As you know, the new COVID-19 Omicron bivalent booster is now available.   When is the best time to take this shot?   It depends.   Read this article for details . For those who took their last booster six months ago, plan to soon travel, or otherwise happen to be vulnerable, like elders, AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. In my case, I'm old, have a long trip coming up beginning on November 12, and live in a seniors' community.   Thus, 15 Craigside will arrange for these shots to be taken on our premises later this month.   For me, that's perfect, especially if taken at least two weeks before departure, which will be the case. But all my four vaccinations were of the Moderna version.   Should I stick to the same one, or expand to Pfizer? The CDC says it does not matter. Some studies of the earlier shots indicated that mixing vaccine brands actually may have produced a higher number of antibodies.  Moderna's earlier monovalent vaccines were slightly more effective than Pfizer's,

   From  Worldometer  (new  COVID-19 deaths yesterday):            DAY    USA    WORLD      Brazil      India      South Africa June     9     1093     4732         1185        246       82 July    22      1205     7128         1293      1120     572 Aug    12      1504     6556        1242        835     130 Sept     9      1208      6222       1136       1168       82 Oct     21      1225      6849         571        703       85 Nov    25       2304    12025        620        518      118 Dec     30       3880    14748       1224       299      465 Jan      14        4142    15512        1151         189      712 Feb      3       4005    14265       1209       107      398 Mar      2       1989     9490        1726       110      194 April     6        906    11787         4211       631       37 May     4        853     13667        3025      3786     59   June    1        287    10637         2346      3205      95  July    7         251      8440        1595        817      411 A

  So what is  microbe ?  Another term is microorganism, those tiny living things too small to be seen by the naked eye.  Is a virus a microbe?  Yes.  Is it alive?  That remains debatable.  As we have recently been overcome by just one, COVID-19, thought I'd deviate from the script and say few more things about viruses: Is the smallest of microbes. Walter Reed discovered the first human virus, a yellow fever virus, in 1901.  He proved that this ailment was transmitted by the bite of a mosquito.  That hospital in the DC area is named after him. 500 million rhinoviruses ( cause the common cold ) could fit on the head of a pin. There are ten viruses for every bacterium or archaeon. However,  viruses are 1000 times smaller  than bacteria or archaea. Some of you might not have previously heard of archaea, for Carl Woese only  discovered it in 1977 . Antonio van Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria in 1676. As this is science day, a few more bits of info about  bacteria and archaea . They are

I was sent this heartwarming story of Sephardi Jews who miraculously survived the Holocaust having a son who went on to lead an effort to develop a vaccine for COVID-19.  Maybe it's a natural inclination to treat all ethnicities and worshipping beliefs equal, or ignorance, but it occurred to me that at my advanced age I knew very little about the Jewish religion.   When I grew up in Hawaii, there was the dominant Caucasian sector, and everyone else as second-class citizens.  Being Japanese, there was also the matter of where Okinawans fit into this society.  My junior-year English-Social Studies teacher Mildred Kosaki and her husband had just returned from the Mainland, and she kept emphasizing the matter of Civil Rights, but we students just had no concept of Black-White relationships.  Nor were we aware that there was another group, Jews, in this national mix. Then I went away to college, when I remember a girlfriend asking me if I knew what a Jewish girl looked like.  I immediat