the week of November 5. This is still an astonishing number of new cases per week, but far better than the nearly 1.8 million cases reported on the week of January 14.”