Post #7518 J

 Pandemic Report

The latest CDC stats: We finally have an update of the macro stats from late December. We also have the latest regional trends.

The latest Sick Times update:

The biggest news over the past week has to be CDC scaling back the vaccine schedule for children (including COVID-19). What's worrisome is that these reductions seem to be motivated more by politics than public health because herd immunity benefits the latter.

Other COVID-19 news:

• "Long COVID still impacting millions of Americans"
• "COVID-19 still claims more than 100,000 US lives each year"
• "COVID-19 immunity stays specific and barely boosts protection against common cold coronaviruses"
• Legal/political issues:
• "FDA report claiming Covid vaccine link to children's deaths misses deadline"
• "Judge allows lawsuit against RFK Jnr’s Covid-19 vaccine policies to proceed"
• "Judges reject public records case linked to UNC and COVID-19’s origins"
• "Bayer sues COVID vaccine makers over mRNA technology"
• Prosecutors continue to pursue COVID relief fraud/other crimes:
• "New Britain woman gets 3 months in prison for fraudulently collecting $233K in COVID-19 relief funds"
• "Junction City business owner pleads guilty to stealing $487K in COVID-19 relief funds"
• "Couple pleads guilty to stealing more than $1 million in COVID-19 relief funds"
• "Feds charge former Georgia lawmaker for allegedly faking COVID-19 job loss"
• "Woman pleads guilty to $1M COVID-19 relief fraud scheme"
• "Chattanooga pastor sentenced after pleading guilty to $1.8 million COVID-19 fraud scheme"

Other Notes

Still, blog pageviews are generally inflated, with 3 daily posts not yet attracting double digits.  I was going to work on my Venezuela essay when the ICE murder kerfuffle in Minnesota broke out, and I've been heavily posting about that on X, so I'll be writing a rant on that soon. On X, I got one peak into analytics at about 1500 impressions a week. My followers are building a base just above 200.

The WWE finally took the Smackdown/Undisputed Championship off Cody Rhodes and on long overdue heel Drew McIntyre. It's confusing how the did so. It seemed like returning Jacob Fatu, a storyline babyface first took out McIntyre in the third and deciding fall of the match but apparently turns heel on Rhodes, opening the way for McIntyre to escape the cage and win the match. Fatu could obviously feud both ways but from a storyline effect you don't want to extend the existing program with a return match. If you do do it. you would want Fatu to sabotage it. So it's more likely a Rhodes/Fatu feud (and maybe turn Rhodes heel in the program to flip Fatu back). As for McIntyre, I think they'll probably first feud Zayn (with Royal Rumble in Saudi Arabia) and finally book hugely popular LA Knight to a long-overdue title shot