Much of today brings back memories.  Let me start with the possible  return of COVID-19 , which served as the theme of my Thursday postings for years.  According to the CDC, there has a been a spike in COVID-19 cases of 18% this past week, and 24% hike in hospital admissions. From  Worldometer,  173 Americans died of COVID this past week and 277 in the previous week.  Of course, last year 550/week died from the flu, and this rate tends to jump in the winter, so flu deaths today are considerably higher than from COVID.  And few take the seasonal flu seriously. This alarms professionals like  Ashish Jha . More people tend to die 21 to 28 days after cases begin to increase. 60% of Americans did not get boosted. And look at how politics can make a difference. About that New Orleans terrorist attack by 42-year old  Shamsud-Din Bahar Jabbar , he was inspired by ISIS, but probably acted alone.  Donald Trump was wrong again, blaming Jabbar as an...

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...

Lahaina on Maui is now no more.   You can follow the devastation from where you are.  I will provide special details tomorrow.  For now, read my posting of 29April2023 about Lahaina , the one best day of our entire 53-day Seabourn Odyssey cruise.  What we saw are now all gone. I prepared the following yesterday for posting today. Some USA Covid stats? 32% have been infected, and the percentage is probably lower/person because many have caught it twice, and some more. 2% died from Covid. 1% of those who caught Covid died. Should you contract Covid today, there is now a 0.5% chance of dying. In South Korea, those who contract Covid today have only a 0.03% chance of dying. Why this significant difference?  I don't know. The mortality rate of the seasonal flu is between 0.03% and 0.07%, depending on the year. Asymptomatic Covid victims have always been the most dangerous to spread this disease. Three years ago, the CDC thought that 35%  of  Covid cases wer...