Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from WaPo:
In the past week in the U.S. ...
New daily reported cases fell 10.9%
New daily reported deaths fell 6.2%
Covid-related hospitalizations fell 10.7%
Among reported tests, the positivity rate was 6.3%.
The number of tests reported fell 21.5%
In the last week, an average of 759.7k doses per day were administered, a 19% increase over the week before. An average of 182.2k adults received the first dose in the U.S. over the last week
From CDC:
We are on the verge of passing another grim milestone: 700K dead from COVID-19. I fully expect to see the Gray Lady to send out an email alert as the odometer turns. [I haven't seen that alert yet, but one of my sources, Medpage, has.] The rolling average has now dropped to under 110K cases daily, and as I have predicted in the last few posts, the death rate is now dropping. All the latest stats--hospitalization, testing, positivity rates, and deaths--show a declining wave and likely future drops ahead.
Perhaps the biggest news since my last journal post has been the announcement that Merck has developed a successful COVID-19 anti-viral pill, presumably aimed at infected people whose risk of hospitalization or death can be reduced by half. I do hope that the FDA will expedite approval on a right to try basis. No word on a target release date. We're still waiting on approval of children's doses 5-11yo; rumors suggest as early as later this month.
Life's Little Problems
iTunes has been the target of several posts; a couple of recent annoyances of note: upgrade confusion and mass, sometimes repeated podcast episodes.
I've noticed the last few upgrade notifications the hyperlink takes me not to an iTunes download webpage but to some general Microsoft App store portal. I ended up doing an Internet search for the new 64-bit version.
Then for some reason I've noticed some of my Woods and McClanahan episodes were being redundantly downloaded. I wasn't sure if it was iTunes or one of my cloud backup drives, but it was clearly iTunes after I reinitialized my cloud drive. Now I've got a backlog of about 3500 Cato Institute podcasts or links going back to 2006. And then recently several hundred episodes were downloaded presumably in place of links. I know because I do (in part) a regular mirror robocopy of my iTunes folder to my external hard drives, and tons of episodes were transferred. The duplicate episodes were driving mw crazy. I was writing simple cygwin scripts to get rid of them and then finally archived my existing files and truncated my podcast lists.
I think I've finally stabilized my prime cloud account. I set up a chat session with a vendor analyst when updates seemed to stop happening for a couple of days. No, I'm not allowed to revert to their trusty backup and sync legacy program. I eventually discovered on my own that somehow it had reverted to streaming versus mirroring mode. And I'm getting used to manually clearing the program cache and the fact that I'm frequently forced to log in via the web browser. All of this violates Usability 101. But I now have my cloud drive seemingly functional again.
Readership Notes
I did break the 2000+ plus pageview mark for the 6th time of the last 7 months, after an awful August. October is off to a sluggish start. My Twitter stats are collapsing in part because most of the trends I've seen lately are boring and repetitious.
