Pandemic Report
The latest weekly stats from WaPo: 13.3K
The latest from CDC:
Stats are leveling off at about 13.3K new cases daily. We saw some progress of sorts in 2021 with COVID-19 dropping from the #3 cause of death after heart disease and cancer to #4 (behind injuries), still about 6% of deaths. A disproportionate number of victims were the South and Southwest. Biden has dropped the vaccine mandate for US visitors. The USG vaccine mandate for workers will expire next week. Mexico has developed its own vaccine.
We are still having to combat lying, incompetent anti-vaxxer 'experts like Peter A. McCullough. For a more detailed debunking of McCullough, see here. A full refutation of McCullough's misinformation is beyond the scope of this post, but I want to emphasize a few points. First is the idea the COVID-19 vaccines "don't work". First, we are dealing with a rapidly involving virus, on for which far more contagious subsequent variants (delta, omicron) emerged, not directly addressed by the validated vaccines (until the bivalent boosters, also targeting omicron). The statistics for the fully vaccinated recently boosted are compelling, even for vaccines based on the earlier archetypal virus. Extrapolate from the early period when vaccines were unavailable. Second. not all vaccines are sterilizing infections in and when experienced by the fully vaccinated/boosted, tended to be milder and shorter lived. Third, diseases and their vaccines can vary by a number of factors: the mutant, the R and T;cell factor, the number factor, and the timing factor, In the early pandemic, we were overwhelming the health care sector, and our economy contracted. Vaccines enabled a return to normalcy and lowered relevant hospitalization and death rates.
Other Notes
My blog and Twitter readership rates continue to lag. Even newer posts in other blogs (like my Softdoc) have very few pageviews. I wrote a recent one explaining how I fixed a file system problem for an encrypted volume recently and as I write no pageviews. I used to regularly get 2- or 3-digit pageviews per post. For the current blog, readership was down by a third, and this week has been even slower. For example, my social media digest posts tend to do above-average, and I barely reached a half dozen. It is what it is.
I'm in sort of an Amazon hell this week. My Ember smart coffee mug somehow thinks it's not charging but it's plugged in. Then I bought an inexpensive Bluetooth keyboard/mouse. It also came with a wireless connector. I don't see the normal setup for a bluetooth connection, and Windows doesn't see it.. Long story short, the keyboard worked for maybe 15 minutes and stopped. It doesn't seem to be charging assuming that is the issue. The mouse seems to work. I have a couple of spare keyboards
