In the past week in the U.S. ...
New daily reported cases fell 19.4%
New daily reported deaths rose 0%
Covid-related hospitalizations fell 7.2%
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 6.9%.
The number of tests reported fell 19.1%
In the last week, an average of 646.9k doses per day were administered, a 15% decrease over the week before. An average of 173.9k adults received the first dose in the U.S. over the last week.
Again, all the stats are headed in the right direction: decreasing cases, hospitalizations, test positivity rate, and tests, not to mention a leveling off of the death rate (I expect us to see decreasing death counts over the days ahead). Note that I'm talking national statistics; the Delta wave may still be rising in largely unvaccinated regions/states, although in researching the
DeMonia tragedy, it seemed like lower-vaccinated Alabama had subsequently come back within hospital capacity. But we are seeing aggregate numbers fall from about 160K to about 130K a day. The vaccination numbers continue to disappoint other than the fact now fully two-thirds of adults are fully vaccinated and three-quarters are at least partially vaccinated.
The big news on the vaccine front continues to be booster shots, with the CDC director expanding the scope of boosters beyond senior citizens and the immuno-compromised to many in the "essential" workplace. We still don't have word on booster approvals for Moderna and J&J. I have an eligible female relative living in assisted living who was scheduled to get her Pfizer booster last week, but somehow the vendor brought Moderna doses to the facility (which is so wrong on multiple levels, unless he was giving out initial or second shots for the few unvaccinated). My RN sister, 14 months younger, took the J&J vaccine; we still haven't gotten word from FDA/CDC on mix-or-match boosters, so she'll have to wait for approval.
I have a nuanced stance on the political issues. I do think evidence of past infection should serve as a waiver against mandates. I still believe Biden's OSHA mandate not only violates the Constitution's vesting health security with the states but lacks statutory authority. Defending the mandate as against grave danger in the workplace is ludicrous on its face except for positions involving interpersonal contact like in the health professions, meat packing, grocery or sales cashiers, etc. Infections requiring hospitalization increases with age but
is less than 1% for those under 40. Breakthrough or reinfections range in the up to 2% range. Make no mistake; you don't want to get infected, especially if you have serious health issues like obesity or diabetes. But with most adults being vaccinated already (and presumably most in the labor force, although I haven't seen statistics on this), the idea of the workplace being a super-spreader location (with some exceptions, noted above) is nonsense. My oldest nephew did not catch COVID-19 from his work but from one of his school-age daughters, and Biden's mandates don't control for the home/social environment. And of course in a lot of professions (like IT) you often work remotely or not in close contact with others. (When I've worked on site they've even alternated cubicle occupation so social distancing.) I don't think OSHA has released its relevant rule yet, which will determine future legal challenges.
I'm still astonished at the resistance to vaccinate even in the health profession and assisted living facilities. Twitter still has relevant hot trends, noting lawyers arguing Biden's OSHA mandate will prevail in court and
protesters against vaccinated-only seating at a Staten Island food court. The latter was fairly stupid; the food court was operating more on a honor system, and this was a municipal, not a food court, policy. The protesters should have picketed city hall.
Life's Little Problems
My cloud computing client change mentioned in a recent post proved to be a little complicated. I seemed to be tied into their somehow hosting the logical drive (P) on a limited capacity flash drive (instead of one of my hard drives) and I ran into an application issue complaining about storage capacity to do something. So I ended up going with the mirror vs virtual drive alternative and reconfiguring 4 major applications to run off workfiles on the mirrored drive, which didn't seem to be configurable but developed a separate mountpoint. Not sure if I could implement something like a symbolic link to avoid mountpoint migration, but I ended up doing the latter. I was really more worried about configuring the applications correctly so my workfiles were replicated to the cloud.
I did file a ticket asking the vendor how essentially to do a migration of mirroring constructs across clients (i.e., emulate client 1 behavior in client 2); all they sent were linked to 2-3 items involving preparing for the migration in general terms. What happened was I wasn't aware of the transition and found the client replaced. The canary in the coal mine was I had listened to podcast episodes which I subsequently deleted and my cloud account didn't process the deletions, like they had under the old client. At least now I'm seeing some file updates getting promoted to the cloud (the online drive has a section on recent file updates), bur I'm not sure yet all the files have been synced.
One of my older laptops is giving one of those "end of lifetime" Windows lifetime notices. I was running into startup issues on the laptop, preventing regular patching but I think the real issue is that I haven't been able to install a feature update on Windows 10 (versus other patches) in a while. So it's working on one as I write
Reader Note
It's not a lock but it looks like my monthly pageviews will rebound to the 2000+ level for the month; I'm up about 200 views over last month's figure already. . It's still inconsistent; I haven't had a daily post reach double-digits for about a week. On post publication, it's unlikely my streak of 50+ posts will extend beyond 2 months.
Entertainment
Well, the WWE Extreme Rules PPV is history. I was pleasantly surprised by the Charlotte Flair (champion)-Alexa Bliss match. On paper, this was a David/Goliath mismatch: Charlotte/Ashley is 9 inches taller than the petite Alexa. Almost everyone I saw commenting in advance of the match seemed to think Alexa was going to take the match. I was worried about WWE working the Fiend gimmick into the match itself. In fact, Alexa accomplished some credible moves, counters and near-falls. Thankfully, Charlotte did win the match. They did work in some of the creepy rag doll (Lily) storyline, post-match, with Charlotte dismembering the doll, sending Alexa into an inconsolable rage attacking Charlotte. Not sure where they take the story from here. I know months back there was a rumor of a female wrestler playing the Lily character. But personally I find the double-ponytail schoolgirlish image of Alexa's character a little creepy. Maybe Alexa will develop Lily as an alter-ego, similar to Bray Wyatt's Fiend character.
The Lynch/Belair rematch was much more credible than Lynch's squash match win of the title. The question is how you hook the match without damaging either character, Well, to be honest, the question was if and when Sasha Banks reenter the title picture; in fact, Sasha Banks was trending before Sunday's PPV, so a lot of fans (not just me) felt Banks' intervention for her lost Smackdown championship was logical and predictable. I didn't expect Lynch to job the title that soon. Banks could play a babyface to Lynch's heel, no doubt peeved by Lynch getting the title rematch she deserved, although she still has a score to settle with Belair since Wrestlemania. Maybe they'll make the next Lynch defense a triple threat.
I was not thrilled by seeing the New Day, reunited with WWE champ Big E, battle Styles, Omos and Lashley. Now Big E was a solo act before joining the New Day novelty gimmick for a long duration. So Big E has spent much of the past year reestablishing his solo credentials, he finally wins the title, and then two of his major post-win patches are as part of the New Day? The PPV match seemed more of a setup for Lashley's contractual rematch, presumably on Monday's RAW episode.
The other matches were predictable; I didn't expect the Usos to job their recently won tag belts. It's nice to see Liv Morgan getting more of a push.
Hallmark is starting to promote this year's Countdown to Christmas just under 4 weeks away.
