Looking back in time, my  posting on 28February2020  summarized my return from Thailand: The fearsome factor was that Thailand had the second-most cases of   covid-19   when I left Honolulu on February 12.  Today, it is #9.  No new cases appeared after I arrived in that country.  No one is known to have died. (Interestingly enough, today  Thailand  is #33 in total cases and #143 in cases/million population.) But on  11 March2020 the World Health Organizaton declared the coronavirus to be a global pandemic .   This was the first time that a pandemic was caused by a coronavirus. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1200 points, the worst since 2008.  The eleven year bull market came to an end. China and Italy were locked down. Tom Hanks posted on Instagram that he and his wife Rita Wilson had contracted this virus.  They were in Australia. Two Utah Jazz players tested positive and the NBA canceled the rest of the season. While thousands of schools would shut down by the end of week,

Checking Worldometer, there were 122,971  new World Covid cases this past  week , 84,153 for just the USA.  This probably means that many countries are just not reporting anymore.  Japan and South Korea had for the past few months always been at or close to #1.  They must have given up keeping score. The World on 21 January 2022 had 3,847,291 new cases, just on that date. On a daily basis, the world new cases/day dropped by a factor of 219 from the peak last year.   The deaths/day fell to around 700,000 around mid-December of last year. I can count eight to ten waves, with the final one this summer unworthy of being included. The USA had 108,386,688 total covid cases, with 1,174,847 deaths. Thus 32% of Americans have been infected. Actually, probably closer to one in four, for many got it more than once. There was only a 0.3% chance that you died from covid if you were in the U.S. The mortality rate was 1.1% Since the beginning the World had 695,250,823 total cases, with 6,915,134 tota

The whole World had 289,936 covid cases this past week, and South Korea alone was responsible for 229,668 of them, or 79%.   The USA was #2 with 21,309, or 7%. Interestingly enough, of the 576 world deaths this past week, S. Korea had only 52 of them, or 9%.   Brazil had 171 covid deaths, or 30%, while the USA had 139 deaths, or 24%. There remains a range of questions and unknowns about our past pandemic.  One of them is, where did this all start?  Well, no doubt about the location being China, and almost surely Wuhan.  But where and how exactly?  The  New York Times  this week summarized the current state of knowledge: Was China initially hiding the truth?  Yes. The country was concerned, and ordered the original coronavirus samples be destroyed.  Maybe this was smart, but was "coverup" the reason? This Wuhan lab was known to purposefully create dangerous viruses to learn how to combat them before they emerged in the wild.  But was this, then, a phase of biological warfare?

    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