COVID – 2022/07/25 versus human nature

The 7-day moving average of new Covid cases last week was 894,460, down from 969,112 five days ago . The 7-day moving average of new deaths was 1,751, down slightly from five days ago. With so many people still incubating the Covid virus, it is possible that a worse variation might appear. There are massive amounts of people traveling, and humanity becomes a massive mixing pot of diseases. Eight billion people at 100 kilos per person would be 8,000,000,000 X 100 or 800,000,000,000 kilos of fresh meat wandering around mixing juices. Whatever Mother Nature can design to eat us is being encouraged by us to do so. With almost a million newly identified new cases every day, there is plenty of opportunity for something new to evolve. The streets of my beautiful little city, Bend, Oregon, are now filled with tourists from all over the world, and few are wearing masks.
The good news is that our former diseases eventually tapered off. On average, our bodies will remain healthy if we have plenty of good food. Uh, the climate wilding seems to be putting our food production in peril, and our political conflicts aggravate its distribution. So, where’s the good news? For me, the Webb telescope’s discovery of vast numbers of formerly unobservable galaxies gives new hope. Each one is filled with enormous numbers of stars. Most nearby stars are observed to have planets, and it is a natural chemical process to form complex molecules that are capable of experiencing natural selection. Those natural processes inevitably generate more complex life forms. Nearly all of those living beings will be too far away to be contacted. But if there is already an existing interconnected civilization within our Milky Way galaxy, they will contact us soon. Our radio broadcasts are now a hundred years out there, and so with a fifty-year round trip signal, we might be contacted within living people’s lifetime. But, we might be unique in the entire Universe. Where are all the aliens? | Stephen Webb asks in a TED talk.
Earlier today, one of my eighty-something friends was talking about fear of dying and thus losing his ability to write and publish a few more books. As he spoke, I was thinking about my relationship with those ultimate things. My personal awareness of being such a tiny part of our ever more magnificent Universe gives me a feeling of community, of being part of something wonderful as long as time exists, even if I am no longer aware of it.

COVID – 2022/07/20 versus the nasty truth.

The infection rate last week of 885,521 was surpassed again and is now 929,123 for the 7-day moving average of new cases. That’s only 43,602 more cases, so who’s worrying, certainly not TIME magazine. Their current issue is a blatant travel issue about the wonderful places to go visit. Just an idle note, but with the exception of the first Omicron spike in January, the current spike exceeds all of those earlier ones that worried the world into shutting down.

The good news is that the percentage of people who do catch Covid and die is way down. The vaccinations dilute the severity of the disease, and the newly created Paxlovid antiviral medication really works. Even so, the world’s seven-day average daily death toll is 1,798, up from 1,398 on June 15th.

The nasty truth is that people under age 65 account for 85.1% of cases, and only 14.8% are over age 65. These young and productive people catch and spread the Covid disease, but those retirees over 65 are the ones who die from it. 94.5% of those who die of Covid are over age 65, even though only 16% of Americans are over 65.

Covid kills people who are physically weakened by age or by other diseases like diabetes. Nearly 100% of the groups of older people I am familiar with have had all of their shots, including the booster shots. I know several have had the Covid disease, but because of vaccines and Paxlovid have survived.

The nasty truth is that it is well known that the nonproductive people of our society are dying, and the others will not be loaded with the expense of keeping them alive to play bingo.

COVID – 2022/07/15 versus humans gone bonkers

The rate of 885,521 new Covid cases per day now being recorded is higher than all previous case peaks except the one caused by the Omicron variant. The deaths per day lags about a month behind the new daily case rate, and so we must expect it to keep rising. But humans are fed up with waiting for the pandemic to be over and are catching up with fun activities, like world travel, and huge masses of people are getting together to have fun, protest governmental incompetence, or just have some revenge by killing innocent people and destroying their cities. And just in case that isn’t enough, to cut a large percentage of food and fuel from reaching the world market, so many poor people will starve to death in the coming months.

