My blog of 21 June 2011 was entitled:   A WORLD POPULATION OF 7 BILLION .  I went on to say: If there has been any criticism of my books, it is that  I have ignored the most important parameter:  the world population .   I didn't have a full chapter dedicated to this topic in any of my publications, and not one of my 100+ Huffington Post articles treated this subject. Why? ... mostly because there was not much I could add to the subject than to say that population growth will reverse once the world becomes economically prosperous, for then, the central government will have something like Social Security in place and parents won't need to have many children to take care of them at old age . It took us from our beginnings in Africa, perhaps 300,000 years ago, to finally reach a population of 1 billion in 1804.  218 years later, we last year reached 8 billion.  However, the  good news is that the time it takes to double our population is finally increasing . What about the future?

 I'll get to more COVID-19 details tomorrow, but here is something from the AP: German Man Caught Trying to Get 90th COVID-19 Shot A 60-year-old man was caught at a vaccination center in Eilenburg in Saxony after trying to get jabbed for the second day in a row. The man, who was carrying several blank vaccination cards, allegedly received around 90 shots at vaccination centers across the state over a period of months. Police say he has been selling forged vaccination cards with real vaccine batch numbers to anti-vaxxers who crave the Covid passports that make access to public life in Germany much easier. It was not immediately clear what impact the 90 jabs — from different brands — had on the man’s health.   (Source:   AP ) On a slightly more serious note, China has totally locked down its largest city of Shanghai of 26 million. The country has jumped to 13,000 new cases, but this compares to 19K in the USA and 127K in South Korea, which is continuing to remove restrictions.  China

The USA continues to recover from COVID-19.  However, several countries in the Orient are getting worse in new cases per day, and New Zealand, which until recently was admired as a being incredibly successful in fending off this virus, is now suffering.  Yesterday (with new cases/million population in the parentheses): South Korea  266,838  (5232) Hong Kong  52,523  (6910) Singapore  17,564  (2977) Austria  32,419  (3602) Denmark  19,178  (3307) New Zealand  22,582  (4516) USA  45,698  (137) Taiwan  (2.7) China  294  (0.2) The case of  New Zealand  is somewhat baffling.   For the longest time they had zero new cases daily.   Now, this number yesterday was among the world highest at 4516/million population. Yet, 95% of New Zealanders over 12 have been vaccinated, and 57% boostered.   Probably says something about the contagious effectiveness of the Omicron variant. Further, and this is amazing, the total number of deaths up to yesterday for the entire country was only 63, which is a rat

  Until Omicron, Japan had managed to keep COVID-19 at bay.   However, this pandemic has bitten the country, and new cases over the past few days have been averaging around 100,000/day.   While that is only around 800/million population, the U.S. was #2 in new cases yesterday, but we are now down to 536/million.   Hawaii was once up to 4466/million a month ago, but yesterday dropped to 381/million. The country with the most new cases yesterday was Germany with 212,724, or 2532/million. Denmark is way up there at 8110/million.  As terrible as it has been,  the country began to lift restrictions last month, and earlier this month became the first European nation to say no face masks necessary anymore.  They don't even check your vaccination status in bars and restaurants.   Said Prime Minister Mette Fredricksen,  we welcome a completely open Denmark .  Am I missing something??? However, not as bad as Reunion in the India Ocean at 33,976/million and Martinique in the Caribbean with 22