It's a slow weekend on the coronavirus front. Pittsburgh Public Schools are reacting to a rise in covid cases locally by recommending that masks be worn. This of course raises the question of how many parents or staff will actually comply. "Recommend" is not "require." I suspect the mayor, city council, or whoever would be able to require rather than recommend is, for now, taking the easy way out. Something will likely hit the fan the first time an official at some level somewhere reinstates a mask mandate.
While I recognize that a model is by no means a representation of what will come to pass, it is still worth thinking about a model I found this morning. It showed the decline of the BA.5 subvariant in the US and showed BQ.1 and BQ.1.1 "going parabolic" as Thanksgiving approaches. Since Thanksgiving is the year's busiest travel weekend, things could get dicey if the model is even almost valid. We've had winter surges before; why should this year be any different?
Israel is reporting a potential Ebola case in a citizen who fell ill after arriving from Uganda. We have become so global that it's easy for this to happen. If the case was caught early enough, it can likely be contained. Ebola is not respiratory, fortunately, and is spread through bodily fluids, making it harder to transmit than covid. I'm not wishing ill on Uganda, but I'd rather cases be confined there than loosed onto the world.
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