Pandemic Report
The latest weekly stats from CDC:
The latest daily stats from Worldometer:
News items of interest include but are not restricted to:
- Public policy post audits continue:
- The prolonged effects of less-effective remote learning of schoolage students had long-term effects on performance and mental health with limited public health payoff, particularly in blue states
- Limited access to hospital/doctor access had serious opportunity costs, like thousands of missed early diagnoses of prostate cancer
- Kentucky legislators are deciding whether to prohibit vaccine mandates.
- Tecas is banning health deprtments from promoting COVID vaccines
- Some leftists argueTrump abdicated pandemic leadership in favor of state by state chaos and GOP Governors like DeSantis manipulated state data to favor of Trump's reelection
- Prosecutions of COVID relief fraud comtinue including:
- a Massachusetts businesswoman guilty of bank fraud (PPP loans, etc.)
- a NY payroll services businessman stole employee wages and engaged in pandemic fraud
- "Omaha businessman pleads guilty to selling unregistered ‘anti-microbial’ falsely marketed as effective against COVID-19"
- a Nevada woman got sentenced for over a half million in fraudulent relief loans
- Texas doctors got the FDA to concede it had interfered with medical practice including off-label use of ivermectin
- Remember DeSantis' use of falling life expectancies during the early pandemic to argue against senior entitlement reform? Thanks to vaccines, COVID dropped to the fourth cause of death and a rise of life expectancy of about a year in 2022, still below pre-pandemic highs
- As the explosive growth of AI continues to attract investor interest
- certain AI technology has been able to diagnose COVID with uncanny accuracy from lung ultrasounds
- Google AI is showing promis in detecting respiratory diseases like COVID from coughs
- "Ultimately, with inflation taken into account, the majority of Americans are worse off financially compared with before the start of the pandemic"
- The war against vaccine misinformation continues:
- a false apples and oranges comparison of vaccinated death figures suggesting vaccines do more harm than good
- a false claom COVID vaccines cause cancer
- general categories of misinformation include "the existence and origin of the disease, purported alternative treatments and all manner of claims about the vaccine"
- Former Brazilian President Bolsonaro faked a vaccine record before a US visit
Other Notes
The blog has ongoing bloated statistics issues; for the most part this hasn't played a role in specific posts except for some weird 14-year old blog post for no clear reason. . My Twitter/X stats are down to annual lows; I have spent less time on it since Biden and Trump clinched theur rematch this fall.
Well, I've just gone through my first experience of transferring prescriptions. I've been going to the same Walmart for over 6 years even after moving maybe 10 miles away. (I also similarly get my hair cut at the same barber shop.) What motivated me is my new health insurance provider offers an even better deal on my generic prescriptions if I went to their preferred well-known pharmacy chain. I thought I had submitted 5 online but for some reason one wasn't processed, all but 1 needed to be renewed. And one was out of stock. So I dropped by the pharmacy for 3 refills Thursday. Anyway, I got called about the missing fifth prescription being out of refills. As an aside I asked about the generic still out os stock Thursday, puzzled why it was taking so long to get fulfilled. It turned out it was back in stock but nobody had processed my backorder refill. I was annoyed but they processed it at my request.
This past Monday I finally got to "ring the bell" basically ending nearly a year of weekly health visits, each Monday which involved mostly nursing care for a wound but very brief doctor checks of the relevant wound. Over the past year I had to cover a $7K deductible, plus I had maybe $2K of paying a nursing escort on procedure days plus other unreimbursed medical supplies. I don't know how widespread the "ring the bell" custom of concluding my long course of monitoring. Besides giving me back my Mondays, I'm finally able to wear my regular footwear again. (No. I didn't have a foot/ankle issue.)
Well, 2 of my alma maters (UT and UH) are in "March madness". Texas failed to make it to the Sweet Sixteen tonight although they got to within a bucket late in the game. The Cougars face Texas A&M tomorrow night.
I finally got the warranty replacement for my failed external drive I mentioned a few posts back.
