Pandemic Report
The latest CDC weekly summary:
The latest daily from Worldometer:
The COVID-fall/winter surge remains elevated but thankfully apparently past its peak nationally. Note that your locale may differ.
A few related notes of interest:
- Work from home productivity increases and income were more pronounced for high-skilled knowledge workers during the pandemic. There were also gains for residential values vs. office space rentals.
- "Type 2 diabetes, as well as polygenic risk scores for type 2 diabetes, were associated with increased COVID-19 severity. The mortality rate was also found to be higher for individuals with type 2 diabetes or a genetic predisposition to it."
- Early CDC evidence suggests dominant variant JN.1 does not lead to more severe health outcomes.
- COVID-19 meds are underprescribed for high-risk patients for a number of reasons like the subjective perception of symptom severity, the duration of infection, concerns about effects on other meds, etc. On the other part, there is some evidence there may be overprescribed for some Medicare patients.
- Vaccinated formerly pregnant mothers' young babies have better respiratory outcomes. And although one example doesn't make a trend, a kindergarten student recently died after being hospitalized over severe COVID-19 symptoms. If you can, have your child vaccinated.
- Political issues included:
- A Dutch lab test vendor had a cyber breach exposing health records of 1.3M patients
- California and Oregon have liberalized/reduced CDC guidelines of isolation of asymptomatic COVID-19 infected.patients
- The FDA continues to drag its feet on alternate COVID antiviral approvals, like simnotrelvir. (It's not clear this dug has been submitted, but the point is it has been approved in China with promising results.)
- "In January and February of 2022—when the Omicron surge caused a high number of COVID-19 infections in the United States—veterans with mild to moderate infections seen in the Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare system as outpatients underused pharmacotherapies, including monoclonal antibodies and antivirals."
- Anti-vaxxers continue to spread false reports of vaccines contributing the untimely death of celebrities like prominent sports writer Mike Dickson.
- COVID relief fraud continues to be prosecuted like this TN woman applying for related unemployment claims.
Other Notes
After a cloudburst of blog pagevuews early week, rhe rest of the week saw lackluster readership. Twitter/X readership also dragged to a more suspect level--like a long string of over a dozen posts or tweets with under a handful of impressions, leading for me to believe I'm being shadow banned. I mean like just a tenth of my small number of followers on top trends. It's hard to tell what's going on because, one of those tweets got a like from an unfamiliar account, and in the middle of the streak one tweet got a decent number of impressions.
I suspect a hostile actor is targeting my Internet connections. I had some technical issues with apps and cloud accounts with my paid VPN service. Over the week I had chronic network stability issues. Long story short, my ISP denied any issue but replaced my router and patch cord. If I still have a problem, they suggested my PC might be experiencing a hardware failure. But soon thereafter it was clear the issue didn't have to do with the replaced components. I started looking for a more recent budget desktop. I tried another VPN setup which had been tricky in the past. After some configuration stability issues, all of a sudden my network connection problems have seemingly gone away, not so much as a hiccup in hours. This doesn't mean the problem is resolved; there could still be failing hardware but I noticed the problems picked up again when I stopped the VPN
As I write, I'm watching the Royal Rumble, the WWE's first PLE since Survivor Series. The women's Rumble match was entertaining. I felt sorry for Chelsea Green who got mercilessly squashed repeatedly before getting tossed out of the ring. Besides the expected return of Naomi, we saw the late return of Liv Morgan. I hate to say it but her intro giggle reminds me of Trish Stratus'. But the one I really enjoyed seeing was the former AEW champion Jade Cargill, who has a distinctively muscular physique, similat to Bianca Belair and Ivy Nile. Bayley won, which I fully expected; I think WWE has been teasing an implosion of Bayley's heel faction, Damage Control, Another faction member holds rhe Smackdown women's title.
