Pandemic Report
The latest stats from WaPo:
The latest from CDC:
The trend is in the right direction with 13.8K daily new case average. About 98% of the country's counties are considered low risk. Again, a disproportionate number of these is concentrated among senior citizens, where we know we have waning antibody counts after 6 months or so prior vaccination. As I tweeted earlier this week, the FDA/CDC approved a second round of bivalent boosters for senior citizens and the immunocompromised. We also see a deemphasis of the original alpha vaccines in favor of the bivalent omicron boosters. We continue to see a number of political post-pandemic issues, including unspent federal pandemic funding clawbacks, reversal of public policies, including reinstatement and backpay for those Chicago city workers who resisted the city vaccine mandate and increasing attention to long-COVID, which includes post-infection long-term or recurring symptoms, like fatigue, etc.
Other Notes
Overall, blog readership has been stuck in a low-readership rut this month, with a rare one-day 100+ pageview day this past week, but even with that, I would need to nearly double this month's numbers over the coming week to match the last couple of months. Twitter is now down to a few hundred impressions a day; I think I have had just one 1K+ impression day over the past month and no viral tweet for a few weeks now.
An interesting trend. One of my cloud storage subscriptions now comes bundled with VPN software/services and with dark web monitoring. I know dark web monitoring became more bundled when Norton acquired LifeLock; one of my credit cards has such a service. I already have a VPN subscription. The main hassle is some websites may track your IP/device and reject an unrecognized one. I know my legacy VPN subscription sometimes causes issues with Internet searches, password managers, and/or certain websites. This gives me another option on my cellphone.
Annoying. I'm still the absent-minded professor. I put my Garmin devices in a "safe" place somewhere. I recently updated my Garmin software and my devices need updating
