The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 237 (737)

I am my own worst enemy. We are having company over Saturday night, and I decided I needed to do something about the shelves over the desk in the kitchen. Three hours later, the shelves look a lot neater and more organized. The pile of stuff that I still need to sort through is not. Channeling an inner housewife is hard because I don't think I even have one. 

I asked The Professor and Son #1 this morning what the second-largest risk factor for dying from covid is after old age. Son #2 figured it was asthma which is what I would have thought had I not just read a fascinating article on schizophrenia's being that second-largest factor. At one point during the pandemic, people with schizophrenia were almost three times more likely to die from covid than were people in the general population. It looks as if the immune system might be playing a role which would mean that schizophrenia could be a whole-body disease rather than one limited to the brain. This discovery opens the door to being able to look at the relationship between the immune system and psychiatric illness by looking at the effects of a single virus at a single point in time. I'm hoping to find out more about this, having majored in psychology in what now seems like a past life.

How bad is the situation in Hong Kong? A month ago, the US covid death rate was 90 times as high as Hong Kong's. Yesterday, the cumulative US death toll was only three and a half times as high as Hong Kong's. 

New York City is preparing to end its school mask mandate for children under the age of five. That end is contingent upon cases remaining as low as they are now. Waiting until April will permit the study of the effect of unmasking on older children. Their mask mandate was stopped a few weeks ago.

Pfizer has agreed to sell up to four million doses of Paxlovid for use in 95 lower-income countries. Using it won't be a walk in the park, though, given the lack of testing and a shortage of healthcare workers who could prescribe the drug. The price has not been announced, but Pfizer says it will be a "nonprofit price." Last week, 35 countries signed up to produce Paxlovid to sell inexpensively. These doses will not, however, be available as soon as the ones from Pfizer.

Been drinking more during the pandemic? You aren't alone. In fact, the number of alcohol-related deaths in 2020 reflected a 25 percent increase over 2019. Between 2018 and 2019, there was a five percent increase. On a longer time scale, deaths in 2019 were up only 3.6 percent from 1999, 20 years earlier. Up for trying to be sober-curious? I thought not.