Pandemic Report
The latest CDC weekly stats:
The latest daily stats from Worldometer:
The winter COVID-19 surge continues to taper down. Life continues to normalize such as marriages picking up to pre-pandemic rates. Gallup reports nearly 60% of Americans believe the pandemic is over.
- The prosecution of COVID-19 relief fraud continues including
- two Miami police department staffers who took out fraudulent PPP loans
- We continue to see anti-vaxxer misinformation spreading through social media like Instagram, including
- a claim in response to Biden's SOTU reference to mRNA technology being used in the fight against cancer, falsely arguing a link of COVID vaccines and cancer
- the Dallas News published a more comprehensive review, noting over 2000 vaccine-related social media claims alone have been debunked
- There are promising proof-of-concept results in animal testing of a highly effective intranasal vaccine
- Some reports claim black and Latinos were disproportionately affected during the early pandemic
- UVA researchers have devised a blood test which may predict long COVID lung complications
- Some research indicates human life expectancy dropped by about 18 months during the early pandemic. (Recall former Presidential candidate FL Gov. DeSantis made a similar claim in rejecting reforms of senior entitlements.)
- Paxlovid works by attacking the way the virus seeks to replicate itself; Stanford researchers have found a similar approach at the atomic level, particularly in developing a tool in dealing with rogue variants for which current technology is potentially ineffective.
- New Jersey had an independent commission evaluate the state's response to the pandemic, the initial of its type
- Australian researchers have provided an alternative approach in arguing the lab-leak/unnatural COVID origins hypothesis is more likely than the zoonotic/natural/animal transfer hypothesis. This approach looks at factors like differences from known zoonotic predecessors. there are criticisms of the methodology, and I remain largely skeptical of the lab leak thesis.
- "Vaccines cut risk of post-COVID heart failure, blood clots for at least 6 months, data suggest."
Other Notes
Once again, nefarious factors are bloating blog readership statistics. My X/Twitter feed is still dragging many days I fail to break over 100 impressions a day. A lot of single-digit tmpression high quality tweets. One of my better days Friday with an unlikely 300-impression tweet. It started with a strong condemnation of Hamas' Oct 7 attack and support for Israel. But then I'm sharply critical of how the Israeli government has responded at the expense of Gaza residents. I thought most readers would reject one of the 2 positions. It seems a long of people share my opinions in the tweet.
Facebook is the latest social media company to censor me. I've embedded a full ecplanation in the post embedded above and won't repeat myself here.
I've had my share of horror stories dealing with incompetent IT help desk support over the years.. The first year of my blog I worked for a software company that specialized in ERP sysrems for colleges and universities. The job dealt with doing installs for operational data stores, which can serve as periodically updated reporting databases and are a bridge to data warehouse and training clients in administering the ODS. The company headquarters were in the Philadelphia suburbs where I did some initial company orientation. But mostly I worked at home or traveled to client sites (clients wouldn't get billed travel expenses if they let me work from home.). I've occasionally gotten company laptops shipped to my home. Usually they came with VPN solutions allowing an interface to my employer's network. Long story short: I soon found that the laptop copy of MS Office would not activate over the company's default VPN connection. (If any of you have dealt with incompetent, arrogant help desk personnel, you can predict the usual rubbish, e.g., "you're the first one ever to report this problem; we would have gotten other reports of users with activation problems, especially with that VPN connection". Typically these idiots have one predictable solution for any such defect: reimage the PC. If I had these boneheads in my MIS classes, I would have flunked them to hell.) Long story short: there were like 3-4 other, more specialized VPN connections. So, long story short I decided to try another VPN connection, and this time Office quickly registered. Was that the end of it? Of couse not! You might think the dumbass would go with it, try to claim credit for my workaround. He was still obsessed with trying to point fingers at my cable ISP, he rejected the fact thar the VPN modes have different connection responses . He demanded I return the laptop for reimaging because he didn't trust it. I needed the laptop for a training session in Memphis the next week. The asshole escalated the issue internally, arguing I was very difficult to work with, and my own supervisor refused to back me up, relying his own prior successful experience with the IT support. You really don't want negative experiences to start off a new job. My boss had flunked Management 101. I don't think our relationship ever Improved before I got laid off months later.
On a recent job experience, I got a PC delivered with unprecedented circumstances--they didn't shut down the PC. And some things very different analogous to the last story. VPN had been installed but not configured and I needed escalated permissions (not given) to use it. I'm not sure how they planned to do remote maimtrnance. But over and beyond that, the Windows on the PC was not activated, and it complained, surprise, surprise, it couldn't reach the company's activation servers. And guess the technician's response to the problem? Hint: see above.
Finally, an experiece that deals with a recent classified gig. I was denied or temporarily blocked a SIPR token on the grounds the certificates on an unspecified prior token had not been expired and made it my responsibility to contact past employers to get those certificates expired. First of all, I've always turned in my tokens after a gig, and I hadn't had a SIPR token in over 4 years, longer than most certificates I've dealt with had expiration periods
