The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 265 (765)

It's not my day computer-wise. First, my ChromeBook died. Twiggy, the laptop I bought in 2018 will not keep a connection to the router, so I moved back to Hal, my 2013 laptop. I made the mistake of agreeing to the Windows updates it wanted to install. Some 15 minutes later, it was still restarting from those. I then dug out Hiram, the cheap burner laptop I got to take to Peru in 2017. It's working so far, but the keyboard is teeny (it was a good size for travel but tedious for daily work) meaning I am backspacing to correct almost as much as I'm typing characters forward. 

The court ruling striking down the transportation mask mandate does not mean that a company has to lift any mandate they have put in place. Alas, it appears no US airline wants to keep their mandates. In fact, some announced mid-flight that passengers could remove their masks. Some airlines did say later that masks may still be required on flights to destinations that have mask mandates in place. As of this morning, the airlines that have ended their mask mandates are Delta, American, United, Southwest, Alaska, Jet Blue, Spirit, and Frontier. I'm trying to think of a US airline not on that list and drawing a blank.

Health experts, meanwhile, were not pleased. A pediatrician at Harvard Medical School noted, "I think it's extreme shortsighted and, if I were impolite, would say kind of stupid." Booster rates for seniors and other vulnerable groups remain low, and many members of those groups rely on public transit, meaning the ruling hurts rather than helps them. One physician noted that the ruling limits the government's power to issue mandates during any public health crises, saying, "If this becomes a precedent, that a judge can overrule government and CDC experts, that puts us in a problematic place for the next surge, the next pandemic, bioterrorism, or who knows." He continued, "Should you wear a mask when you're in an aluminum tube shoulder to shoulder with people for six hours? I think you should and I will."

Official covid case counts are up 43 percent nationwide, but hospitalizations are not. Experts are citing three possible causes. First, vaccines and boosters are effective and keep breakthrough infections mild. Second, it is getting easier to get treatments such as Pfizer's Paxlovid. Finally, people may have had covid but not known and afterwards have some extra immunity from the prior infection. The prevalence of home testing also complicates things. As a result, several sources have said that they will concentrate their reporting on hospitalization rather than case counts.

Moderna announced preliminary results for the vaccine they are developing to handle various variants. They hope to have a vaccine candidate with even better results by late May or early June. I wonder if that will be around when the next new, totally unexpected variant appears. A vaccine that can handle Omicron and its subvariants is made and then there's a brand new variant. It could happen.

It seems that in the first year of the pandemic, four Americans were infected with a version of the coronavirus that is found mostly in minks. Two of those people worked at a mink farm; the other two were a taxidermist and his wife. This would be the first known instance of possible animal-to-human transmission, though that cannot be conclusively proved. Mink-to-human transmission has also been reported in Denmark and the Netherlands.

And now the not-so-fun job of proofreading and hoping at least one slightly larger laptop is working for me tomorrow.