The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 83 (583)

The new as-yet-unnamed Chromebook laptop is pretty sweet so far. There are a few things I still need to figure out, but they are things with no pressure. I can read the screen easily and no longer must contend with an itty-bitty keyboard and a bouncing cursor. Life is good so far.

Early voting was busy this afternoon. People are taking this election very seriously, which is good. I do wonder, though, whether there will be noticeably fewer people voting on election day because so many voted early. 

There is a new covid vaccine, the French-made Valneva, showing promise. It uses inactivated Sars-CoV-2 virus and can be stored in a refrigerator. It gives rise to T-cells able to respond not only to the coronavirus spike protein but also to two other key proteins. 

Here's a quick international rundown. Schools and hospitality venues in Latvia are being closed, and a curfew has been put in place. Russia saw a new record on daily cases--34,325--along with 998 deaths. St. Petersburg has started taking anti-virus measures, while Moscow has not. The UK had close to 50,000 cases in one day, the highest since July 17 and a 16 percent rise over the previous week. Tuesday in New Zealand saw the most new cases of the pandemic, 94, most of them in Auckland. A "Vaxathon" event on Saturday saw 130,000 people vaccinated, over two percent of the population. New Zealand has a goal of fully vaccinating 90 percent of residents. Currently 67 percent are fully vaccinated while 85 percent have gotten at least one shot. Australia has passed the US in terms of the percent of the population having gotten at least one dose of vaccine, 72 percent compared with 66 percent. Both countries have fully vaccinated about 57 percent of their population; Israel has fully vaccinated 63 percent of its population. Finally, where are the highest vaccination rates? Try tiny Pacific island nations such as Palau, the Cook Islands, Niue, and Nauru.

According to the CDC, the US has exported more vaccine doses than it has administered, with 494,655,075 doses exported and 408,797,942 doses administered; 10.7 million people have gotten booster shots. In Chicago, 4,500 police are at risk of being put on leave without pay. A private school in Miami previously asked teachers not to get vaccinated and told them not to return if they did. The school is now asking parents who get their children vaccinated to keep them home for 30 days after each vaccination, boosters included. 

In one of my personal favorite coronavirus incidents, Washington State University has fired its head football coach and four of his assistants for not following a state mandate that all state employees get vaccinated. The Washington mandate is one of the country's strictest; there is no option to substitute testing for vaccination. And get this: the head football coach was the state's highest-paid employee, not the university's, but the state's. I personally find that distasteful.

The FDA is planning to allow Americans to get different vaccines as boosters than they originally got. It seems that a Johnson & Johnson booster following an initial dose of Johnson & Johnson results in a four-fold increase in antibody levels. A Moderna booster results in a 76-fold increase.