Pandemic Report
The latest weekly stats from CDC:
Well, the summer surge continues although I think we may be at or near an inflection point. (I need more data to make that call.) Celebrity infections continue, now including imprisoned movie mogul Harvey Weinstein (convicted of sex abuse charges) has been hospitalized with COVID and double pneumonia. And sports continue to be affected like 5 women on the Olympic Australian water polo team.
Other news items of interest:
- The Navy settled a lawsuit over vaccine mandate related discharges and agreed to scrub related adversarial elements from their service records .
- A recent JAMA study suggests more rigorous policy enforcement of things like masking and vaccines may have saved up to a quarter million more lives
- Researchers are looking at long-term immune changes in unvaccinated people who had COVID to better understand long COVID
- "New research from NWEA, a nonprofit research organization, shows students [affected by pandemic school shutdowns] going into high school are a full year behind academically,"
- "Exercise May Ease COVID-19 and Long COVID Symptoms"
- Prosecutors continue to pursue COVID relief fraud:
- One of a group of suspects in Minnesota who tried to steal from a federal program intended to provide food assistance for children during the pandemic tried to bribe a juror in his trial
- An Alabama woman who sought a PPP loan for a nonexistent business pled guilty
More Notes
The blog, which will be 16 years old Monday, continues to attract about twice the long-term pageview trend. Most posts are now reaching double-digit readership. My Twitter/X followers are at tle low 40's, maybe half the number of the old account.
Well I am one final car payment away. Familiar readers know I didn't intend to buy a new car about 5 years back. But Maryland demanded I think a biannual exhaust check. I had routinely passed it since moving to MD in the early 2000s and when I moved back to MD in 2017. But in 2019 it failed, and I couldn't a mechanic to fix the purported problem. So I bought a new car for the third time, this one a hybrid which most recently shows about 58 mpg. I'll be relieved when it's finished because I'm at a stage of my career where I need to save more for retirement. Ironically not much mileage on the car: for much of the interim I worked remotely.
Hallmark is finishing up its Christmas in July promotion and already promoting its Countdown to Christmas starting in about 3 months. But the Olympics are underway.. The swimming freestyle relays were great with the men easily winning gold and the women barely nudging past China for the silver. The latter was exciting because for a while it looked like they were looking at a bronze showing. It's hard to tell but it's looking like the US swimming team isn't quite as dominant. Katie Ledecky, a 3-Olympics swimming champion, barely won a bronze in her first event, and I saw a final where the only male American was seeded 7th. The women's water polo and beach volleyball teams excelled in their first events.
