Halloween passed uneventfully, and The Professor has taken the leftover candy to the physics department. Any that he brings home today will immediately get "packaged" to go with us to the polls tomorrow as a contribution to the officials' break table. I also just finished two batches of oatmeal raisin cookies. Most will go to the break table, some will go to my mom, and The Professor can save me from the rest.
So Johns Hopkins University says that the global death toll from covid is now five million. This is almost certainly an undercount. How big is five million? It's the number of people killed in battles among nations since 1950 or the populations of Los Angeles and San Francisco combined. That total makes covid the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and stroke. The director of a global health center at Columbia University in the UK says, "What's uniquely different about this pandemic is it hit hardest the high-resource countries. That's the irony of Covid-19." The high-resource countries have larger proportions of elderly people or cancer survivors, two especially vulnerable groups. The poorer countries tend to have larger proportions of children, teens, and young adults, three groups less likely to have serious symptoms or to die. Perhaps the best summation of the current death toll comes from an infectious disease specialist at the Yale School of Public Health: "This is a defining moment in our lifetime. What do we have to do to protect ourselves so we don't get to another 5 million?"
People protesting against Italy's health pass this past weekend wore striped bibs and compared themselves to prisoners of Nazi concentration camps. Protesters in France a while back wore stars of David and compared themselves to Jews during the Holocaust. How has the Holocaust become so trivial as to be misused in these ways? Some of it may not be so trivial, though. Nine hundred people gathered in Predappio, Mussolini's birthplace, to mark the anniversary of his march on Rome and to protest the health pass. The need for a health pass to enter some venues or conduct some activities may have helped Italy's vaccination rate, though. As of Monday, almost 83 percent of the population ages 12 and over are fully vaccinated.
Russia recorded another 40,402 cases and 1,155 deaths in a 24-hour period. All 85 regions across 11 time zones have vaccine mandates in place for certain types of workers. Israel will now recognize Russia's Sputnik V vaccine and allow vaccinated Russians entry into Israel as of November 15. Australia and Thailand are reopening their borders. Right now, only Australian permanent residents and citizens are free to enter. Priority will also be given to fully vaccinated foreigners arriving on skilled worker and student visas. Vaccinated tourists from Singapore, home to one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, can enter effective November 15. Four Australian states and one territory still have restrictions in place on crossing state lines. An Australian who flew to Sydney from Los Angeles was frustrated that he then had to apply for an exemption to enter Western Australia to visit his dying mother. Indonesia opened Bali, but with so many restrictions that few tourists have come. Finally, Vietnam and Cambodia plan to reopen selected areas to foreigners at the end of this month.
US covid cases rose slightly in the past week driven by increases in the interior west from Arizona to North Dakota. Alaska leads the nation in cases per capita with 89, while Colorado has the fastest rate of case growth despite 61 percent of residents being fully vaccinated. Deaths are down to about 1,400 per day from 2,000 in parts of September. There are, on average, six times as many cases in unvaccinated people as there are in vaccinated ones. Deaths are about 12 times as high for the unvaccinated.
Finally, a bit of trivia. The Oxford English Dictionary's word of 2021 is ... drum roll ... "vax." Part of the citation noted that "[N]o word better captures the atmosphere of the past year than vax." I have to give the OED credit; the words of the year I thought of captured the atmosphere were a bit more, no, a lot more profane than "vax."
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