The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 298 (798)

Let's get monkeypox out of the way up front. There appears to be a theory circulating that monkeypox has grown out of the coronavirus; I have read several doctors debunk this thinking. POTUS did call monkeypox something "to be concerned about," adding, "It is a concern in that if it were to spread it could be consequential." 

Three Air Force Academy students who have refused to be vaccinated against the coronavirus will be awarded their degrees but will not be commissioned "as long as they remain unvaccinated." It has not yet been decided if they will be required to refund to the government their tuition for four years. A fourth cadet who initially refused vaccination did get vaccinated and will be commissioned.

Shanghai has reopened part of the world's longest subway system in preparation for lifting the lockdown as of June 1. Some businesses have reopened, and some people are now allowed outside their homes. Community transmissions have largely been eliminated. There are some parts of the city that are still under tight control, but there has at least been progress.

In late September 2020, covid was discovered in mink at a Michigan mink farm. Last month, the CDC confirmed that four people there were infected with the same unique covid variant found in the mink. This is the first, and so far the only, possible animal-to-human coronavirus transmission in the US. Scientists are worried that mink could become a long-term reservoir and help in the creation of new variants. The Netherlands and Denmark had this worry as well in the early days of the pandemic. They closed all their mink farms and killed all the mink. At the time, the US developed a set of voluntary guidelines; there is still no national screening, just self-reporting. Covid has now been detected on 18 mink farms; the CDC has visited eight. At the Michigan farm, 159 mink were tested with the result being that all but two were actively infected. One dog had covid antibodies. Interestingly, some herds of mink have since been vaccinated. I saw nothing to indicate how many doses of vaccine a mink gets nor if it would need a booster. 

It's probably not the news you'd like to hear, but Omicron and its variants suggest that people could get covid three or four times in a year, similar to the common cold. A Columbia University epidemiologist says that it is "not going to simply be this wintertime once-a-year thing and it's not going to be a mild nuisance in terms of the morbidity and mortality it causes." Since jumping out of a moving car is generally not a good idea, I guess we'll have to buckle our seat belts and see where this ride takes us.