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Saturday, February 22, 2025

Post #7142 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest weekly stats from CDC:


COVID is trending slightly down but lower year after year but some areas remain at elevated risk; the flu continues to dominant among respiratory illnesses. The latest celebrity infections are SNL veterans Martin Short and Maya Rudolph, fresh off the golden anniversary special. No doubt the biggest news item over the pasr week is that the Chinese have found another bat coronavirus with a delivery system similar to COVID-19.

Other news items of interest:

  • "Scientists Describe Rare Syndrome Following Covid Vaccinations"
  • "What sparked the COVID pandemic? Mounting evidence points to raccoon dogs"
  • "The Hidden Death Toll Fueled by COVID-19’s Ripple Effect"
  • "New research from Northwestern Medicine reveals link between long COVID and eye health"
  • '"Breakthrough computational tool enhances design of targeted antiviral therapies"
  • "Data suggest Paxlovid doesn't reduce severe COVID in older, vaccinated adults"
  • "Wastewater testing done to track COVID-19 now used to monitor substances like fentanyl"
  • "Social Security given $205 billion boost due to COVID deaths"
  • "Study reveals dramatic rise in ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine prescriptions during COVID-19"
  • "Co-Diagnostics, Inc. Announces Intention to Submit Enhanced Version of COVID-19 Test to FDA for 510(k) Clearance"
  • "China’s denial of coronavirus tinkering at Wuhan lab misleading"
  • "AI tool diagnoses diabetes, HIV and COVID from a blood sample"
  • "Big EU countries push expanded carbon border tax to help repay Covid debt"

Other Notes

Well, the manipulated blog pageview problem stats are back in force: over 5k in a recent week. I did finally publish two essays this week. Still with 6 days left in this short month I have to publish 2 more essays to hit my monthly target  of 40. I expect 2 essays on Trump on immigration (especially birthright citizenship) and tariffs, but I won't rush them into print just to reach an arbitrary target.  Twitter/X ran intraweek at 3500-4000 pageviews a week. At one point I was close to breaking 80 followers, but still the most since I deactivated my old account around 2020.

Well, Amazon is tightening Kindle title digital rights and over the coming week will disable functionality to transfer content to a USB device. (There are YouTube tutorials on this for the interested reader.) I literally stumbled across a workaround for a Kindle for PC issue I probably mentioned several weeks back. All of a sudden I couldn't download content. I could see the title in the app but download didn't work. in fact, earlier today I downloaded the latest version. not only couldn't download any title, but I couldn't open any title. so all I had was an app to show what titles I own .i tried tweaking network parameters, etc., but the unexplained red exclamation point which Amazon tech support couldn't explain. And my Internet searches really didn't show others with my issues. Okay to further explain my context, i had located my Kindle content location on a sync/virtual drive (for backup purposes, not to propagate content). So i decided to relocate the target to one of my external drives with available disk space. All of a sudden, expected functionality worked.. I have a different usability issue. You don't have any functionality to automatically download content and/or select all titles to download. As far as I can tell, you have to download one book at a time. Which is a hassle when you own over 4000 titles (most of them "free"

i finally gave in to buy my first laptop since 2018. Best Buy had a sale on a model which sold for just over $300 including sales tax. I can still remember buying my first PC clone at about 10 times that as a young UWM prof. In part I was motivated by Microsoft's September desupport of Windows 10. one odd thing: Best Buy didn't mention the OS on the specs. I figured out it had to be Windows 11 Home.  I think that's true, but I haven't had time to unpack it yet.

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