BIRD SANCTUARY

San Jose just recorded COVID in the wastewater at 99.99% of its peak
Statewide, COVID test positivity rates are rising quickly

Many respiratory virus illnesses peak during the winter due to environmental conditions and human behaviors. COVID-19 has peaks in the winter and also at other times of the year, including the summer, driven by new variants and decreasing immunity from previous infections and vaccinations.

I'm not old* and if anything I'm underweight.

Also I feel about 10 years older than I did before I had COVID and I lost weight during COVID I can't put back on. I have also gone from drinking 1-2 alcoholic drinks* a day to 2-4 per month, but the caloric loss there does not in any way account for the general weirdness in my lack of appetite and inability to put on weight with what feels like forced caloric consumption. I managed to stop losing weight and put a few pounds back on without resorting to calorie counting by just forcing myself to eat more than ever seems quite correct, but this feels weird.

I used to get hungry very reliably an hour or two after smoking weed and that just sort of stopped around the same time, along with my sexual desire falling off a cliff. Interestingly, the latter thing has sorta been more of a blessing than a curse because I don't have any problems in terms of performance, I just don't feel like I'm being led around by my hormones the same way I did from ages 17-COVID.

If there's an actual change there, though it's probably not actually good.

* some of this is lifestyle choices and recognizing that actually 1-2 beers a day is Pretty Fucking Bad, but, again, COVID shifted my reaction to alcohol over a long enough time frame to disrupt my long term use pattern. I simply lost the desire, the effects became different and muted, and the cognitive slowness following even moderate consumption has increased.

I'm pretty overly self-analytical but I'm convinced this virus made me dumber in ways I both do and don't understand and probably did other stuff too. Can't wait for round 2, 3, 4, 5.....

It's quite something to hear of somebody dying from a sudden cardiac arrest after a week long stint in the hospital and say that it's just a big mystery, the doctor doesn't know anything at all, they were in perfect health.

And everybody else is taking it all in stride as if it's just how it is

Multiple inhibition assays revealed that antihistamine drugs broadly inhibited the infection of various SARS-CoV-2 mutants with an average IC50 of 2.4 µM. The prophylactic function of these drugs was further confirmed by authentic SARS-CoV-2 infection assays and humanized mouse challenge experiments, demonstrating the therapeutic potential of antihistamine drugs for combating coronavirus disease 19.

Interestingly, several antihistamine drugs, including clemastine, astemizole, azelastine, brompheniramine, and ebastine, which have been approved for treating allergy symptoms without side effects for decades, have been found to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection or replication via protein-protein interaction analysis or drug library profiling (30–35). Another study revealed that the use of azelastine was associated with a reduced incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection based on an analysis of over 219,000 electronic health records (36).

I took a flight from the east coast to the west coast earlier this year to see my daughters and granddaughters for the first time in two years. I am 72 and retired.

Other passengers on the flight west were coughing and sneezing. I tested positive for covid one day after arriving and isolated myself in my hotel room, instead of staying with family as I had planned, for the remainder of my visit for the safety of my loved ones.

I only wish the other passengers on the fight from the east had been more caring about the welfare of others. I wore a N95 mask on the flight back east, even though I was no longer contagious. Other passengers viewed me with alarm, as I was the only one on the plane wearing a mask. The only person sitting in my row asked to be moved because of my mask, and was allowed to move to a more expensive seat at no charge.

Something is backwards here.

I was reading a general audience media article (take it as you will) on Chronic Wasting Disease in Canadian deer, especially the hot spots in places like Northern Alberta. When a deer dies in a hay field its body essentially creates a prion bomb, contaminating the nearby hay. Alberta exports a lot of hay creating many opportunities to spread prions to new and exciting locations and species. And I thought having a weird alien Eastern species of fungus called "Dog's Penis Fungus" spring up in my spoiled imported hay mulch was unsettling. According to the article prions survive temperatures that will melt lead so don't rely on the cleansing power of brush fires to clean things up.

The article suggested that CWD crossed species from sheep (scrappies) to deer on a mixed deer/sheep facility in the northern US. At the same time I was reading this article it came to light that the US allows farmers to use chicken shit as a nitrogen booster in cattle feed.