"An Army of COVID Viruses"

Andrew Nikiforuk, a great reporter with The Tyee, has written an excellent article about the COVID pandemic that everyone, especially the deniers and the minimizers, should read right away.

It's called "We Now Face an Army of COVID Viruses", and he says, "The pandemic has not ended. It is evolving, with big implications. Here are six."

1. One virus has become many.
2. The new COVID soup is a unique experiment in evolution.
3. What were viral peaks are now a constant rising sea of infections with high and low tides.
4. One pandemic has morphed into regional epidemics.
5. Reinfections rarely happened. Now they are commonplace.
6. We can do more to blunt the evolutionary threat of COVID subvariants.

He sums up the article with this:

"So the pandemic is not over. Viruses, one of the most abundant entities on this planet, don’t stand still. They mutate. They shift. They adapt.

The more a virus transmits; the more opportunities it can exploit to change its shape and character. Infections and repeated infections where random mutation and non-random natural selection lead to variants better adapted to the environment in which the viruses survive and reproduce — namely us.

We can do better at recognizing this reality and collectively respond to save lives and limit constant waves of infection. We can:

Broaden our vaccine-only policy to an anti-transmission strategy that is more varied and flexible with one goal: limiting the circulation of the virus.

Set new standards to clean the air in our schools and workplaces to dramatically reduce viral spread in the public.

Educate people about the multiplying benefits of wearing masks in public places and make effective masks easily available to the public and health-care workers.

Pour more resources and effort into improving variant-proof vaccines.

Hear from our leaders a more engaged, accurate and sophisticated discussion of where we’ve arrived in this pandemic and why, no, it is not close to being over.

Such public discourse must acknowledge hard truths about the risks of repeated infection, on COVID and uncertainties about the changing burden of disease.

From where we stand today, viral evolution, which is never linear, can pursue many futures, as evolutionary biologist Gregory has written. 

An immunocompromised host could produce a variant capable of launching another major wave like the original Omicron.

Animal reservoirs could add something surprising or nasty to the evolutionary party, too.

China’s explosion of infections in 1.4 billion people could generate its own bold new variant.

Two viruses with wildly different parents could recombine in human hosts and also alter the pandemic.

Or one of Omicron’s four lineages could evolve in a different direction altogether. 

In any case the pandemic will continue to evolve.

Will our response?"

An Unforgivable Downplaying of the Holocaust - on International Holocaust Remembrance Day!

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the clueless, politically correct opinion writers at the Kentucky Courier-Journal decided to publish this disgraceful piece: "Holocaust Remembrance Day is a time to remember more than one atrocity."

I got through the following section but too outraged to read any further, The writers are Honi Marleen Goldman, Maria A. Fernandez, Mary Lou Marzian, Rosalind Welch and Tina Ward-Pugh.

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"International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 is not just a reminder of the six million Eastern European Jews who were rounded up and murdered between 1941 to 1945. As one Louisville rabbi recently said, January 27 is a teachable moment to remember all the hate speech and all the violence that is perpetuated against religions, races and genders, all those acts committed in the past and those that continue to this day.

Jews do not have a monopoly on persecution and atrocities.

For one group, for one person, to claim that the hate and violence towards them is more important than another’s, only encourages more acts of violence against others, including Black people, Asians, Hispanics, Muslims, LGBTQ+, trans-gender and Native Americans. This list is not all-inclusive."

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Unbelievable shamelessness!  It's called Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember the 6 million or more Jews who were deliberately exterminated in order to eliminate them as a people!  

I don't remember ever reading or hearing about 6 million Blacks or transgender people for whom gas chambers were specifically built. I don't remember learning about 6 million Native Americans who were marched naked to open pits, shot by the Nazis, and thrown into mass graves. Where are the descendants of the 6 million Hispanics who are victims of the Final Solution? I'm waiting..

We will never be able to persuade victim-hustlers like these about the true scope and nature of the Holocaust. It wasn't "hate and violence" -- it was genocide. Go look it up before you have the nerve to ever write another column like this.

UK Guardian: ‘[Americans] aren’t taking this seriously’

What's it going to take to wake Americans up from their COVID apathy? I don't see their careless attitudes changing any time soon -- I see fewer masks and more risk-taking, with dismissive remarks such as, "Oh well! They're old and sick anyway..."

From the British Guardian: ‘People aren’t taking this seriously’: experts say US Covid surge is big risk

"Fewer precautions, recent holidays and subvariants have driven rise but boosters, masks and other precautions are still effective

In the fourth year of the pandemic, Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays, fewer precautions and the continuing evolution of Omicron subvariants of the virus.

New sub-variants are causing concern for their increased transmissibility and ability to evade some antibodies, but the same tools continue to curtail the spread of Covid, especially bivalent boosters, masks, ventilation, antivirals and other precautions, experts said.

