Happy Canada Day

Happy Canada Day to my friends north of the border! (Pour saluer la fête du Canada en français, appuyez sur 2.)

The inherent good taste of Canada is, of course, most clearly evidenced by their having chosen to celebrate their national holiday upon my own natal day.

Local COVID-19 updates

( Wall-o-text )

Not exactly a great birthday present, but there are some slight improvements in the day-over-day numbers, at least. While newly reported deaths held steady, cases and hospitalizations are both down from yesterday. On the other hand, the seven-day averages for cases, hospitalizations and percent-positive are all higher than yesterday, and higher than this time last week, and way, way, way higher than this time last year.

Seriously, last July 1 the state reported all of seventy-six new cases. Today the state reported 1,678. We haven't had a day with less than a thousand new cases since March 29; we haven't had a day with less than five hundred new cases since July 22, 2021 (nearly a year ago). Certainly we're doing better as far as deaths and serious illness go, thanks entirely to effective vaccines; as far as trying to reduce infections, though, it's all "Party on, Wayne! Party on, Garth!"

Presumably the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will take this weekend off, what with Monday being Independence Day; however, there's no notice on the Tableau dashboard. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do note on their various tracker pages that their next update is July 5:

COVID Data Tracker will not update on Saturday, July 2, 2022, Sunday, July 3, 2022, and Monday, July 4, 2022. Updates will resume on Tuesday, July 5, 2022.

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 28 active and 3,635 cumulative cases as of June 30. In the most recent "newsflash style update" at 7PM on December 21, 2021, the town reported 1538 cumulative cases with 89 individuals in isolation, 1417 recovered and 32 fatalities.