The picture continues to look brighter in the US, little by little. In the past week, Wyoming was the only state to show a 10 to 50 percent increase in the number of covid cases. States holding steady, with the number of cases changing between -10 and 10 percent were Idaho, California, Arizona, Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Alabama, and Virginia. All other state showed declines between 10 and 50 percent. The pace across the US fell by almost 20 percent over the last week, the fifth straight week of double digit declines.
The worst covid hot spot in North America right now is Manitoba, Canada; covid is spreading faster there than anywhere else in Canada, the US, or Mexico. Currently, Manitoba is seeing 35 new cases per 100,000 of population, compared with seven per 100,000 in the US and two per 100,000 in Mexico. In between sit Alberta with 16 per 100,000 and Colorado with 15 per 100,000. Between May 1 and 19, indigenous and other nonwhite people accounted for 61 percent of Manitoba's cases even though they make up 37 percent of the province's population. People of Southeast Asian descent are the most disproportionately affected at 146 cases per 100,000. The province's premier says that the problem is not caused by too few restrictions but by people not complying with the restrictions that have existed.
Facebook has lifted its ban on posts that claim covid was man-made; the ban was put in place in February 2021. The ban was lifted "in light of ongoing investigations into the origin." Did covid come from the Wuhan Institute of Virology? The report of three staff falling ill is "uncorroborated evidence from a foreign source." This means that is was not obtained and has not yet been verified by a US intelligence agency. The initial claim was made during XPot's administration. Some questions that jump to mind include whether the symptoms suffered were from covid or from another ailment or virus such as influenza. And if the symptoms were from covid, was it related to the work in the lab or was it caught on the open market. The US has 18 intelligence agencies (that's certainly more than I thought); of those, two lean toward covid coming from animal to human transmission, and one leans more to the lab theory side. Needless to say, China is against any further investigation and says that the US is trying to stigmatize it.
Another short post, but it's been that kind of a week going in several different directions at the same time. Just one of those things...
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