Yet booster uptake has been “pitiful”, said Neil Sehgal, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Maryland School of Public Health. Antiviral uptake has been low, and few mandates on masking, vaccination and testing have resumed in the face of the winter surge, which is once again putting pressure on health systems.

New Covid hospital admissions are now at the fourth-highest rate of the pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Covid hospitalizations declined somewhat after the summer wave, but never dropped to the low levels seen after previous spikes, persisting through the fall and rising again with the winter holidays.

“Hospitals are at maximum capacity,” said Brendan Williams, president and CEO of the New Hampshire Health Care Association, of his region’s current rates. “I’m not sure what the trajectory of this thing’s going to be, but I am worried.”

The majority of Covid hospitalizations are among those 65 and older, although the share for children under four roughly doubled in 2022.

In the past week, Covid deaths rose by 44%, from 2,705 in the week ending 4 January to 3,907 in the week ending 11 January.

This is one of the greatest surges of Covid cases in the entire pandemic, according to wastewater analyses of the virus. It’s much lower than the peak in January 2022, but similar to the summer 2022 surge, which was the second biggest.

And it’s not done yet. “Certainly it does not appear that we are peaking yet,” Sehgal said."

Shalom and Aloha!

The word police and overly-sensitive idiots are on the warpath about the latest "offensive" words you shouldn't say. USA Today asks:

Is it time to stop saying 'aloha' and other culturally sensitive words out of context? 

"'Aloha.' 'Hola.' 'Shalom.'
These are ways to say 'hello' in Hawaiian, Spanish and Hebrew, respectively. But just because you can say something doesn't mean it's always appropriate.
On the surface, simple greetings and phrases from other races and cultures may seem fine to sprinkle into our vernacular. Inclusive even.
But did you know that 'aloha' doesn't just mean hello or goodbye? "It's a greeting or a farewell, but the meaning is deeper," says Maile Arvin, the director of Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Utah. 'One of my Hawaiian language teachers taught it to me as 'Aloha means recognizing yourself in everyone and everything you meet.''If you're not Hawaiian and you say it, it could come off as mockery. And that's just one word to think about.
The use of certain words requires education, knowledge and the foresight to understand when they should – or shouldn't – come out of your mouth.'

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Sorry, but the only thing that comes off as mockery is articles like this and endless attempts to ban every word we use! Just stop already.

Woke University

From the Washington Examiner:  "USC's nonsensical decision to declare the word 'field' as racist. The University of Southern California's School of Social Work sent a letter declaring it would no longer use the word 'field' when referring to one's area of expertise. Instead, it is replacing it with the word 'practicum.'  Why would such a reputable school make such a silly, nonsensical change? Because of slavery, of course. The change was motivated by an adherence to the radical orthodoxy of  'anti-racist' methodology."

Do these idiots not see how ridiculous these bans of words are?  And anyone who uses the replacement words is just as foolish.

If "field" meaning "area of expertise" is to be banned, does that mean that "field" as in an "area of grass" is also off-limits?  The lyrics to "American Pie" come to mind:

"The players tried to take the field
The marching band refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?"

Don McLean had better get to work revising that line right away!

"Everyone in the Country is at Risk"

Here's an alarming COVID report from USA Today. Ignore it at your own peril.

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"The newest COVID-19 variant is so contagious that even people who've avoided it so far are getting infected and the roughly 80% of Americans who've already been infected are likely to catch it again, experts say. 

Essentially, everyone in the country is at risk for infection now, even if they're super careful, up to date on vaccines, or have caught it before, said Paula Cannon, a virologist at the University of Southern California.  

'It's crazy infectious' said Cannon, who is recovering from her first case of COVID-19, caught when she was vacationing over the holidays in her native Britain. 

'All the things that have protected you for the past couple of years, I don't think are going to protect you against this new crop of variants,' she said. 

The number of severe infections and deaths remains relatively low, despite the high level of infections, she said, thanks to vaccinations – and probably – previous infections. But the lack of universal masking means that even people like her, who do wear masks, are vulnerable."

 

 

Jersey Jihad

When I first saw this headline, I thought they were talking about something that happened in the Middle East. Instead, not surprisingly, it has taken place here in the United States, in New Jersey:

Machete-waving maniac chases Orthodox Jewish teens at their school

Hitler would be proud.

A Picture of Liar George Santos is Worth A Thousand Words

As Christina Cauterucci reports in Slate,   "Tuesday marks the first convening of the new Congress in Washington, which means Kevin McCarthy will be spending morning, afternoon, and possibly all night being repeatedly embarrassed by the many Republicans who detest him.

But no one is having a worse day than incoming Rep. George Santos, the millennial Republican who flipped a seat on Long Island in November despite (or, actually, because of) lying about nearly every aspect of his biography, including working at Citigroup, graduating from Baruch College, having grandparents who fled the Nazis, and being Jewish.

No one wanted to sit near him." 

It's going to be a very long 2 years for him -- unless he resigns before he can get sworn in. Right now, he's just getting sworn at!

Read the whole article and see the photos for yourself here.