edschweppe: (summer house)
Got my registration request in for this summer's edition of the All Star 2 conference on Star Island.

Something to look forward to, while I await the next snow event. (Supposedly three to four inches in my neck of the woods by tomorrow evening.)
edschweppe: (snowpocalypse)
The National Weather Service still has a Winter Storm Warning posted for my neck of the woods until 1AM tomorrow morning:
but only another inch or two of accumulation )
I'm not going anywhere tonight, so no worries on my part. Seven inches of accumulation as of this morning; eleven as of just a moment ago. Alas, the winds are picking up, so going for a walk tonight won't qualify as fun.

And Wednesday is still forecast for low 50s (F) and rain, so it'll probably be all washed away come Thursday.
edschweppe: (snowpocalypse)
Official Winter Storm Warning in effect as of 4PM EST today:
Nine to fifteen inches expected )
Of course, Wednesday's forecast is for rain and high temperatures near 54F, so everything but the plow berms will likely wash away in a few days ...
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Of interest only to me, perhaps - but the first I heard of Henry Kissinger's death tonight was a push notification on my phone from the France24 app, followed almost immediately by notifications from the BBC and Deutsche Welle.

I'm not sure why state-owned European broadcasters do a better job of breaking US news than private US firms do, but there you go.
edschweppe: (vote at your own risk)
I'm not at all sure this qualifies as "moving past chaos", as the Associated Press headline claims. Still, we do have a Speaker of the House of Representatives, three weeks after the House Bombthrower Freedom Caucus deposed Kevin McCarthy:
Mike Johnson, a staunch Louisiana conservative, is elected House speaker as GOP moves past chaos )
Representative Johnson is, from what I understand, not just extremely conservative. He's a full-fledged denier that Joeseph Biden won the 2020 Presidential election, as evidenced by his being the author of an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court when the state of Texas claimed that the presidential election was fradulent because ... Pennsylvania gave out too many absentee ballots due to COVID. (The Supremes shot that case down in flames, noting that "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.") Johnson is also apparently in favor of a national ban on abortion, along with massive cuts of Social Security, Medicare, and other "entitlements." He also has a ... poor, shall we say? ... record as a fundraiser, which is one of those things the Speaker of the House is expected to do for his party.

So, we've now got a not-yet-well-known Republican backbencher, who presumably will do whatever the Freedom Caucus demands of him. Yay?
edschweppe: (vote at your own risk)
Not only not the Speaker of the House, but no longer even the Republican nominee: House Republicans drop Jim Jordan as their nominee for speaker, stumbling back to square one
Three strikes and he's out! )
The official tally of the third House ballot was 210 votes for Democratic House leader Hakeem Jeffries, 194 for Jordan, 25 for various not-Jordan Republicans, and four members not voting. Reportedly the private vote in the GOP conference to keep Jordan as their nominee was 112 nays and 86 yeas.

I have no clue where this goes next, although I'm guessing it's going nowhere slowly and painfully.
edschweppe: (vote at your own risk)
Once again, Jim Jordan is not the Speaker of the House:
Read more... )
I suppose the good news is that Jordan is only going through this exercise in humiliation once per day, rather than Kevin McCarthy's agonizing multiple-votes-per-day marathons. On the other hand, McCarthy never dropped below two hundred votes.
edschweppe: (vote at your own risk)
Today, it was Jim Jordan's turn to not be elected Speaker of the House of Representatives:
Here we go again ... )
Somebody should nominate Sesame Street's Count Von Count for Speaker. At least he would be able to count votes ...
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Well, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has reorganized how they present COVID information - again:
Read more... )
On the one hand, it makes some amount of sense to provide a one-stop overview of respiratory illnesses statewide, as the combination of COVID, flu, and RSV combined are what's most likely to overload the health care system.

On the other hand, this looks to me like the state (like the feds) is looking at respiratory illnesses as just an acute threat, and is focusing its attention and messaging on the short term. Long COVID is definitely a thing, despite our lack of hard data as to prevalence and treatment.

