Summary
Covid cases are surging across the U.S. post-holidays, with rising test positivity, hospitalizations, and deaths, while booster uptake remains low.
Only 21.4% of adults and 10.3% of children have received the latest booster, leaving vulnerable groups, including the elderly, at higher risk.
Experts warn of continued dangers from Covid, including long Covid and economic impacts, as the virus has not yet reached an endemic state.
With uncertain federal priorities, researchers stress the importance of monitoring infections, updating vaccines, and using preventive measures to mitigate future waves.
Mpox and bird flu glare from the corner, bidding their time.
Ebola looks up from their book and yawns.
I was reading the posts from one of my local animal rescues last night about how they’re dealing with hundreds of dead snow geese that are testing positive for avian flu. They were begging for more money, PPE, and medicine to euthanize the ones not dead yet and crematory fees for dealing with the hundreds of contaminated bodies. That state and fed don’t seem to be pulling their weight in this, and they’re nervous about using the same equipment and vehicles they have for their healthy animals for so much bird flu. The photos and videos they showed were devastating.
Meanwhile, comments section was filled up asking how they know it’s bird flu, that bird flu is a gov conspiracy (US or China, both were covered) or this is what the mystery drones were gassing us with, and something about a “fog you could taste” (???) that was to blame for this.
If other animals like vultures get to the dead geese first, it just spreads the flu more, and if people try to dispose of the geese themselves, it can spread to their cats or birds at home.
People will just complain about the price of eggs as we lose so many animals, and potentially people.
And such news doesn’t seem to be hitting mainstream, or at least I’ve missed some of it. Pandemic level stuff is so 2020 and not click worthy maybe.
My mind always goes to the “what ifs”, and reading that my first thought past more spread was…what happens when a natural system of carrion breakdown loses part of its mechanism? Dead animals will still decay, but not as fast and complete without the help, and diseases can come from rotting corpses that just sit.
I’m not the most up to date on what all one should know, but it’s rapidly rising on my list of need to knows. I only ever hear blips about it from MSM and it always gets played like oh some more birds died today or this is why eggs got expensive. At the most bad I’ve noticed it get reported is when it hurts business by wiping out giant portions of large poultry farms. I don’t even think all these dead geese would make local news.
We do have a good test run of what happens without scavengers. This is just the first link that came up, but India near killed off their entire vulture population a few years back and it killed over half a million people from disease and such.
*biding