I like to think the civilized people here in Bend, Oregon, have risen above that nonsense, but if anything, we are worse. The death count from Covid has risen to 301 for a community of only a bit over a hundred thousand. The things we used to call pickups have grown to such enormous sizes that they need to have ladders descend so the drivers can ascend to the cab. And, of course, my social groups have about half of their older citizens having had Covid.

Whine, whine, WHINE!!!

The things I am really enjoying are the Webb photos coming back. They are absolutely revolutionary for our human place in the Universe. We are so much smaller than when Galileo demonstrated that the Earth went around the sun. And the Lick Observatory made absolutely certain that distant glowing patches in the sky were galaxies like our Milky Way, and the red-shift meant the Big Bang was a real phenomenon.

Humanity is astonishingly intelligent and productive while at the same time stupider and more foolish than the crows.

COVID – 2022/07/05 versus Traveling

To repeat – COVID hasn’t gone away! On the contrary, it has increased yet again this week. The daily average of new cases went from 553,747 on June 09 to 768,202 on July 05. The deaths per average day are flat at 1,298 on June 19 and 1,309 on July 05. The pandemic might explode next week because of the massive air and auto travel coupled with delayed air flights. Vast numbers of people were stranded and stuck together in airport terminals.

The future is always unpredictable, but our current number of new cases per day is as high as the first three peaks. The world went into a panic with those first three but has ignored this one, and we had a near-record number of people in the air.

I entertain myself by reading aphorisms based on oral traditions and rewriting them, trying to find essences that make sense in our modern world. The one thing that jumps out is how many references there are to famine and extreme poverty. With the storage of grains from Russia and Ukraine, there will be a food shortages, and for people already on the edge of hunger, it will mean starvation. But, of course, that will stress the world politic even more with everyone blaming everyone else for the problem.

One similar thing for us is that the purveyors of food here in the US, like Safeway, are now doing free home delivery for purchases over $30 with an annual subscription. That saves us an hour or two every couple of days and some modest hassle driving around.

COVID – 2022/06/30 versus human reality.

COVID hasn’t gone away! It has increased yet again this week from 615,965 to 726,866 for new cases. The death rate has gone from 1,266 to 1,346. That new case rate is about the same as all of the former Covid peaks except the Omicron one of January 25, 2022. Those former peaks caused worldwide hysteria, but today this is already a peak level one with nary a mention. The problem is that it’s growing.

The new Monkey Pox is getting news coverage even if its total reported cases so far are only 780, with no deaths. It is mostly a sexual intimacy disease, and an effective vaccination already exists, as well as effective medical treatments.

My current effort has been trying to understand what works in the world to motivate humans to change their society-wide behaviors. I have been doing this by searching for the underlying learning of thousands of years of human experiences as expressed in proverbs and aphorisms. Proverbs are more symbolic and poetic, and aphorisms are more descriptive. My strategy has been to rewrite them with the intent of revealing their core truths. The Google search I’ve used has been “a country + proverbs” and then compiling them before rewriting. My search country list is from the United Nations list of 226 countries.

It is a challenging task, but brings up some things we modern people have forgotten, like recurrent famines. In two hundred years we have gone from a population of half a billion people inhabiting Earth to eight billion. That’s sixteen times as many people living now! That population increase was made possible by modern technology, but our success is now polluting our world and that will come back very soon in the form of famine. It will strike first at the poor countries and will be weaponized against whoever is at the bottom.

COVID – 2022 versus the NEWS

COVID hasn’t gone away! It has increased this last week from 510,086 to 615,965 new cases. The five-month drop in deaths has stopped dropping and has now climbed this week from 1,134 to 1266 deaths per day. Let us hope this isn’t the harbinger of a new peak, but only time will tell if human ingenuity will overcome human stupidity.

The US Supreme Court just voided the half-century Roe abortion decision, and many states instantly declared pregnancy termination a crime. This decision will generate lots of political turmoil for years to come and bring the Supreme Court itself under a cloud of violating the majority opinion of most Americans.

Putin’s war is still getting lots of news coverage and lots of money from the US, but his depriving the world of vast amounts of grain will bring starvation to many poor people. Also, Putin’s chokehold on Europe’s fuel is sending prices up on oil and natural gas, which power modern high society.

