The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 174 (674)

Do a good deed daily? I've done mine. It seems that the website through which free covid tests (four per household) can be ordered went live a day early. I've ordered ours and alerted The Sons who have now ordered theirs. I also alerted my Internet quilt guild, and at least two of them have ordered. Tests are not going to ship until around February 1, but I don't have to worry about forgetting to order tomorrow.

When is it all going to end? Possibly not for a long time. Dr. Fauci says that we're still in the first of the five stages of a pandemic. The first stage is when "the whole world is really very negatively impacted." The other stages are (in order) deceleration, control, elimination, and eradication. That last step is rarely met. Smallpox is pretty much the only disease that has been eradicated. In terms of people wanting to catch Omicron so they gain immunity, Dr. Fauci said whether Omicron is the equivalent of a live virus vaccination is an open question. We could get another variant that can evade a body's immune response in which case the immunity from Omicron might not be usable at all. 

The Edelman Trust Barometer is a survey of 35,000 respondents across 28 countries. The 2022 results were just released. One result is the percent of respondents who believe that an entity is "purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations." Some 67 percent of respondents felt that journalists were misleading. Government leaders were viewed as misleading by 66 percent, and business executives were viewed as misleading by 63 percent. In general, respondents feared that the media were becoming more sensational for commercial gain, and that government leaders were exploiting divisions for, what else, political gain. 

Although some cities in the Northeast have started to see rapid declines in their numbers of covid cases, the surgeon general claims that Omicron has not yet peaked in the US and that the "next few weeks will be tough." Elaborating, "The challenge is that the entire country is not moving at the same pace. The Omicron wave started later in other parts of the country. We shouldn't expect a national peak in the coming days." Indeed, there are models that forecast 50,000 to 300,000 more Americans could die by the time the Omicron wave subsides in early March. 

I came across a report of an observational study that both intrigues and concerns me. Hospitalized patients with covid and no prior history of dementia had elevated levels of brain injury biomarkers. Levels of certain compounds were as high or higher in the short terms among hospitalized covid patients without a history of dementia than they were among Alzheimer's patients who had never had covid. Findings were said to indicate "a profound neurological insult in these patients." A big reason I find covid so frightening is that it seems able to attack just about any organ in the body--brain, kidney, heart, liver, blood, on and on. And don't get me started on long covid. 

Internationally, Canada has approved Pfizer's anti-viral Paxlovid. Tonga is worried that as much as they need relief workers, those workers could bring covid to the island nation. Finally, the French education minister is facing calls to resign after it came out that he had announced strict covid-testing and isolation rules for schools while he was on a long weekend New Year's holiday in Ibiza. It's justifiably called a public relations disaster. The minister broke no law; there were no travel restrictions in place. Ministers had been asked to remain in Europe, within two hours of Paris. A government spokesperson says that the minister was reachable the entire time. Parents of school children affected by the new policy did not appreciate hearing about a policy starting in just a day or two not to mention that the announcement came from someone on a beach.