The Road goes ever on and on ... Day 476 (976)

It won't be a long post today, but the 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle done without a picture of what the puzzle was is done. It's The Family Dog burrowed into the sheets and comforter of the master bed. It was a birthday gift from Son #1. I wanted to finish it by today so that we don't have to deal with the puzzle box in which we work ,on the floor somewhere through the Thanksgiving holiday. My Brother arrives today for a Thanksgiving stay, which is what set the date of puzzle completion. I still have three other puzzles to do "blind," a puzzle of Mars, and an all-black puzzle to do.

The Professor would request kudos if he'd read about the study reported from The Royal Society -- COVID and Relative Humidity. The Professor runs a humidifier all winter long to keep the humidity in the house around 50 percent. The researchers used meteorological data from around the world, and a long procedure I will not describe (TL;DR). They computed indoor average conditions for each country using measured outdoor condition variables and established human thermal comfort zones. They found that COVID outcomes were less severe at intermediate indoor levels between 40 and 60 percent. More severe outcomes came at both lower and higher humidity levels. 

A study on Paxlovid rebound looked at 127 COVID patients treated with Paxlovid and 43 who were not. Most--95 percent--had been vaccinated at least once. Patients did rapid testing every other day for 15 days and completed a symptom survey daily for 17 days. Patients were interviewed after six months as a follow-up. For rapid antigen testing, viral rebound occurred in 14 percent of the Paxlovid patients and five percent of the control subjects. Symptoms were reported by 18 percent of Paxlovid patients and seven percent of control patients. While there was a Paxlovid rebound effect, it was not as high as the general public perception has been. The researchers noted that Pfizer, the maker of Paxlovid, had no involvement with the study.

On the number front, WHO reports the first global increase in weekly COVID cases in four months; WHO cautioned the the count was lower than it really was due to a decline in testing. Meanwhile, the US death rate showed a seven-day average below 300 for the first time since June 2022. The lowest since the pandemic began was 222 in July 2021.

All sorts of articles are out there about the holidays and COVID. Fortunately both The Professor and I have few relatives who might visit or who might invite us to visit them. We did do rapid tests on Sunday, as did My Brother. Had any been positive, we would have changed plans. All were negative, fortunately.