Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo: 50.8K
The
latest from
CDC:
It's now been 3 years since the first confirmed COVID-19 cases. US cases now are at about 50.8K cases daily. Deaths continue to mount, disproportionately at the expense of the elderly, especially the 60% or so who have not gotten their bivalent boosters.
Probably aa I and others (who have gotten the new bivalent booster) have gone past the 2-month minimum period since the last (full) vaccine shot for eligibility for the new booster, when do we get our next? The CDC/FDA have not been clear on this point, probably because they are still analyzing immunity data; a basic inference from experts is likely 4 to 6 months of protection; it probably depends on local infection density, personal risk factors (like impaired immunity system or serious health issues like diabetes).
We see some nations like Japan beginning to transition from treating COVID-19 as a pandemic to more normalized endemic stage, similar to getting one's annual flu shot.
China's outbreak surge continues to rage with over 12K/week and an estimated 80% of the population has been reported infected.
We are continuing to see anti-vaxxer sentiment emboldened with social media reports of government lobbying to suppress COVID-19 misinformation. FNC heralds the end of the military COVID-19 vaccine mandate and presses for reinstatement of others who left service because of it with backpay. Florida Governor DeSantis issued a no-COVID-mandate policy in the state. There are posts about mRNA vaccine manufacturers being crony capitalists. I get my fair share of anti-vaxxer crap in my Twitter; I have to pick my spots to respond or Twitter will think I need more of it in my feed.
It's obvious that the COVID-19 vaccine and its side effects would seep into the common culture and fiction. I stumbled across this imaginative story online (which doesn't list the type of of vaccine, but the context is obvious). In this fiction, a petite mother and her 12-year-old daughter experience some side effect involving stimulation of the pituitary gland in some women; the 6'3" star college quarterback in the family soon finds himself being outgrown by over a foot by both of them, and his own petite cheerleader girlfriend also begins to tower over him. Not very realistic, of course, in people whose growth plates have fused. But more entertaining than people automatically attributing any unexplained death to a presumptive recent vaccine shot. I personally snapped when I read hos a grieving mother over the loss of her young child was urged by an anti-vaxxer to come forward and point fingers at vaccination.
Other Notes
Readership continues to be on a depressed level, maybe at roughly last month's record low. Twitter stats remain fairly interesting; timing can be everything. To give a telling example, I have been annoyed by Trump's adolescent nicknames for his political opponents, including Sen. Warren's as "Pocahontas". I think a few months back I pointed out Pocahontas was not s Cherokee, like Warren's ancestral claims and suggested Trump's knowledge of Native American women derives from a Disney cartoon movie. My initial tweet barely got a ripple of impressions. I then noticed Pocahontas trending and republished a similar tweet, this time getting 5.5K+ impressions and nearly 100 impressions, including over 30 likes and retweets. Now Trump could sneeze in a tweet and get better stats than that. Many Twitter users routinely get stats more impressive than mine. But I have a different style and publish a lot of critical posts outside the typical leftist or right-wing range; I also don't get a lot of libertarian followers. I can probably count on both hands the number of responses (Twitter, email, other) I've gotten from known libertarians. One Trumpkin listed me on his "woke" list, not the first time I've been put on some Trumpkin list. It's amusing to find myself listed as "woke"; the tweet has nothing to do with social justice or racial equity. It had to do with Trump being a dumbass. I briefly broke into the 20's of followers over the weekend, but I often get a follower's remorse reaction (back to the teens), probably a leftist who gets pissed when he reads other tweets he disagrees with. Like my late best friend Bruce Breeeding used to say: I'm an acquired taste.
Now that the holiday season is in the rear-view mirror, I've been working on my watchlists and backlogs on primarily Amazon Video and Peacock. I finally finished off "The Voice" from the fall and caught up with the "Quantum Leap" reboot. The "Night Court" reboot is okay but lacks the charm of the original. I finally watched the "Halloween Ends" finale (unless someone conjures up his spirit) and on HBO, I saw "Black Adam". I'm not familiar with the original comics; it was okay but my understanding at least at the present time, box office wasn't good enough to win a sequel. I'm now resuming two Landon series via Amazon, "Little House on the Prairie" and "Highway to Heaven".
Egg prices continue to go bonkers. I'm not even talking anymore of paying less than $1/dozen a couple of years back, but I've seen them fluctuate over the past 6 months from briefly under $2 to about $4/60. Walmart charges about a buck more (and if you have the room, you can buy a 5-dozen box for about $20). Lidl has been heavily promoting cutting its regular prices recently To give s brief example, I don't eat much canned pasta, but I had seen the prices surge from maybe 60-odd cents to over $1 and I recently saw them drop to about 92 cents a can.
Dreams are an interesting phenomenon. One of my more interesting ones involved my taking yet another exam. (I remember thinking after earning my doctorate I would never have to take another exam; was that naive!) For some reason, in this dream, I was impatiently waiting for delayed results from my exam, and I eventually got an apology: "We're running your code to see if it works on one of our project issues/" There is some context in my past; I never engaged in one of these gimmicks in tests I've written. I have sometimes given test questions without "best answers", but more to see how they approached problem solutions, e.g., on doctoral qualifying exams. But nothing like, what is the meaning of footnote 7 on page 589 of the textbook? I wasn't trying to design a test everyone would fail. I was trying to sample over untested material I had covered. But I remember getting this off-the-wall question during a USPTO contractor job interview. I ended up getting the job and asking him where the hell that question came from? He shrugged his shoulders and said he had been researching the issue for 2 weeks, and it didn't hurt to see if I knew the solution.
There are a few incidents I remember when I got unusual feedback. I had a friend from Wisconsin-Madison who got a job at Illinois Tech. He later asked a tech communication professor if he ever heard of me. The guy said, "Yeah, he's written some of the classic papers in the discipline." An earlier example came from my now defunct APL programming industry experience. We made revenue by people running custom proprietary APL mainframe computer execution time. on our custom apps. I wrote a utility that allowed an Exxon real estate subsidiary to track his costs. He called me one day to tell me some 16 other Exxon managers were running my code. Finally, I had written an analysis on CASHFAST, a proprietary real-estate development utility one of my other timesharing employers had created for my marketing management (MBA) courses. My professor, the late controversial professor George Zinkhan later at University of Georgia, stopped me in the hall months later (I was then an MIS doctoral fellow) to tell me somebody else had reviewed some 27 projects from Zinkhan's classes and ranked my analysis the best of them. (I wasn't even aware of the project review).