My hope is that the Webb space telescope’s first photos, which are due to be revealed on July 12, will be fantastic and excite enthusiasm for humanity’s greater aspiration than greed for political power. Of course, that will distract me from the ongoing COVID disaster. Oh, I almost forgot to mention that gun violence and school mass murders have occasioned lots of horrible news, but that awful news finally got the US Congress to write some legislation.

COVID versus the future – 2022/06/20

COVID 7-day averaged world case rate is 510,086, down from 601,000, and the 7-day averaged death rate is 1,134, down from 1,400. Those are good drops although the case rate is still as high as the former peaks before the Omicron peak. However, the daily death rate is one-seventh of the first peak and one-fifteenth of the worst peak. That seems like a good indicator that the COVID pandemic is on the way out, but a new long-term subcritical hangover is still with many of those people who had the disease but didn’t get hospitalized. If those people have refuge sites of potential viruses that can become active, it may spring back. However, if a pocket of COVID does recur as a local outbreak, there will be a massive response with new vaccines and antiviral medications. Once the disease is confined to relatively small outbreaks, it will probably be controlled. Unless, of course, the outbreak begins in a mass concentration event, like we are now seeing in airports with flight delays and cancellations, leaving passengers from all over the world stuck in airports confined together for hours.

Time will offer humanity many opportunities to prove itself stupid and resourceful.

COVID – Logarithmic chart 2022/06/10

Corel Draw has crashed again and refuses to open. I have used these programs since they were introduced and have updated them several times, but have always used the simple features of the original program. I don’t need the other stuff and don’t see a reason to pay them for the decades-old program I paid for repeatedly when free ones are online and don’t crash.

The problem I would have illustrated was that the case rate and death rates both worldwide and locally here in Deschutes County, Oregon, the USA have taken a sudden uptick. No one is wearing masks here anymore, and people I know have departed on worldwide trips. The skies above are filled with jet contrails from planes loaded with travelers. If we had held on to the strict mask and social distancing protocols this Covid pandemic would have gone away a long time ago. With the massive turnout for the Queen of England’s jubilee, we will probably get a further kick in the pants. Here is the chart from five days ago, so just imagine the upticks. Covid cases per day up to 533,387, and Covid deaths per day up to 1,300.

COVID – Logarithmich chart 2022/06/05

COVID – Logarithmic chart 2022/06/05

The Covid pandemic has been tapering off consistently for all four months since February 1st. The worldwide COVID deaths per day chart has dropped from ten thousand per day to almost one thousand per day. Of course, humans are reacting to that good trend by having super spreader events such as the celebrations for Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years as queen. Thousands of people jammed together for the four-day event with few people wearing masks. Fortunately, it was mostly outdoors.

The virus appears to be gaining more ability to proliferate outside of cells at the expense of getting fatter and less able to replicate within human cells. That resulted in a spike in the number of people infected back in January with a clear decline in deaths since that time.

If we can just be reasonable, this disease will drift away within a year.

COVID – Logarithmic chart 2022/06/05 – JPG – Click the image for a bigger view.

COVID – Logarithmic chart 2022/06/05 – GIF – Click the image for a bigger view.

COVID – Logarithmic chart 2022/05/31

COVID is evolving into a less deadly form. I’ve never heard the authorities talk about why it is getting milder. My assumption is that it acquires more garbage as part of its molecular structure, and that makes it less effective compared to the more nimble original structure. COVID has evolved more efficient abilities to grab onto a human cell, but while adding those it added other things that made a fighter into an obese sluggard.

The chart of COVID cases per day took a sudden drop this week, and the COVID deaths per day continued its four-month-long downward trend. But here in the US we had a near-record number of travelers visiting their families for Memorial Day for our fallen soldiers. That activity will probably bring on another short-lived spike in US cases. I can understand why people would like to go on vacation and visit their relatives, but I have trouble agreeing with the removal of masks when in grocery stores or sporting events. The latest masks work much better so why not wear them?

COVID – Logarithmic chart 2022/05/31 – JPG – Click the graph for a bigger image.