On the gripping hand, this quite thoroughly breaks my wall-o-text builder. They're scattering information across at least five raw data files, and it sounds like they're shifting from one data file per dashboard per week to one file per dashboard per July-through-June surveillance period (updating every week). This may take a while to fix.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
I (finally) got my fourth COVID booster today, at the not-quite-so-local CVS that I got my previous shot at. As-you-may-remember-Bob, I tried to get it almost three weeks ago, only to be foiled by my insurance carrier not having gotten their act sufficiently together to update their coverage files to include the current shots. Apparently, letting the private sector handle vaccinations (rather than the Federal government driving things) doesn't necessarily mean smooth rollouts. Who knew?

This time around, things went swimmingly; in, out, no drama. One new development: the old fifteen minute wait to see if you have a horrible reaction is no longer mandatory; I haven't had a bad reaction yet, so I didn't bother waiting around.
edschweppe: (whiskey tango foxtrot)
It's done: Kevin McCarthy voted out as Speaker of the House
Read more... )
Those of us who've been doing Zoom meetings for the past few years know the sensation of the speaker being on mute. This is, AFAICT, the first time a Speaker has been put on boot ...
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Wall-o-text )

Some of this week's numbers seem at least a little bit good - newly confirmed deaths down by one, newly confirmed cases down by one percent, newly reported tests up by eight percent. On the other hand, both the current hospital census and the number of new hospitalizations over the past seven days are up, which is not good news under any circumstance.

Maaaaybe we've hit a peak? Maaaaybe?
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
The US government's free home COVID tests website is once again taking orders for no-cost, at-home COVID tests delivered via the US Mail. Each household in the US can order four more free rapid tests.

I put my order in today. According to the USPS, "Orders will ship free starting the week of October 2, 2023." There's also the following note regarding test expiration dates:
Tests may show "expired" dates on the box, but FDA has extended those dates; see the full list of extended expiration dates.
Presumably, that means they'll at least start by shipping more of what's already in stock, rather than wait for the new-build tests announced last week.

It stinks that we still need these; given the need, though, far better to have them than not.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
In further COVID-is-not-done-with-us news, there's a new outbreak at the Holyoke Veteran's Home:
Read more... )

Hopefully those cases remain mild - because finding ten cases in just four days is not good.

(This story was on page B2 of today's print edition of the Globe. It is currently not on the home page of the Globe's website, although it is available on the Globe's COVID page.)
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Wall-o-text )

A big jump in COVID deaths compared to last week (29 vs 19); reported confirmed cases up slightly, but the test rate ticked up as well, so the percent-positive ratio actually dropped a bit. The current census of COVID patients in hospitals is up slightly, but the ICU population this week is more than double last week (39 vs. 19), and the total number of new hospitalizations is up almost 15%. At least the week-over-week MWRA wastewater numbers are down. On the other hand, there was a lot of rain in the Boston area late last week; since many of the MWRA cities and towns have combined sewer and storm drainage flowing out to Deer Island, I have to wonder how much of that decrease is due to dilution.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Semi-good news: Biden Administration announces reopening of free COVID tests website:
Read more... )
The bad news, of course, is that at-home tests are still needed, due to our not actually eliminating COVID transmission nationwide (let alone worldwide).

But this is at least a decent step in the right direction. Especially as part of the program is to make sure domestic test production lines remain available to handle future surges in demand. Like, say, surging cases this fall and winter ...
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Once the news formally broke that the FDA and CDC had signed off on the latest COVID vaccines, I signed myself up for a booster at my more-or-less-local CVS. The appointment was early this evening, so I hied myself down at the appropriate time and presented myself at the vaccine check-in counter - only to be told that my health insurance wasn't covering the shot, and would I like to spend almost two hundred bucks out of pocket instead? According to the pharmacy tech, the insurers have yet to update their coverage files for the new vaccine. Left unexplained (because the tech had no information) was how CVS' online vaccination scheduling tool, which supposedly specifically checked my insurance status as part of the signup process, let me make the appointment in the first place.

Mumble, grumble, and whiskey tango foxtrot? I'll likely call the insurer on Monday and see if I can get an answer; I have a cynical suspicion, though, that much pointing of fingers and blaming someone else will ensue.

