Thank you. Hearing that meant a lot!
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Thank you for the remindersā¦probabilities, etc. I needed that. I was just feeling so discouraged. But youāre right. Mitigation bought us three years before his lotto number came up! And thanks for the encouragement, too.
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Iām so sorry for the circumstances of your DFiLās loss as well. I hope your family is healing from that grief compounded by more grief. Hugs. Thank you for your words.
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Thanks for that info. The great unknown. 
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We donāt get any covid/booster news, though clearly itās available if you go looking for it. I only knew there was going to be a booster because I had to give consent on behalf of DMIL.
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EUA granted!
Children 6 months through 4 years of age who completed their three-dose primary series with the monovalent Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine more than two months ago are now eligible to receive a single booster dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent.
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Well this stinks! (Literally)
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Australia has opened up Covid boosters to ALL adults that are 6 months out from their last one.
https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/getting-your-vaccination/booster-doses
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Hospitalizations up in the UK. Deaths typically lag by a couple of weeks, on top of it looks like the death data itself is lagging.
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There was a bunch of this stuff in Miami Beach and the Florida Keys last week. Yuck 
Iāve been really disappointed so far in a lot of the Long Covid research being done. For instance, lots of focus on risk factors, which just widens the divide between the most vulnerable and least vulnerable. (I mean, I guess itās great news for the least vulnerable, but reeks of eugenics, especially when considering actionable results.) Also, an uncomfortable amount of research into treatments that are very unlikely to help (can we move on from ivermectin already?) to ones that may actually make patients worse (such as some variation of Graded Exercise Therapy, which the WHO guidelines specifically cautions against because of the detrimental effects shown in ME/CFS studies of similar post-infection symptom profiles).
But this study using Paxlovid is promising, including attempts at bio markers so they can try to correlate any successes to targeting which Long Covid sufferers would most likely benefit.
https://twitter.com/virusesimmunity/status/1638182962515648515?s=46&t=JD8lfknyOt-1jICzMFrc2A
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@ehsanchez Any idea what is going on with Houston wastewater data? It looked like we were clearly ticking up and now that uptick is justā¦gone? 
Current chart:
Comparing what was shown originally:
2/13 was 290% of baseline and now shows 280%
2/20 was 321% of baseline and now shows 240%
2/27 was 272%, now 206%
3/6 was 218%, now 181%
3/13 is 166%
Itās like every week they adjusted it as they went so the uptick was a little less pronounced and now itās completely gone?
Iām so tired of trying to make personal risk decisions while operating on shaky data.
For what itās worth, since Christmas the other adults in my household have pretty much been living like itās 2019. Iām basically the only one left taking any precautions. (I have enough health issues as is.) Iāve still managed to avoid getting infected as far as I am aware. Which is kind of surprising, given Covid just made its 4th (or 5th?) pass through one or more others in our houseā¦
DH turned up positive last Monday after a multi-day robotics event. He isolated at a hotel. DD21 also had symptoms that Monday but tested negative for 6 day straight so we just had her isolate here in her room. We didnāt want to put her with DH in case she had something else. She was at the same event but mostly not with DH, so not necessarily same exposures.
DH is 52 so got Paxlovid. He said it tasted really terrible but did seem to help the Covid symptoms resolve fairly quickly. His test line was strong through Saturday (Day 5), super faint on Sunday, and negative Monday and today.
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Wow! Thatās crazy. 
How can you just change data! I would send this to a councilman or a news station.
Glad to hear DH is on the mend.
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But it still falls with in the original confidence interval, right? Isnāt that what the grey area is? Iām just glancing and looking at the data but it seems like they adjusted downward as the rest of the data began to trend downward because that is the line of best fit.
I think if you look at hospitalization data at the same time it had kind of plateaued a bit so that makes it a bit harder to really know where the trend is going. That data did fall again after a couple of weeks.
I also noticed that while the wastewater was shown as up ticking the estimated percent positive was still more downward trending.
If you consider seasonality, it doesnāt look very far off from where we were last year at the same time.
Iām sorry itās run through your house again. We have, praise the Lord, had a very healthy year at our house while so many others have suffered numerous illnesses.
Our family is back to 2019, and I confess that it feels really, really good to be comfortable just around people again. Im sorry for the weight of that resting on your family as everyone else eagerly puts the pandemic in the rear view mirror. I donāt love masks; Iām glad those have mostly gone away, but I do wish that as a society weād added broader measures to reduce spread of diseases in public places.
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Bingo card: The pudding controversy
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MPox update. (Yes, itās still a thing.)
The good news is that it never took off on high school and college campuses as some speculated. The bad news is that the outbreak continues, so it didnāt just fizzle out as others speculated. We now have sustained human-to-human transmission, which has never happened before. Apparently this is due to a new strain in humans not seen in animal populations.
Recent WHO update:
In the US, we continue to have 1-2 cases detected on average per day. I havenāt heard anyone float how many cases must be out there undetected for that kind of sustained transmission to be happening.
The wastewater data looks like there is currently consistent detection around Virginia Beach and intermittent detection in DFW area.
Iām not sure what to make of that, really, in understanding how much is really out there.
Updated within the last week:
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