The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 281 (781)

Between the leak of the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade draft and the continuing war in Ukraine, there wasn't a lot of coronavirus news out there this morning. The number of people who were at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday night and have since tested positive for covid continues to grow. Besides multiple journalists, few of whose names I even recognized, the Secretary of State tested positive. Given his recent international travel, though, he might have contracted covid elsewhere. I again cross my fingers that POTUS doesn't get it. 

WHO again announced a revised covid death toll based on excess deaths rather than numbers reported by countries. As before, that number is about double the sum of all the national numbers. The reported numbers total in the neighborhood of six million, despite there being 15 million more deaths than normal in the time span of the pandemic. Excess deaths in Mexico are roughly twice their reported covid toll. Pakistan's excess deaths are about eight times its reported covid toll. Topping both of those countries, Egypt's number of excess deaths was roughly 12 times its reported covid death toll. Between home tests complicating case numbers and how deaths are counted country to country, we will never know just how bad the last couple of years have been.

The BA.2.12.1 subvariant will likely be dominant in the US in a matter of weeks. In the week ending this past Saturday, it accounted for 36 percent of new cases compared to 26 percent one week earlier, and 19 percent in mid-April. Fortunately, there's no indication so far that it's more serious than the original Omicron.

One reporter described China as "prisoners of their own narrative" in regard to their zero-covid policy. They can't change course now much as they might want to. The effects of zero-covid have hurt China's competitiveness as a global manufacturing center. Countries are less willing to invest there given the uncertainty and instability accompanying the lockdowns that support zero-covid.  

Research is ongoing to develop a covid vaccine nasal spray. Injected vaccines prepare the immune system to fight covid after it has entered the body; they don't keep it out in the first place. The hope is that as a nasal spray, a vaccine would produce a strong immune reaction in the nose and throat where most covid infections start. Over a dozen clinical trials are underway.