Anyway, I did not get vaccinated today. Which annoys me no end.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Wall-o-text )

The trends statewide continue to be mostly in the bad direction; with the confirmed death count up by one and the confirmed case count up eighteen percent. The test count actually went up, and the percent-positive rate managed to drop a fraction of a percent; still, at 11.74%, that's way too high to have any confidence that reported cases match the actual prevalence of COVID in the population. There were slight drops in the numbers of patients currently in hospital, but both the seven-day average and the number of new hospitalizations over the past week are up again. In additional unencouraging news, both sides of the MWRA sewershed are up over six hundred copies/milliliter, continuing their upward climb from their late June lows (around one hundred).

In better news, the Food and Drug Adminstration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have approved updated COVID-19 booster shots. (I'm signed up to get my latest booster on Saturday.)
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
More thunderstorms this afternoon. Also, a fortunately brief loss of power; presumably one of the system's automatic transferring dinguses successfully transferred this time.

Many of the branches and trees downed by the Friday storms are still lying about, waiting to be collected. Not to mention all the pine cones that haven't been ground to mush by local traffic.
edschweppe: (can't take it any more)
A nasty microburst knocked out power to myself (and most of my town) yesterday afternoon around 2:30. Irritatingly, the storm also apparently knocked out cellular data service, while leaving cellular voice service intact (at least for me); I actually had to call Eversource's 800 number to report the outage, like it was still the twentieth century.

I got power back about three hours later. Hot, dark, and jonesing for data wasn't particulary fun.

The town has an update posted on its website; as of 9:15AM, there are still over two thousand Eversource customers in the dark:
Read more... )
That's still nearly twenty percent of the town in the dark, with detours still up in the center of town. On the other hand, there haven't been any reported injuries in town, which definitely qualifies as good news.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Wall-o-text )

Welp, that ain't good. Not yet horrible, perhaps, but definitely not good. Newly confirmed deaths are up by 50%. So are newly confirmed cases, even as tests dropped back below 20k per week; the percent-positive ratio is now over twelve percent. The current hospital census is up almost eleven percent from last week, while the number of new hospitalizations is up over twenty percent. And the MWRA wastewater numbers are up over forty percent from last week on the north side and nearly sixty percent on the south side.

In hopefully good news, a study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston found that people's immune systems have as good (if not better) responses to the latest BA.2.86 variant than the other variants currently circulating:
Read more... )

I was hoping that the CDC's new "weekly" CDC Respiratory Virus Updates page might include an update, but no such luck as of this posting.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
... no matter how many folks claim to be done with COVID, as these three stories from the Labor Day weekend show:

* Four pitchers for the Cincinnatti Reds baseball team tested positive
* So did the lead singer for the rock band Metallica
* And so did First Lady Jill Biden

(All links to the Associated Press website, which is paywall-free)
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Wall-o-text )

The good news (such as it is) is that there were fewer deaths this reporting period. Also, tests are up fractionally (although still far below the testing rate of April 2020). However, cases are also up, and the percent-positive ratio is now up to 11.39%, the highest reported since January 12 (when we were averaging four times as many tests per day). Hospitalization rates are also up, and the wastewater levels from both the north and south sides of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority sewershed are both up compared to last week, not to mention way up compared to their June levels and way, way up from their all-time lows in previous Junes.

One other point in the wastewater numbers: back in April, the MWRA went from daily sample collecting to a three-day-per-week cycle. As of last Thursday (August 24), they've gone back to daily collections. I haven't seen any official announcement as to why.

Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have launched a new site, CDC Respiratory Virus Updates, in which "CDC is posting updates on the respiratory illness season here every week", apparently on Wednesdays. The first such update (last Wednesday) reported the initial risk assessment for the new BA.2.86 COVID variant; the second (yesterday) updated that risk assessment:
Read more... )

The new variant hasn't officially been spotted in Massachusetts, and it's still very early days figuring out whether it'll be better or worse than any of the other variants floating around. On the other hand, the local trends are mostly going in the wrong directions anyway, even without this new variant. There's no need to panic - yet - but I can't say there's any basis for lowering one's guard.

Mug shot

Aug. 24th, 2023 09:23 pm
edschweppe: (vote at your own risk)
Yet another historic first for former President Donald Trump: a mug shot while being booked in Fulton County, Georgia

Read more... )

That is one ugly mug shot.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Wall-o-text )

Newly reported deaths ticked up by one. Newly reported confirmed cases up nearly thirty percent, while newly reported tests are only up around ten percent; thus the percent-positive ratio has broken the ten-percent mark for the first time since January 19, when it was reported at 10.86%. The current hospitalization count is up to three hundred, the highest level reported since April 6.

