Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo: 60.5K
The latest from CDC:
Obviously, the spike in deaths to 567/day is worrisome. As the first variant chart shows, nearly half of new cases involve the XBB.1.5 variant. Misinformation by anti-vaxxers is going beyond intolerable on social media. Almost anyone who dies a sudden, unexplained death whether it's a celebrity like Lisa Marie Presley or a young boy, anti-vaxxers immediately and presumptuously attribute to a recent vaccine. I adversely responded to some ghastly anti-vaxxer responding to some parent losing her child, trying to coax her into publicly scapegoating her son's death on a vaccine. CDC isn't helping things when it flags a possible safety risk (stroke) for Pfizer bivalent boosters for senior citizens. In other news, it turns out China has been spurning US assistance in the form of mRNA vaccine exports. Part of it is face-saving, since China doesn't want to concede its own vaccine efforts are ineffective, but keep in mind that the vaccines are more effective at lowering the risk of hospitalizations and death than of infection and have more modest success in staving off infection. Others suggest that meds like Pfizer's oral med in treatment of COVID-infected individuals may be needed more.
Other Notes
Blog readership continues to slump st multi-year lows. Occasionally I'll see a burst of say 80 pageview hits in the early evening and then less than 10 pageviews over the following day. Whereas over the last couple of years, monthly pageviews tended to range 1200-2500, lately it seems to have fallen off by 50% or more. I don't understand the drop; maybe some change in Google Analytics? It's just I've been obsessed with math and statistics in my adult life, but then I had over 70 followers to my first Twitter account but a year plus into my second account, I don't have a third of those. It is what it is.
Since the end of the holiday season, I've been getting back to my streaming services' wish lists. My Amazon wish list seemed to shrink as some holiday movies seemed to expire from one day to the next. I had a weird problem with running Pluto movies in the list; it was almost like the video equivalent of a warped vinyl record, skipping back to like 10 minutes into the movie. I tried fast-forwarding through the movie, but it kept happening until I just gave up and dropped the movie. There were others; I don't know if there is a relevant app issue on Prime Video.
I had built up a couple of series backlog on Peacock: the reboot of Quantum Leap (the science fiction time travel/body possession series) and The Voice, both I think on NBC Monday nights when I normally watch WWE wrestling. I've occasionally watched episodes of the latter, mostly auditions, in the past but never the full season and/or finale. As I write, I'm at the midway point through the finale; my 3 favorites have been all male: Bodie, Justin, Omar. (Congratulations, Bryce.) It frustrates me I've never heard like 70% of the songs but I stopped listening to pop music probably a decade or more back, too much rap and hip-hop. I don't know Beyoncé beyond "Crazy for You", I've never listened to Drake or Taylor Swift. I did see some innovative takes on classic Queen, Foreigner, and Stevie Wonder. Even a group cover of the Turtles' "Happy Together", one of the most misunderstood songs in pop history, really an ironic song of unrequired love, not a love song per se.
Beware of some of these cut-rate perpetual license versions of Microsoft Office/365 you might see some ads for on social media. (I do have a perpetual license copy of an older version on one of my backup laptops. I think I got it through an employer-related program, but I think Microsoft later decided to phase out perpetual licensed products in its program.) I've got some open software office suites installed on my workhorse PC's. But every once in a while, you'll see promos varying bundles from, say, $30-$100. Terms vary: the bundles, the platform (some may require Windows 11), one-time, non-transferable license install, restrictive updates or upgrades, etc.) When a subscription to 365 Cloud costs $70+ per year and you may not need the latest/greatest features (which in theory should be almost instantly available online via the subscription model along with faster/transparent bug fixes), you can rapidly reach payback on the license if your PC is usable over a few years.
But one of these pitches smelled a little fishy, too good to be true. It turns out one little detail in their pitch was telling: you can't use an existing email address to register your product but apparently theirs. It's possible, if not likely, they bought a volume of licenses from Microsoft on attractive terms and they are trying to arbitrage the price differential from Microsoft's own subscription terms for home users. Technically, these licenses cannot be resold , e.g.., to non-employees, and violate Microsoft's licensing terms. I would think Microsoft is aware of these ads and could revoke any such licenses, leaving the user with no recourse.
