Pandemic Report
The latest weekly stats from CDC:
The winter surge continues to taper down, and once dominant JN.1 is finally beginning to lose market share (including the FLiRT mutations). I still caution for those of us in a risk category to be cautious, be aware of you local/county health profile (i.e., hotspots), and to get additional protection, like an extra booster shot, when possible. I have to admit I start looking at any change in symptoms with alarrm and suspicion. For example, late lasr weekend I developed probably in hindsight a nasty stomach flu. I was constantly vomiting for over 24 hours, amd to be honest I don't remember a precedent. It was enough for me to stay off a tough hour-plus commute in my current work gig for a couple of days. My doctor prescribed a med to settle my stomach. I was skeptical when I purged shortly after my first 8-hour dose, but symptoms improved overnight for the most part.
Latest news items include but are not restricted to:
- Former Gov. Cuomo (D-NY) agreed to testify in Congress on the early pandemic nursing home advisory
- A Brazilian study concluded effectiveness for the bivalent vaccine booster but needed to be updated for most recent variants
- States/local governments continue to spend COVID relief funds on other spending, such as SC spending on a gunshot alerting system
- Maine's Supreme Court upheld a vaccine mandate for EMS personnel
- New York MTA employees got suspended without psy for submitting phony COVID vaccine data
- A number of posts reviewed the first college class spanning the pandemic
Other Notes
The unprovoked bloated blog statistics continue. In the meanwhile, my Twitter/X account is now uner 100 impressions daily, which is probably my lowest ever, even during periods I had been shadow banned or suspended. A lot of this is just lower published tweets, in part disinterest in hot trends. I also spend a lot of time commuting to and from mu current job.
I normally avoid discussing specific vendors and their products/services, but I'm goibg to make an exception here. I'm generally a good Amazon customer and have a favorable opinion of many devices I own and transactions. I own a lot of Kindle books (like over 1000). I've been a user of the Kindle for PC app, and I normally download my newly acquired titles. Amazon is good at syncing new purchases to the app, and you can easily right-click and download. new titles. Until some time over the past 2 weeks. For all practical purposes, I can no longer use app to view my books. This doesn't mean I don't have alternatives; I can read on my Amazon Cloud reader. my Amazon Fire tablet, and (I installed and tested while writing this) the Amazon Kindle app on Android. But I spent much of one evening with literally over a half dozen Amazon employees or contractors, none of them who could explain or correct the issue I was experiencing, including the dreaded black exclamation point! You name it--they listed any BS reason you can think of it, including:
- utilization of VPN (I usually had VPN on without a Kindle issue but behavior didn't change with VPN turned off)
- deinstall/reinstall the app
- try pushing the content from Amazon to your device.
- one analyst said my digital account didn't a physical address linked to it
- deregister the device (this basically meant all previously downloaded boooks were no longer usable)
- send a copy of my screenshot of the screen with failed download {next day Amazon customer service saying effectively they didn't know what to do with my email)
