Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
Modest uptick in new cases to 41.3K daily. One of the key sources of information during the pandemic has John Hopkins; they filled a void initially unfilled by CDC. Noting that CDC has since expanded its COVID-19 coverage and statistics, the Hopkins project has announced it will be ending its own operations in about a month. (I know I've been at their website a few times during my blog coverage of the pandemic, and they will be missed.) Japan, which is aging like many major economic powers, is also beginning to see a disproportionate number of the hospitalized and dying with more complex health issues, waning immunity (recent boosters?), and recent newer variants, not unlike what we've been seeing in America. CDC is once again pushing bivalent boosters as death rates remain sticky high at over 400/daily. New York is relaxing mask mandates at hospitals and health facilities this week.
There was pushback at the House of Representatives on the Wuhan lab leak hypothesis (on the genesis of COVID-19) championed by Rand Paul, FNC and others. The discussion is important enough to quote:
The acting head of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) said that viruses studied at a laboratory in Wuhan, China, didn't show any resemblance to the COVID-19 virus that eventually spread around the world...The suspicions put forth by Republicans at the hearing revolve around $8 million in NIH grants to EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit that was collaborating on coronavirus research with scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology... NIH officials have long maintained that the viruses studied in Wuhan couldn't have possibly been the source of SARS-CoV-2 or the COVID-19 pandemic...and said there is no direct evidence linking the Wuhan laboratory to the start of the pandemic...In February 2021, a team of experts from the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was "extremely unlikely" that the coronavirus leaked from the lab. Zeng [Chinese vice-minister of the National Health Commission] said then that the Wuhan lab has no virus that can directly infect humans.I have discussed a likely transition of COVID-19 from a pandemic to an endemic (like seasonal flu):
“If you look over the last two years, we have populations that have built up immunity, you have a virus that’s continuing to make shifts, but I think what we’re going to settle into is more of an endemic environment with respect to coronaviruses and the Covid virus specifically,” Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, told CNBC at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.“That will mean we will have sporadic outbreaks, we will have populations at risk that need to continue to be vaccinated but I would expect as it has been the case with other coronaviruses over the last centuries that the human populations will adapt and will come to a kind of resolution with this virus.”
Other Notes
Weird blog readership patterns this week; mid-week readership slowed to single digits, occasional pageview bursts; most recent daily posts to date have not reached double-digits; essays and weekly special posts usually do, but it's been months since one of my posts have reached 30 or more pageviews. I seem to be in a monthly range compatible to the last 2 months, probably at about 40% the pace of my blog lifetime average. I suspect Google has lowered my search exposure. It's more an inference from doing Google searches; a few years back, I would do a related search and see one of my posts pop up, not on the first page of results, but on a later page. That almost never happens now. To give an example, I'll occasionally do a "vanity search" on my name; recently, it was motivated by a post and tweets I wrote about the "Dr. Jill Biden" kerfuffle. I was curious if others were saying, "How do I know this Twitter user himself has a PhD?" And so I've done a few searches based on my name, and here is an interesting note; I've found references to my Twitter and Facebook accounts, some of my academic writings, UH webpages, JSTOR (my dissertation), a few references to academic employers, etc., but ZERO references to this blog or any related posts or webpages (and one of them lists my academic writings, many not listed by other webpages). Of course, Google is willing to promote my blog--for a fee. I'm not sure why Google has a Blogger service and chooses not to catalog contributor content. But something has changed over the recent past few years. For example, a few years back, I discussed cellulosic biofuels (I'm not a subject matter expert and don't work in its industry) in the blog and at one time did a subsequent search on the topic, and one of my posts popped up unexpectedly. Not even that shows up anymore.
Out of curiosity, I went to my top referrers monthly stats and saw 181 from Google (not sure how even that is happening) but then I dropped down to "other": 707. What the hell? Bing? Out of curiosity, I had never done a vanity search on Bing. I was ever surprised! Not only did I pull up references to all my Blogger blogs and multiple posts but several cross-referenced tweets from Twitter., but it even sees a corporation I started in Houston in the early 1980's (but never earned a dime in revenues).
I don't think I've blogged the story behind that, but maybe a few elements. In the early 1980's I worked in the defunct APL timesharing industry. APL was an interpretive (vs. compiled) computer programming language developed out of IBM in the 1960's. It was a cryptic heavily mathematically-notated language (that executes from eight to left--which most programmers find counterintuitive and difficult, but comes naturally to us lefthanders/southpaws). I had gotten my start at a large insurance company based out of San Antonio; they had had trouble retraining other programmers and liked my 2 math degrees. I taught myself well enough to land a much better paying job at the leading APL timesharing company branch in Houston a year later. APL was a prototyping language that enabled rapid development. We had enhanced proprietary versions of APL, and we made money by metering mainframe computing units running our APL and custom developments. Major companies (like Exxon and Shell) used us to augment backlogged IT departments and between acquisitions of expensive new mainframes (today's cloud computing is an analogous business model).
