The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 352 (852)

Monkeypox moment: The demand for monkeypox vaccine exceeds the available supply. We have also had the first confirmed case here in Central Virginia. On the coronavirus front, the wastewater analyses done in Virginia suggest that we are in a post-holiday surge. Or we can hope it's just due to the July 4 holiday and not to the growing prevalence of BA.5. A post-holiday surge would be shorter and, maybe, less worrisome. 

The chronic shortage of registered nurses is worse than it's ever been in some parts of the US. That's causing more and more covid patients to lack nurses to care for them. Or, if the nurses that are in one hospital are busy with covid patients, other patients are doing without. Nursing employment seems to be somewhat cyclical. One year, graduating RNs are easily able to find employment in whatever place they want to live. Other years, graduating RNs take what they can find where they find it. Back at the start of the pandemic, there was mention of applications for nursing and medical schools increasing. Maybe we need to give it another year or two for the nursing students to graduate assuming they went to programs giving a bachelor's in nursing.

China's economy just had the lowest quarter of growth since early in the pandemic; it only grew 0.4 percent. Lockdowns and quarantines in support of zero covid are having a significant effect. Zero covid makes it hard for companies and even small businesses or shops to make investment decisions, buy property, or travel. There is a growing sense of impatience, but the government seems firmly committed to zero covid.

Research on viruses. Good or bad? In mid-2020, researchers catching bats in Laos found coronaviruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the one underlying the pandemic. They are experimenting with one in a high-security lab in Paris, letting it evolve and studying how it might jump to humans. So, is this a good thing? We clearly need to know more about viruses, but should research be done on a new one or the one we need to know more about? There's your starting point for a rousing dinnertime discussion.