Pandemic Report
The latest weekly CDC statistics:
We continue to see improvement in recent surge statistics overall, but your location may vary. Rock legend Santana had to cancel Texas tour dates due to infection, a golfer leading a tournament had to drop out, Pakistan is experiencing a wave and Australians are preparing for a nearing winter surge. The rogue Trump Administration continues to make news, pushing the lab leak hypothesis of COVID origin, cutting funding for new vaccines, RFK, Jr. arguing autism is worse than COVID, which he argues mostly affects the old; he's also looking at possibly removing the covid vaccine from childhood schedules. It looks like protein-based Novavax is back on track for full approval with additional data requests.
additional related news items includes:
- "high rates of long COVID among healthcare, dental workers"
- "COVID-19 lowers sperm count and motility"
- "driving with COVID-19 raises crash risk by 25%"
- "New vaccine targets sugar shield to protect against multiple coronaviruses"
- "Unvaccinated kids face up to 20 times higher risk of long COVID"
- "Invivyd secures $30 million loan for COVID-19 antibody development"
- "Could this Molecule be ‘Checkmate’ for Coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2?"
- "Global clinical trial tests two anti-inflammatory drugs for long COVID"
- "New Study Finds No Link Between COVID Vaccination During Pregnancy and Birth Defects"
- Legal and political COVID issues:
- "Sunsetting of COVID-19 Paid Emergency Leave Law"
- "BlueCross nears settlement with employees fired for refusing COVID-19 vaccine over religious reasons"
- The battle against misinformation continues, including
- " Japanese study does not report explosion in deaths among COVID-vaccinated"
- Prosecution of COVID relief fraud and other crimes continue, including
- "U.S. border agent is charged in COVID-19 business loan fraud scheme"
- "Memphis woman sentenced to federal prison for healthcare, COVID-19 relief fraud"
- "Suburban Chicago officer indicted in alleged COVID-19 relief loan scheme"
- "Spokane Valley Couple Guilty Of Fraud Charges In Connection To Covid-19 Relief Loan"
Other Notes
The blog had a modest pullback after an encouraging first week or so back from my hiatus. I published my first post-hiatus essay yesterday with a reasonably good pageviews. However, most of my recent daily posts failed to reach double digits. My X following has risen to as high as 90 which is I think exceeds even the original account, However, I was informed my account was labeled which is ambiguous but may be a suspect, like spam status, which seems to limit the reach of my tweets, I did have 3 recent 1K+ tweets over a couple of days, almost 21K+ in total.
It seems I'm continuing to run into weird issues with Thunderbird email client. In one case, it seemed to lose track of my local mail folders, which it wouldn't let me reset. In the other case I had to install on my new laptop which I am using at rehab. I had to reset my calendar to enable the today's pane option and address book via Google. I think on my desktop I originally did it via add-ons, but it turns out these can be done through an option via the File menu.