There were signs that commodity computing through PC applications posed an existential threat to our market niche, and I bounced around through an energy recession and other timesharers through layoffs. BB, a cartoonishly evil boss, hired me. He was a slimy sales guy who couldn't code a line of APL but made all sorts of deals (at our expense) to maximize this quarter's bonus. I got tired of his Trump-like boasting over his "17 years of DP expense". He had a bad temper, played workers against each other and I could go into other stories, beyond the scope of this post.
He didn't like to commute within the Houston loop, so he decided to move our office near his home in the northwest suburbs. He also decided to expand the business to house his own team of developers--all women. No, not because he was an enlightened feminist, but so he could pocket the profits from alleged lower costs of hiring women. That plays into this story. He hadn't hired his female staff yet but during the office move, he took my office chair and replaced it with some piece of crap with a broken caster. He caught me retrieving my old chair from his empty female staffer room and fired me on the spot. (Not the first time he fired me--a different story). I think to this day, I'm the only person I know who got fired over office furniture.
I later called his manager in Virginia who knew and liked me. I seriously doubted he was told the real reason for firing me. He kept asking what was "my side of the story" involving BB's wife and myself. What the hell? I had met Mrs.BB once, in passing; she had brought doughnuts to the office reopening. There was zero interaction, beyond a brief, polite self-introduction. BB's boss refused to discuss further.
At some point, one of my last clients, who worked for an Exxon real estate subsidiary, got in touch with me after the termination. I think this was the same guy who had me develop a computing timesharing tracker and later told me my application had spread to 16 other Exxon managers. He told me I should set up my own business and implied he could help me with contacts but only if I had a real business setup. So that's why I set something up. And then my contact used me to negotiate better terms from BB, and I don't think he ever contacted me again; live and learn. I never landed a single paying customer.
On Twitter I discovered I was shadowbanned:
There's so much weirdness going on. On my Twitter home page, at least late yesterday, it claimed I hadn't published a tweet this month. This is from a tweet I published on Feb. 6:
Last Sunday: 1246 impressions
M: 1486
T: 7235 (includes above tweet)
W: 593
Th: 170
F: 194
Sa: 26
Su (so far): 186
The daily stats started counting tweets again over the weekend, but zero earlier, maybe after I tweeted a complaint over being shadowbanned. Earlier today I showed zero impressions for 2 tweets for hours--not even my own impressions were being totaled. There has been an abnormally long string of single-digit tweets since this one (I think 2 or 3 have since barely broken double-digits): This is the last tweet that got nontrivial impressions and an engagement:
"Traitors" are armed invaders unconstitutionally violating state sovereignty. Lincoln is responsible for the deaths of over a million American lives. Stop reinventing history!
— raguillemette (@raguillemette) February 10, 2023
But there was a long string of single-digit tweets before that. Maybe my 17 followers were/are seeing my tweets? But the tweet over the Civil War, the last to earn an engagement, could have touched a politically correct nerve. The last I was regularly getting double-digits or higher impressions seems to be Feb. 6/7. It is theoretically possible I have gotten into a long rut of unappealing tweets but when you have 17 followers (down from 21) and getting less than a handful of impressions--that's when I started suspecting a shadow ban.
Eggs: Lidl remains my favorite grocer but there are reasons to go to Walmart. Walmart offers more selections and brands. It can vary by item, but for example, Walmart sells A&W sugar-free root beer (Lidl only offers diet cola), Braunschweiger sausage, and value-brand tartar control mouthwash. I also think their budget pasta sauces are a better buy. But, oddly, this week, it was eggs that proved a better value, at least for now. For the last couple of years, Lidl has offered a better everyday value: when Walmart was selling its budget eggs at 78 cents/dozen, Lidl was at 50 cents. Even recently when Walmart was selling like $5.70+/dozen Lidl was selling at nearly a dollar less. I refused to buy eggs at that price. Walmart had been selling 5-lb boxes at $20. Then over the past week, I noticed Walmart cut the price of its boxes to under $14. I didn't see any price change online at Lidl. I bought a box and warily went to Lidl, but no. They slightly decreased their price to $4.91/dozen.
