Pandemic Report
The latest weekly stats from CDC:
The latest daily stats from Worldometer:
Well it's difficult to conclude things are back to normal when 1500 Americans are dying from COVID daily almost 4 years into the pandemic. Hospitalizations and deaths renain elevated at near yearlong highs, despite an effective relevant omicron-based booster available. Overall, we've seen overall numbers improve over a second consecutive week. Note that your mileage may vary by location. I think CA and TN, e.g., are in an surge; anecdotally I mentioned last week I got an email from a past provider saying they were reinstating masking and other safety protocols. I've been dealing with an unrelated health issue through another provider since last May. I didn't even notice at first until the nurse was having to repeat herself that she was masked. Other employees, e.g., registration people, didn't and we patients aren't required but registration routinely asks us to report symptoms, recent travel, etc., and they block off chairs in the waiting room.
Other notes of interest:
- political notes
- the Chinese had mapped out COVID genome for weeks before the global outbreak and mid-January 2020 announcement to the WHO, The Chinese labs have also experimented with a mutant COVID strain whih killed 100% of humanized mice.
- GOP Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, whose FL surgeon is spreading mRNA vaccine misinformation, is himself spreading anti-vaccine rubbish, falsely suggesting vaccine takers are more vulnerable for infection.
- Inadequate vaccination remains a problem;
CDC data show that only 2 in 5 people have received their flu vaccine so far this season and about 1 in 6 getting the latest vaccine to fight COVID.
- COVID-19 vaccination reduces risk of long COVID symptoms
- A new medication, simnotrelvir, shows promising symptom relief and quicker recovery for people with mild to moderate COVID infection.
Other Notes
It was a fairly light week of readership on the blog and Twitter/X. Fewer double-digit pageview daily posts; the special format posts did better but only modestly so. The 15.5 year blog finally crossed the 400K pageview mark although I believe several thousand of those are questionable.
I did some long overdue spring cleaning on my key cosolidated hard drive repository folders, including emails, software, podcasts, digital magazines, etc. In some cases, it's humorous. For example, I used to save Bush's weekly addresses, but never found the time to listen to many of them . I had 8-year old sales and news emails. I had copies of Netscape files and other software products no longer supported or published and/or I never installed. Part of the reason for that it can take hours to clone my files on a new hard drive and/or to the cloud and it doesn't make sense to maintain stuff I rarely if ever use.
As if it wasn't bad enough I recently had a mini-PC die on me, I had one of my redundant external drives go south in less than a year of use. I also got scammed by a cheap cloud computing deal that offered lifetime multi-TB storage. If it sounds too good to be true... To date, I've been unable to upload a single file. I trusted the reseller.. I'm going to protest the charge; neither the vendor or reseller have been responsive to date
