The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 33 (533)

Where to start? I wish I could add "the ridiculous or the sublime?" but that likely won't work here, at least not today. If you continue to worry about the Delta variant, you might want to skip that in May South African scientists detected a new coronavirus variant that may have increased transmissibility. At least it contains multiple mutations associated with increased transmissibility. It has not been established if the increased transmissibility is because it's more contagious or because it is able to overcome immunity from vaccination or past infection. An infectious disease specialist and one of the authors of a paper about the new variant offers that "this pandemic is far from over" and "this virus is still exploring ways to potentially get better at infecting us." For some reason, that last comment has me picturing the coronavirus spike protein dressed as infamous villain Snidely Whiplash.

The EU has removed the US and five other countries from the "safe list" of countries whose residents can travel to the EU with no additional requirements such as quarantine and testing. It will be up to individual counties whether to follow this. To be on the "safe list" requires having fewer than 75 new covid cases daily per 100,000 people over the previous 14 days. The US has been well above that figure. It also does not help the US that it still has not opened its borders to Europeans, and they're not thrilled about the lack of reciprocity.

The daily average for hospitalized covid patients in the US in now over 100,000, higher than in any previous surge except last winter's when most Americans were not yet eligible to be vaccinated. Hospitalizations nationwide have increased by almost 500 percent in the past two months. Florida has 16,457 hospitalized covid patients, the most of any state. Texas is second on what is not a good list on which to be. Oxygen supplies are running low for some hospitals. One Florida doctor said he was seeing younger and younger patients die, all of whom were unvaccinated. The article in which he was noted did not specify if these younger patients were so young as to not yet be eligible for vaccination.

From hospitalizations to deaths. Deaths in 14 states increased by more than 50 percent in one week. Deaths went up by more than 10 percent in 28 more. A projection from the University of Washington suggests we could see 1,400 daily by mid-September. 

Demand for ivermectin continues to rise. It started as a veterinary drug in the late 1970s, and the discovery of its effectiveness combating certain parasitic diseases in people won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2015. The ivermectin sold for animals can be a much higher concentration than that intended for humans. Calls to state poison control centers have jumped fivefold since July. Mississippi says that 70 percent of recent calls to its state poison control center come from people who have ingested ivermectin from feed supply stores.