The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 294 (794)

I ended with monkeypox yesterday, so let's start there today. It's now spreading in Portugal and Spain in addition to the UK. So far, cases seem to be concentrated among gay and bisexual males. 

I mentioned a while back that there seems to be a lot more bad driving out there now than there was before the pandemic, when I used to go out in the world on a more regular basis. I also mentioned a very short while back that gunshot, overdose, and sexually-transmitted disease deaths were up? While road deaths did not reach a new all-time high, in 2020 they were the highest they've been since 2005.

North Korea's new report mentions 62 deaths and 1.7 million cases. The report also includes that one million people have recovered. Blame for the outbreak is spreading. Kim Jong Un ordered the execution of two people for covid-related crimes. One was a customs official who allegedly did not follow virus prevention rules when importing goods from China. 

The levels of cases and hospitalizations in New York City is now at high alert, a level that comes with the recommendation that the city government require masks in all public indoor settings. The mayor replied, "We're not at the point of mandating masks." City health officials are recommending that masks be worn in offices, grocery stores, and other public indoor settings. Unfortunately, "recommended" and "required" have very different definitions.

Public school systems nationwide are losing students due to the pandemic. All together, there are now at least 1.2 million fewer students than there were in 2020. One possible cause is that in response to virtual or online learning, some parents switched to homeschooling or moved their children to private or parochial schools that chose not to stay closed as long as the public schools did. In some cases, the children just dropped out. Older teenagers may be staying at jobs to help offset income parents have lost. Parents may have simply stopped making younger children attend. Most interesting is that in some states, including Florida, that eschewed virtual learning, enrollment rebounded and is still on the robust side.

Senior citizens have been especially hit by the coronavirus. Now it seems that 32 percent of those older adults who survived covid had symptoms of long covid up to four weeks later compared with 14 percent of adults between the ages of 18 and 64. The difficult part is that many of the symptoms of long covid are the same as changes that occur with aging. It may be hard to identify to which group individual symptoms belong. Being able to know that would obviously help the people who care for those elderly.