At least the MWRA wastewater levels haven't been showing big jumps over the last couple of weeks. And the absolute numbers of hospitalizations and deaths are still low compared to previous surges. But a percent-positive ratio over ten percent and climbing is bad news.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Starting today, I've added a new datapoint to the wall-o-text: the number of new COVID-19 hospitalizations statewide over the preceding seven days, along with the rate of those new hospitalizations per 100,000 population. It won't quite match the county-level new hospitalization rate that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention use to figure the COVID-19 Hospital Admission Level that they're using to recommend prevention steps. On the other hand, I still haven't found a good source for the CDC's numbers, so I figure statewide numbers are better than nothing.

So, what do we get this week?

Wall-o-text )

We get bad news, that's what! Both confirmed and probable deaths are way up compared to last week (three combined deaths last week, twenty-one this week). Cases are also up, far faster than tests; this week's percent-positive rate is 9.94%. Hospitalization rates are all up by double-digit percentages, and the number of new admissions per week is climbing steadily. The one possible bit of good news is a small drop in the seven-day averages for MWRA wastewater levels, but I'd definitely want to see that trend continue for several weeks before I'd start feeling better.

The absolute numbers are still not terribly high. But, dear God, those trends just stink.

Prior to today's data being released, the Boston Globe published a "here's a guide to staying safe in 2023" article, which actually semi-sorta takes the next wave seriously:
Read more... )
Yikes.
edschweppe: Count Von Count of the Muppets (count)
Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted for the fourth time last night; this time in Fulton County, Georgia, along with eighteen other named co-conspirators:
Read more... )

The indictment covers ninety-eight pages, nineteen defendants, and forty-one separate counts starting with violations of the Georgia state Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. That first RICO count alleges one hundred sixty one separate and distinct criminal acts in furtherance of the conspiracy to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

That's four indictments, in four separate courts, in three states and the District of Columbia, in less than five months.

Way to go, Donnie.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Massachusetts' wastewater report interactive dashboard is currently showing the following note:
Please note: The 8/10/2023 update of the COVID-19 Wastewater Report interactive dashboard has been delayed due to delays in the availability of test results. The dashboard will be updated as soon as the new test results are reported to the Department.
Unsurprisingly, they don't have the raw data file available, either. However, the main COVID-19 Interactive Dashboard is up to date. So what do we see?
Wall-o-text )

First, the (tiny) bits of good news: only two confirmed deaths reported in the past seven days, and a bit of an uptick in testing.

Pretty much everything else stinks. Confirmed cases are rising fast (up 27.3% from last week). Hospitalizations are 35.9% higher than last week. The percent-positive ratio is now up to 9.00%. The last time we had an over-nine-percent report was January 26's 9.35%, as we were coming down from our last big winter surge.

As noted above, the statewide wastewater data is delayed. On the other hand, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority has posted a PDF report dated today, which shows seven-day averages (as of August 5) at 557 copies/mL on the north side and 486 copies/mL on the south side. That's way up from the roughly one hundred copies/mL they were reporting in late June of this year.

Sure, the press coverage has been focusing on how things aren't as bad as before, such as this Associated Press article from yesterday talking about this being a "far cry from past peaks" and "the [wastewater] concentrations are still fairly low". But the trends are in the wrong direction. Unless something changes quickly, the currently-low absolute numbers are going to climb to levels that can't be compensated for by applications of official dont-worry-be-happy-ium.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
In today's Boston Globe, an op-ed piece by Dr. Jerome Adams: Ignoring COVID-19 is still not an option for most Americans
Read more... )

I'm glad to see somebody in public health calling out that ridiculous op-ed by Dr. Ashish Jha claiming that we can now ignore COVID. And goodness knows health equity is a huge problem in these United States. But Dr. Adams makes no mention of masking, ventilation improvements, or even air monitoring.
edschweppe: Myself in a black suit and black bow tie (Default)
Another day, another Federal arraignment for Donald J. Trump, formerly the President of the United States:
Read more... )
I'm fine with a rapid trial. After all, if Trump is in fact innocent, shouldn't he have the benefit of an acquittal before the New Hampshire primary?

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Edmund Schweppe

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