Pandemic Report
The latest CDC weekly stats:
As we head down the home stretch of winter with DST this weekend and spring equinox just over a week away, the winter COVID-19 surge continues to taper down.The pandemic is now about 4 years old; Americans have grown weary of the discipline of restrictions in the interim. The last figure I've seen is only about 18% has taken last fall's upgraded vaccine. One of the most cited stories over the past week is a 62-years-old German man who has gotten over 200 COVID vaccine shots, with no serious complications.
- The window to order free COVID test kits and/or paxlovid from the government closed late this past week
- "Women who receive an mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccination or booster during pregnancy can provide their infants with strong protection against symptomatic COVID-19 infection for at least six months after birth, according to a study from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health." See also here for discussion of booster-enhanced COVID antibodies in breast milk. This study also confitmsthe vaccine is safely administered during pregnancy.
- Continuing prosecution of COVID relief fraud
- A Florida man was sentenced for nearly 6 years using PPP funds to nuy jewelry and luxury cars
- The COVID-19 pandemicmay have killed off the Yamagata flu strain.
- Public policy pandemic era post-audits continue including
- former NY Gov. Cuomo is being called to testify in Congress over the nursing home placements of the infected leading to horrific fatalities
- Congressman Roy is looking to expand the legal rights of those allegedly harmed over COVID vaccines.
- There are gender-different responses to COVID-19: "Men's skin temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate increase more than women's with Covid-19. According to a study by researchers from Liechtenstein and Switzerland, the higher coronavirus mortality rate among men could be linked to this."
- COVID-19 viruses can remain in bodies for up to 2 years after infection
- A possible link to long COVID is how the virus affects the body's management of iron, a key part in the body's production of hemoglobin, a protein key to how blood carries oxygen from lungs to the rest of the body
- Recent research shows the greatest benefit to frequent vaccination is to the elderly and immunocompromised.
Other Notes
My blog viewership improved over the weekend. My X/Twitter readership remains sluggish with long strings of nominal impressions, and unviewable (likely insulting because X warns me about their content). I'm not sure if the trolls are blocking me or restricting access to their replies. Oh, and one weird thing about X/Twitter stats--they don't seem to report post counts beyond a 2-day interval.
I hadn't used my Amazon Fire tablet in a while. It seems some of my news and entertainment cable channels were getting interference yesterday; I don't know if it was weather or maintenance directed. The cable service suggested using a phone or tablet appand stream the desired channel via another device. I groaned, not wantimg to warch on my cellphone screem. What a minute, did they say tablet? You sometimes have to wade through a lot of crap on Google; I found a lot of stuff saying Amazon didn't support my provider and trying to find the app on the tablet was tedious. I found a brief suggestion to ask Alexa to find the app. That worked. Then came the hassle of logging into the account with a long, complex password. But the result was a far larger screen, and hours later, cable's channels were back to normal.
Funniest "Young Sheldon" scene to date: dressing up as Carl Sagan for Halloween. Even I'm not that much of a geek
Even a nerdy former IT academic runs into nagging tech issues. My workhorse for the last several months has been a desktop, and I recently bought a mike, partly because I'm flirting with the idea of starting a podcast for my YouTube channrl and blog content and parly because I have a Google Voice account and Google gets a little cranky if one doesn't use your phone number often enough and threatens to take it away. Some of my call recipients (e.g., my cable company) recognize my cellphone number, so I have to be careful of what party I call using GV;
So I was testing an outgoing call on Chrome when audio went dead after connection.. I still don't know why it's happening; I didn't google a similar problem; the only thing I've seen from Google about browser issues is to try disabling add-ons and reintroduce add-ons one at a time until the problem reoccurs. Then I tried testing Gooogle Voice in other browsers (Firefox and Edge) and this time I could hear the voice messaging system at the other end. (One party complained about voice quality but not others.) If and when I have the time, I'll troubleshoot the Chome issue, but in the interim I've got a workaround. (Well, I've also got GV installed on my Android phone but I haven't used it yet.
I recently added another 2 TB cloud computing subscription, in part triggered by multiple recent portable drive failures. One never knows when you'll have to put your Linux/Unix scripting skills to use. I was puzzled why a 10 GB upload was constantly stopping to upload, within the service's size constraints. (You can upload to the Internet drive via browser or through a desktop client through drag-and-drop to a virtual drive folder via explorer.) I eventually encountered a warning in the client that the service doesn't support the upload of files without extentions. (It also limits the number of files you can upload in a folder.). I tried simply renaming the file in question, and it worked. There are at least a couple of cases which generate files without extensions: mbox files (like local email folders in Thunderbird), and certain disk encryption vaults/virtual drives. So, for instance, in a Cygwin bash terminal session in my mbox repository folder I can type the following:
$ ls |while read -r myfile
> do
> mv $myfile $myfile.mbox
> done
I then copy/move the renamed files to the virtual drive folder. (Note that I could do the same within the do loop itself.) Note that I could use similar logic to redistribte files into folders up to the folder file. count max. Of course, the upload software could automate similar logic in design; I'm not sure why they didn't.
