In a word, yes, you should continue to worry about Covid-19 when you travel.  Although we luckily avoided getting sick on our 53-day world journey, just around the time we returned, three of the residents at 15 Craigside where we live came back from trips and tested positive.  I also learned that we have a resident who traveled outside of Hawaii on three occasions after the pandemic was declared over, and each time contracted this virus while on the road.  They were all up-to-date in every Covid vaccination, including the latest booster.  But because of that, symptoms were mild. As I once devoted Thursdays to this disease, let me today bring you up to date on the latest info. In 2017, the leading causes of deaths in the USA were heart disease, cancer and accidents. During the pandemic, Covid-19 replaced accidents at #3. In 2023: Heart disease:  702,880 Cancer:  608,371 Accidents:  227,039 Covid-19:  186,552 Stroke:  165,393 Respiratory causes...

Using   Worldometer   data, the USA had 66,046 new cases during the past week.  This was 55% the World total of 119,320 cases.  This past week, however, saw a 48% drop in the U.S. from the previous full week. That 55% rate is far too high, as many countries, such as Japan and South Korea, don't report anymore, and I know from  other sources  that South Korea at more than 10,000 or so cases/week. South Korea began to have covid outbreaks after most of its citizens were vaccinated.  Thus, their overall mortality rate is  only 0.1%.  Today it is still at 0.1%, twice that of the seasonal flu at  0.05%.  The USA overall is now at 1%.  However, in recent weeks, the mortality rate has dropped to 0.2%, or four times the flu mortality rate. The USA during the 2021-2022 flu season had 9 million cases, or divided by 365 meant 25,000 flu cases/day.  Of course most people got sick during the colder months.  So let's double that to...

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 695,250,82...

From the beginning of this covid pandemic till a few months ago I weekly on Thursday showed a table of vital statistics.  I still on this day tend to feature some facet of this disease because it remains with us, and the older you are, the more prone you are to an earlier death.  In fact, at 15 Craigside, we have returned to wearing masks in the building because of a minor outbreak.  Not residents, but mostly dining staff members. So today I'll show the latest weekly data on SARS-CoV-2 from  Worldometer .  Note though that many countries no longer are even reporting.  Most cases this past week: World  149,666 #1      South Korea  82,165 ( 55% of all world cases ) #2      USA  18,654 #3      Brazil  9,634 Deaths this past week: World  661 #1      Brazil  167 #2      USA  98 #3      Russia  86 Deaths this past week per million popu...