NETFLIX PREVAILS

The morning New York Times provided the following graphics:

To quote the NYT, slowly getting less terrible. Note that hospitalizations come a week after the infection, and deaths another week later. Thus, the decline in new deaths has not yet occurred...but should.

However, schools have just opened, people are packing football stadia and indoor entertainment is increasing. I fear that new deaths will not drop much below 1000/day for the rest of the month or two and maybe more.

Here is a NYT article on world vaccinations you can actually read. I'd swear the U.S. hit the 50% vaccination rate a month ago. Well, we are seem stuck at 54% fully vaccinated. If you glance at the full world table, we rank around #40. The laggards in our country are the less educated and Republicans. Another graph:

There are other countries with much lower vaccination rates, but there doesn't seem to be any correlation with the deaths/million people rate (right column):

UAE 82% 207

China 72% 3

Germany 63% 1112

USA 54% 2075

Mississippi 35% 3115

Hawaii 57% 504

South Korea 42% 47

Russia 28% 1352

New Zealand 22% 5

Thailand 22% 218

India 15% 319

Indonesia 17% 507

South Africa 13% 1430

Vietnam 7% 171

Taiwan 6% 35

Nigeria 1% 12

Some countries clearly don't report all their deaths, and some others don't need to be vaccinated because of strict government regulations that maintained a low infection rate. No matter how you explain it, though, the U.S. is doing a terrible job of controlling this pandemic. And we are continuing to open up because of the economy.

With its high transmissibility, if this Delta variant was the original COVID-19, our current 4.7 million world deaths would have been much higher. Keep in mind that the Spanish Flu from 1918-1920 killed 50 million when the world population was less than a quarter of today. Of course that number is controversial, and could have been anything from 17.4 million to 100 million. To the right, the right column for COVID-19 should today read 230 million cases, 4.7 million deaths and a mortality rate of 2%.

When this pandemic ends the total number of COVID-19 cases could well approach that of the Spanish Flu. But deaths/million will remain quite a bit lower. Why? Lower mortality rate of this coronavirus (the Spanish Flu was caused by a particular virulent H1N1 virus), better medical care today, vaccinations and maybe a difference in asymptomatic rate. Medical researchers still have no clue on what this is today, with a rather dated article suggesting anything from 17% to 81%.

Oh, one benefit of this pandemic. The seasonal flu number dropped to almost insignificance. A graph of the U.S., Canada and Bermuda (?) from Scientific American:

Well, that was a lot more than I intended, but on to entertainment. At the Emmys last night Netflix finally won the most statue battle. The closest it came was 2018 when it tied HBO. This year Netflix won 44 Emmy awards, beating out the combined total of #2 and #3, HBO/HBOMax. What happened to CBS, ABC and NBC?

This new streaming cable system that has overtaken network TV has a flaw. Never heard of Mare of Easttown and never saw Ted Lasso because they were on HBO Max and AppleTV+. Interesting that in Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, four from Ted Lasso were nominated, and one still won, Brett Goldstein. I don't dare add any more pay channels because I can't even keep up with Netflix and Prime. Crown, the life of Queen Elizabeth II is on Netflix, but I avoid historical series. It is into Season 4, with two more to come.

The Red Carpet? Cosmopolitan said Taraji was stale:

Dan Levy deserved to be panned:

And Nicole Beyer must have loved how she looked:

HONOLULU TO SEATTLE

The story of the day is Hurricane Milton, now a Category 4 at 145 MPH, with a track that has moved further south and the eye projected to make landfall just south of Sarasota. Good news for Tampa, which is 73 miles north. Milton will crash into Florida as a Category 4, and is huge, so a lot of problems can still be expected in Tampa Bay with storm surge. If the eye had crossed into the state just north of Tampa, the damage would have been catastrophic. Milton is a fast-moving storm, currently at 17 MPH, so as bad as the rainfall will be over Florida, again, a blessing. The eye will make landfall around 10PM EDT today, and will move into the Atlantic Ocean north of Palm Bay Thursday morning. My first trip to Seattle was in June of 1962 just after I graduated from Stanford University. Caught a bus. Was called the Century 21 Exposition . Also the Seattle World's Fair. 10 million joined me on a six-month run. My first. These a...

A NEXT COVID SUBVARIANT?

By now most know that the Omicron BA.5 subvariant has become the dominant infectious agent, now accounting for more than 80% of all COVID-19 cases. Very few are aware that a new one, BA.4.6, is sneaking in and steadily rising, now accounting for 13% of sequenced samples . However, as BA.4.6 has emerged from BA.4, while there is uncertainty, the scientific sense is that the latest bivalent booster targeting BA.4 and BA.5 should also be effective for this next threat. One concern is that Evusheld--the only monoclonal antibody authorized for COVID prevention in immunocompromised individuals--is not effective against BA.4.6. Here is a reference as to what this means. A series of two injections is involved. Evusheld was developed by British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, and is a t ixagevimab co-packaged with cilgavimab . More recently, Los Angeles County reported on subvariant BA.2.75.2 . which Tony Fauci termed suspicio...

IS FLORIDA AGAIN THREATENED BY A MEGA TSUNAMI FROM LA PALMA?

From the morning New York Times : Here is a graph comparing average daily COVID-19 deaths/100,000 people, and the USA is doing something really wrong: The difference between our country and Europe is that we have flubbed the availability of cheap and ubiquitous at-home RAPID testing. They have covered this base. There are two obvious problems: The FDA is much too bureaucratic about quickly approving anything related to this pandemic, including testing. We seem stuck with the test that takes one to several days to get your result. The good news is that the Biden administration has finally realized this problem and through executive order hope to soon flood the market with take home testing that at first will be subsidized to make it affordable. Now, on to getting everyone vaccinated, especially 5-11 years olds ( and we are close to getting to making this happen ), the undereducated and Republicans. What to do about the latter two? The other concern is whether we a...

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