Post #6710 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest CDC weekly stats:

The most recent Worldometer daily stats:

You'll notice no daily differentials for the later chart. Worldometer indicates its feeds are no longer consistently ongoing and published its last statistical update earlier this week. So, this will be the last update of this chart. I don't know of a comparable source; I had come across this when CDC had stopped publishing its own dailies.

So, the interested reader may be wondering how long I'll continue publishing this segment. Years back I similarly following the Fukushima accident back in 2011. As the disease becomes more endemic, I'll probably transition off the regular updates, barring something like a more deadly emergent variant; similar considerations include CDC reporting changes.

.We continue to see recovery from the winter surge. As always, I caution readers to be aware of their own community disease statistics (particularly if it's a hotspot) and older or immunocompromised people need to be more proactive in their health because of their higher risk of severe health complications.

News items of interest include but are not restricted to:

• An elderly Dutchman died after being infected over 600 days despite vaccinated and a new variant emerged during the process. Long COVID has troublesome risks such as cardiac issues. 
• A report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine revieed evidence of purported COVID vaccine effects. Note that vaccine harms are generally rare and vaccines prevented over 14 million deaths the first year of release; "The report concludes that two messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) vaccines, manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, can cause myocarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle. Evidence suggests the two mRNA vaccines do not cause infertility, Guillain-Barré syndrome, Bell’s palsy, thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS), or myocardial infarction (heart attack). Evidence also suggests the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine does not cause ischemic stroke."
• "The World Health Organization (WHO) and around 500 experts have agreed for the first time what it means for a disease to spread through the air, in a bid to avoid the confusion early in the COVID-19 pandemic that some scientists have said cost lives." For example, there was some emphasis on hands hygiene vs. ventilation earlier in the pandemic.
• "Aging affects immune response and virus dynamics in COVID-19 patients."
• Prosecution of COVID relief fraud and other crimes continues, including:
• an Alaskan businessman engaging in fraudulent EIDL applications
• a Canadian dad abducted his 7-uear-old daughter to keep her from being vaccinated
• Visitation restrictions for hositalized COVID patients had negative effects including on family members
• " A new study coming out of York University's Centre for Disease Modelling in the Faculty of Science shows that immunity after a COVID-19 booster lasts much longer than the primary series alone."
• An Oregon study "finds no link between COVID-19 vaccine and cardiac deaths".

Other Notes

Blogger readership statistics continue to be artificially high, and a recent work crisis kept me from Twitter/X more than usual.

My local utility for some reason is replacing its natural gas meters. I didn't understand why the utility's contractors were hassling me instead of the landlord. I think it may be to reset the pilot lights on the stove/oven. So, because work can often require driving to a worksite 2 hours away on short notice. The reason why that matters was the arrogant contractor was demanding to set an appointment when I was at home. We finally settled on Saturday morning (as granular as they get--so I was resigned to being here until 11:30 AM). I knew immediately the assigned technician was an arrogant  jerk from his previsit call to make sure I was home.  So the dude shows up and then asks an unexpected question--where's my water heater? I didn't know--not inside the aparment. I know because I lived in a complex a decade  ago where inside the aparment it sprung a leak. In my lasr apartment it was actually on a lower-level area; I knew that from a complaint over icy cold showers one week. I guessed it was probably in the back. The guy decides to leave before I can suggest to call apartment maintenance. He hung up my followup call. I tried texting apartment management--no response. I know the contractor already badmouthed me to the utility. What I don't understand is why the freaking contractor company didn't ask this at the time they made an appointment. It's not like I've gone through this particular hassle  before.

I basically spent a lot of time this past week resolving a high-profile production database replication technology failure. I interfaced with a talented client system administrator. He is much like my late best friend fellow former doctoral student Bruce Breeding who was a CPA and very detailed. Now, I  am very detailed as well (I have articles and book chapters citing hundreds of publications), and I have a pertectionist streak; I would rewrite articles multiple times, working hard on readability and organization. But I was enough of a pragmatist to let a manuscript go. My SA friend went down a lot of rabbit holes: obsessive technical threads. The replication breakdown was having a real world effect. He ran into an issue with database links. I provided him a workaround, but he spent hours until he resolved the database link issue. Functionally it didn't get us to the finish line any faster. He eventually bought into my iterative approach to resolving the problem  I do seem to have a talent for getting things done, for getting a project back on track, etc. But dealing with other people, especially those not reporting to you, can be challenging.