Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo: just under 33K
The latest from CDC:
Well, all 3 major stats are slightly on the decline this week down to just under 33K/daily new cases. A few weeks back CDC released last quarter of 2022 on comparative stats, primary vaccinations and primary vaccinations with bivalent booster. While vaccinated (including boosted) do significantly than the unvaccinated on hospitalizations and deaths and modestly better on infections, the low bivalent adoption is worrisome, especially for the at -risk senior population because protection starts waning after a few months after one's last primary/monovalent booster.
Much has been made of DoE and FBI conclusions with low confidence of the lab leak hypothesis for the origins of COVID-19, This has stimulated Congress demanding declassification of related intelligence. I have little patience for this theory; I find the zoonotic hypothesis as more persuasive and recently wrote a series of relevant tweets, including citing a relevant PNAS article.
It looks like the government is phasing out of the emergency declaration in 2 months with some phasing out testing centers and call centers starting to close down.
Other Notes
Blog readership is off to a better start than most of the previous 6 months but \still lower than the long-term trend. In fact, February I think ranks the second-best readership over the past 6 months, still only about half of the long-term trend. Interesting stat: a recent daily post leads the pack over the past week. My weekly or essay posts usually dominate the weekly top posts. Last week Blogger depublished 2 posts and 2 others got warnings, probably over collections of tweets. All 4 were not recent posts. So far I've been able to republish 2009 Jackass of the Year. I think it was related to server sources that have become infected since post publication. On the Twitter side, after a daily average of over 1K daily over a couple of weeks, it'll probably dip below that early over the coming week.
Interesting tip. My current residence has air filters and smoke alarms near the ceiling. I've nearly hurt myself stepping on chairs trying to shut off the smoke alarm. I was just frying a burger in a Foreman-like grill the other day and the smoke alarm went off. (No, not burning). So, the maintenance guy came without a stool or ladder, and I'm taller than he is. It turns out he carries along a plastic bucket which can support his weight on the bottom. When I complained about the sensitive smoke alarm, he suggested blowing a fan at the smoke alarm while cooking.
Odd year since I moved back to Maryland: no appreciable snowfall Snow loses its charm when you have to clear the snow and drive in the stuff. Oh, it's gotten plenty cold enough to snow. I've seen a couple of days where snow had been forecast but it didn't happen--at least enough to stick to the ground. And we're roughly 2 weeks from the start of spring.
March Madness, the NCAA men's basketball tournament, starts in just over a week; I have high hopes for my UH Cougars. I've been splitting my time between Amazon Video and Peacock. I'm now binging on Young Rock, an interesting sitcom on wrestler/actor Dwayne Johnson; the series is set up in the context of a 2032 Presidential campaign and the Rock flashes back on his family and young adult experiences.
I'm now transitioning to a new workhorse computer. My HP notebook is slowly dying. The power button dislodged a year ago; I had to use a mini-precision screwdriver to power the computer down and up; the mouse cursor stopped working; the touchscreen and touchpad stopped functioning. I'll probably write how I migrated my Thunderbird to the newer workhouse in my SoftDoc blog this weekend.
