Local COVID-19 updates

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Confirmed deaths are down from last week, as are all four of the seven-day averages. In fact, the seven-day deaths average (0.4 deaths per day) is the lowest it's ever been reported. Hospitalizations held steady. Cases continued to drop, but with testing continuing to crater, that's neither surprising nor encouraging.

The wastewater levels at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority Deer Island plant are a bit encouraging, though, as both the north-side and south-side levels are down compared to last week. They're still far above their levels two years ago, let alone their record-low levels. Oh, for those wonderful days of June 2021, when there was still plentiful testing, the delta variant was just beginning to rear its ugly head, and the omicron variants had yet to appear ...

Titan lost

It's now official: OceanGate's carbon-fiber submersible Titan imploded Sunday while diving on the wreck of RMS Titanic, killing all five passengers and crew:
( Read more... )

I'm an ex-submariner myself, so this has particular resonance for me. But the sub I went to sea aboard had a high-tensile-strength steel hull, with every single weld radiographed prior to our even leaving the drydock. The Titan submersible had a carbon-fiber hull and, apparently, no way for the (single) hatch to be opened from the inside. They also routinely lost communications with their support ship, and I keep hearing stories about how the company refused to get certified by any of the maritime classification societies.

The sea will kill you if you give it the chance.

Note that I'm using a Wayback Machine link to OceanGate's website; currently, their web server (www.oceangate.com) is returning HTTP 525 errors, which is apparently a Cloudflare-specific error meaning "SSL Handshake Failed".