Shutdown Diary
The latest stats from WaPo over the past week:
Vaccine stats from CDC:
Well, the good news is the Omicron Wave has clearly peaked although with still nearly 440K cases a day it doesn't seem like it.. Deaths are a lagging indicator. Infected patients can suffer symptoms for long periods of time. Nevertheless we seem to be past the inflection point; if I'm correct, we will probably see death numbers peak within a couple of weeks.
The bigger news since my last journal post include: (1) Moderna has joined Pfizer in gaining full FDA approval (beyond emergency use authorization); (2) Pfizer is looking to get authorization for 2 small dose vaccines for younger children, although it looks like up to 3 doses may be necessary to achieve effectiveness in the higher end of that range.
Life's Little Problems
It seems every day I get unexpected nagging little issues to resolve. For example, when I went to archive emails in MailStore, I ran into an issue because my target external drive changed drive letters, which violated the configuration. In this case, I simply switched the drive letter back through Windows computer management.
A weird issue with a draft email not saving because of a pretty good privacy configuration issue, which is odd because I wasn't trying to encrypt the email. (I really don't use it much because other correspondents aren't set up for encryption with their own public keys.) I think my current issue resulted from recent Thunderbird patching that affected a key I had been using for a gmail account. Long story short.Thunderbird wasn't finding an obsolete key somehow still configured in the account profile, and the problem I was experiencing went away when I generated a new key pair.
Readership Notes
Well, the blog readership did hit the informal 2K monthly pageview target but wouldn't have in a short month like February, down 10% or so from December. The first third of the month did relatively well but for the most part dropped off the rest of the month. Oddly enough, one of my essay posts from December has gotten over 100 viewers which hasn't happened in several months. My Twitter stats are still dragging below my historical average. I've had only one day with over 1K impressions over the past month. I never can tell what tweets find an audience. Oddly enough some of those involving pro wrestling, not really the focus of my normal tweet topics, have done well. The recent Twitter suspension which I discussed in my recent digest post. had a modest temporary effect.
