Pandemic Report
The latest stats from CDC:
On the zoonotic vs lab leak origins of COVID-19:
US intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said.
The four-page report by the office of the director of national intelligence (ODNI) said the US intelligence community still could not rule out the possibility that the virus came from a laboratory, however, and had not been able to discover the origins of the pandemic.
No deductible coverage for COVID-19 ends next year:
High-deductible health plans (HDHPs) will generally no longer be permitted to cover testing for and the treatment of COVID-19 without a deductible or with a deductible below the minimum deductible (for self-only or family coverage) for an HDHP as of the end of 2024, the IRS said Friday in Notice 2023-37.
Moderna (mRNA vaccine maker) has submitted an application to the FDA for its fall booster targeting the XBB.1.5 subvariant of the virus
Other Notes
With just under a week left in the month, it's unlikely I'll improve on last month's below-trend numbers in part because it's a shorter month. It was a modestly improved week with one day above-average pageviews.
Just into summer this week, and Hallmark is promoting its upcoming Christmas (Movies) in July tradition. Sister channel HMM started its companion week this weekend. I don't follow all their programming shifts; I think HMM used to do a Christmas movie every Thursday evening like HC's every Friday evening. The first promo I've seen for an original cable Christmas is, surprise, surprise, the umpteenth royal theme Christmas movie.
Tech issues seem to crawl out of the woodwork. I've primarily used Thunderbird as an email client after Microsoft desupported Outlook Express. I quickly found the successor, Windows Mail, unusable for my tastes (it took forever to load message folders). I've since then integrated multiple external email accounts and constructed detailed email filters. Even though I currently have a licensed copy of Outlook (and have used Outlook at work for years), I really don't want to recreate another set of filters plus I can run nearly synchronous free Thunderbird clients on different PC's using cloud storage
I've occasionally run into Microsoft account integration issues. One day (no password change) it stopped connecting. Had something happened to my account? I went online and had no issue connecting. I noticed now my Thunderbird connection was working. Did Microsoft implement some timeout if you haven't accessed your account online in a while or was it simply a temporary server outage? Not sure.
A recent Thunderbird upgrade seemed to require reconfiguring my email clients, and the Microsoft account was difficult to implement using the default configuration. (I think I mentioned it in a journal post a few weeks back.) Long story short, I ended up having to do a manual configuration, and I found a UT post with similar relevant setups.
So, over the weekend my Microsoft account in Thunderbird stopped working. Oh, there are workarounds, like my copy of Outlook, and I can run my Outlook profile through Mailstore (and there are ways to access Mailstore folders in Thunderbird). Long story short, I ran an alternative manual configuration of the account in Thunderbird which is currently functional.
