Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
Well, all the stats are heading in the right direction with infections down to about 53.5K/daily. I see in the CDC chart that 4.4 million people have already taken the bivalent vaccine (including omicron protection), including me. I had minor side effects like a bit of lightheadedness yesterday and a minor sore arm (I also had my flu shot in the same arm). Over and done; doctors tell us that they signify a response from one's immune system that it is processing COVID-19 protection. As I wrote, I took the Moderna booster after 3 Pfizer shots; a lot of people are asking as sometimes pharmacies don't have inventories of both; interestingly a doctor here reports he also took Moderna for the first time and noticed a stronger response, but yes, you can mix or match. In other news, if you noticed the variant trend above, the prevailing dominant BA.5 strain appears to be peaking. "Three rival strains – the BF.7, BA.2.75, and BA.4.6 variants – have now climbed to make up nearly 1 in 5 new infections nationwide, according to the federal estimates."
An elderly matriarch in our family tree lives in an assisted living facility. She's been vaccinated and boosted, but not yet for the bivalent booster. She was scheduled to have it done this week, but in the interim there's been an outbreak at the facility. We don't know the nature or extent, but we haven't been advised of any change in her condition. For all practical purposes, they are in quarantine/lockdown, and their meals are brought to them. The boosters have been deferred for a couple of weeks. It's annoying because we can infer the breakout is omicron.
Other Notes
Blog readership for some reason has tailed off the last few days; difficult to judge with a week left, but I would need an unlikely streak of triple-digit days to match last month's numbers. On the publication side, I've already passed #400, which I've achieved every year in the blog since 2016.
On the Twitter side, it's been a while since I had 4 IK+ impression tweets in my rolling month history. I don't want to overanalyze my tweets, but occasionally my sense of humor strikes a chord. There was a trend on the testy relationship between Chris Christie and Trump. One Twitter user wrote that the not-so-trim Trump shouldn't mock Christie's weight. This triggered my memory of a viral rumor back around 2016 of Christie being sent out on errands by Trump, like fetching his lunch from McDonald's. So I wrote a relevant tweet to the effect "Trump still thinks Christie stole some of his French fries".
A followup on a past journal note: I had run into a recent problem with my original Garmin device basically implying it needed a 32G SD card to process the latest map updates. I found a SanDisk one for about $11 (there were other brands selling for twice the cost but directly referencing Garmin use). Inserting the thin small card was straightforward. I think it recognized the card on device startup, and later running the map update utility was able to run as normal.
There were cryptic hints that many of us took as a possible return of Bray Wyatt on Friday's Smackdown, but it didn't happen. I thought maybe they might factor it into the Braun Strowman (former family member) match. In my view, the whole Bloodline story line is old. The rumor is they want Rock to battle relative Roman Reigns next Wrestlemania, but you know they aren't going to put the belt on a busy actor who can't defend the belt.
