Post #6195 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest stats from WaPo:

The latest from CDC: 

Well, daily cases have dropped to 15K, but we still have over 1K people dying a week from a disease largely not a problem to the recently vaccinated. 

There is increasing attention for the newer variant Arcturus, the more infectious XBB.1.16 Omicron strain, which has surfaced in a couple of dozen countries, including the US (see the second variant in the last chart above. One interesting symptom of this varian is pink eye. 

I've seen another post on UT/Austin's approach towards a universal coronavirus vaccine. 

WHO has reaffirmed all hypothesis of COVID-19 origin (zoonotic, lab leak) remain open. George Gao, the former Chinese "CDC" head, says, ""Even now, people think some animals are the host or reservoir. Cut a long story short, there is no evidence which animals (were) where the virus comes (from)." 

We continue to see COVID-19 public policy challenges in the court system; in California, a Superior Court judge imposed a $1,2M fine for failure to comply with size and masking compliance on a San Jose church. 

Some post audits look to how the pandemic affected the healthcare system, such as 100K RN's leaving the profession over burnout.

If you recall, part of panic underlying much public policy was the idea that asymptomatic individuals were spreading the disease. So, this study grabbed my eye: most asymptomatic individuals were not contagious.

One of the big pieces of news was Biden signing a bill to formally end the COVID-19 public emergency. There are related posts on related ending of tax expenditures, e.g., some supplemental Medicaid funding, private-sector payers of vaccines and testing supplies, etc.

We continue to see misinformation being hyped by anti-vaxxers, including a false assertion that 600K Americans a year die from COVID-19 vaccine shots. Actually, the total to date has been more like 9 total out of over 670M doses administered in the US, and those were mostly associated with rare blood clots linked with the "one and done" J&J vaccine,

Another study backs the effectiveness of Pfizer's bivalent boosters in protecting against hospitalizations and mortality.

Other Notes

Readership of the blog has dropped to the lowest level in about 6 months, which itself was a multi-year low. My readership is also dropping on Twitter, largely to the uninteresting hot trends

Some of life's little problems are clustered. I recently had a follow-up doctor's appointment. Prior to the visit I had seen an email notification from the diagnostic lab on some tests relating to the original visit ordered by the physician/clinic. I had questions over "abnormal" findings, but it didn't occur to me to print them out for the visit. So, I'm talking to the doctor, and he doesn't have a clue what I'm talking about; their records show lab results are still pending. Apparently, patients are provided real-time notifications but not necessarily to providers. At one point, my doctor asked me if I could pull up the results over my cellphone. (They eventually got the document from the vendor.) 

But the point is I ran into an issue with my password management software on the cellphone. I do most of my website work on my PC, but I had just used my password software on the phone the other day. No explicit error, but later I find an email saying someone is trying to access your data from a new device. What new device? Then it suddenly dawned on me: I'm using my VPN. I hadn't even configured it to run on my cellphone until recently. The other day while I was at a laundromat and tried to buy a Kindle book, Amazon refused, saying it didn't trust my connection.

I had a near-(tech) death experience on my workhorse PC when it lost power during a Windows update. I got caught in an F1 reboot loop. The one-time boot startup key can differ by make. Somehow I muddled through an option basically restarting with the patch in process, and later I had to figure out how to make that one-time boot change permanent. It does help having my backup chromebook to research never-used options. Lessons learned. I've mostly relied on laptops since the 1990's which normally have full battery power, so it's time to look into buying another UPS if I'm relying on any desktops.