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Saturday, July 19, 2025

Post #7287 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest CDC weekly stats:

The overall stats seem to remain low nationally except in about half the states like parts of California where some statuses are testing past winter surge highs; however, note that test rate has gone up a full point  Crackpot anti-vaxxer sentiment and Fauci Derangement Syndrome continue to drive the Trumpkin agenda and related red state politics like Florida's crackpot surgeon general Joseph Ladapo, demanding an "vaccine injuries". "COVID-19 outbreak cancels 'Spongebob' performance at Community Players"

COVID-related news items include:

  • COVID relief fraud and other crimes are being prosecuted:

    • "Actually, research supports the COVID school closures...A cohort study of over 165,000 American households containing both adults and children confirms this assessment, finding that among all “household transmissions … 70.4 percent started with a pediatric index case.” The authors of the study, published in the American Medical Association’s “JAMA Network,” conclude: “We discerned an important role for children in the spread of viral infection within households during the COVID-19 pandemic, heightened when schools were in session, supporting a role for school attendance in COVID-19 spread.”...The study “COVID-19–Associated Orphanhood and Caregiver Death” confirms this view. Published in “Pediatrics,” researchers found that from April 1, 2020, through June 30, 2021, over 140,000 American children “experienced the death of a parent or grandparent caregiver,”
    • "2 pharmacies deny COVID-19 vaccine to immunocompromised Vero Beach, FL resident"
    • "Moderna gets full FDA approval for kids COVID-19 vaccine" "FDA approves Moderna’s Spikevax for children at increased risk of COVID-19"
    • "Vitamin D Deficiency Boosts Covid Hospitalization Risk"
    • "COVID-19 vaccines offer strong protection for cancer patients, but uptake remains low"
    • "New COVID-19 vaccine candidate shows strong protection against multiple variants"
    • "Sarilumab and Tocilizumab Equally Effective in ICU Patients With COVID-19"
    • "How Defensins [small proteins with potent antimicrobial properties] Could Help Stop Viruses"

    More Notes

    The blog seemed to attract a more normal pageview trend mid-week but dubiously soared going into the weekend.. No new essay this week (I'm working om my Sec+ recertification)--but it's likely two future essays will rant om Trump on immigration or the Fed. On Twitter/X, I seem to have plateaued on followers in the short run around 140. I'm still not allowing comments on my blog or tweets for different reasons, not because I'm unwilling to debate (in fact, I'll often quote-tweet opinions with which I disagree). But my experience is I have attracted spam replies or personal attacks in the past. I put a lot of work into my non-humor tweets, often supporting my position in a citation. Sometimes I can't fit in a citation because of "free account" constraints. What surprises me is how my feed attracts so many Trumpkins who I would think would join others on Trump's own Truth Social.

    I had to replace my missing Kindle tablets. After reconfiguring my WIFI and apps (e.g., for my streaming cable service), one of the things I wanted to do was expand my storage resources with an optional micro SD card. I double -checked with a YouTube video: even though my chosen SanDisk card wasn't that expensive, I didn't want to damage it or the Kindle tablet The video or the product design confused me. The video implied when you properly insert the memory card, the tablet would launch a configuration page. That didn't happen; in fact. I saw no sign acknowledging it could see the storage disk. I ended up looking at storage settings with mixed results: it saw a card but implied it was corrupt or defective. I knew it may not have been Kindle-ready but what did "corrupt" mean? The disk couldn't be formatted by the tablet? I really didn't want to go through the process of returning the SD card to Amazon. I tried drilling into the status--and it told me the disk was empty and how did I want to use it: as an extension of device resources or as an independent storage device (the former)? That triggered a process whereby some storage got transferred to the card usably including some apps

    I use a variety of cloud services, but one of them has some limitations not shared by my device NTFS filesystem. In particular, it only allows up to 1000 files per folder and up to a certain size file (currently 20G). Over the years I've collected collections of certain files in groups of tens of thousands. (For instance, I have over 7000 blog post pdf files.) So I have to restructure  my data. One  example is zipping files in a collection.

    Another is create an encrypted compressed disk/vault like Safehouse Explorer or more recently VeraCrypt. The concept is similar: you mount say a 20G  file as a virtual disk on Windows and you move your files to that disk. So suppose your mapped drive is M:, and your source files are in E:\myfiles. I can create a cygwin terminal session and then

    cd "e:\myfiles"
    ls | while read fn
    do
    echo "move "\"$fn\"" m:" >>myscript.cmd
    done

    This assumes there is no existing myscript.cmd in your working directory, you no longer need to maintain the original files (otherwise, replace "move" with "copy"), you want to run myscript.cmd at a Windows command prompt after cleaning up the script and possibly splitting it to run across  multiple containers (if you have more than 20G) separately mounted, dismounted as M: There are nuanced complications, e.g., your source file names including special characters. In the real world, I had  to create 3 containers for 50G. I was not trying to write a utility, but do a quick and dirty: I interrupted the \script as each container filled  and regenerated a new script. 
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