Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
The latest vaccine stats from CDC:
Well, cases in the omicron BA.2 mini-wave are up to 90K daily, nearly triple that from a few weeks back. The WaPo fatality count stands about 577 shy of 1M with deaths about 324 daily. This suggests we'll reach that total not later than Tuesday. Among more recent developments is the restrictions on distribution of J&J vaccines/boosters based on blood clot risk. Unless of issues tolerating mRNA vaccines, users are encouraged to take the latter (i.e. Pfizer or Moderna). And I think I initially discussed in a recent post, but antibody tests suggest the number of infected adults nearly doubled to about 60% during the omicron wave and a similar increase to about 75% of children.
Other Notes
The blog readership continues to drop to multi-year lows. Another day with single-digit pageviews,and it is a struggle to reach 200 weekly pageviews, not even a 1K/monthly pace, itself a third below my recent record low month. It's been a while since I had a multi-day burst of up to 600 or more pageviews over a week. I think I've only had one 100+ pageview day over the past few weeks. It's not simply a drop in readers which would alarm any writer; it's watching a 50% drop over about 3-4 months after a multi-year trend. I just don't have an explanation; is Google throttling access to my blog? As I write, the blog hasn't seen a single pageview in over 12 hours, which isn't a typical pattern.
After a recent rant on USPS, I have a couple of updates. My Mom finally got her Mother's Day card late: better than never. I finally got my missing federal tax return back. I don't know what happened--I was fairly certain I had correctly addressed the envelope. I do have a possible explanation although it doesn't come from USPS. I was astonished that the right edge of the envelope was cit open. No sign IRS processed the envelope. I have a CPA sister who speculates that the envelope got mangled by postal equipment. So I'm going to try to send it by certified mail.
