Covid-19 diary: Part 50

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com June 19, 2023 When done properly, masking is a safe and effective way to reduce the transmission of Covid-19 and other airborne diseases. It can also be cumbersome and uncomfortable. With the emergency phase of the novel coronavirus pandemic now ended, masking requirements seem to be a very rare exception […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 49

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com June 18, 2023 The public’s willingness to deal seriously with Covid-19, the deadliest pandemic in a century, began petering out long before the end of 2020. Some people never treated the disease as a true crisis; others weren’t willing to do so for longer than a few weeks. The American […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 48

By Matthew E. Milliken MEMwrites.wordpress.com Aug. 31, 2022 It’s been six months since my last post about the Covid-19 pandemic. As spring got under way, it became clear that the nation had reached an uneasy accommodation with the novel coronavirus. While the disease infected Americans at a hitherto unseen rate in the early weeks of […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 47

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comFeb. 28, 2022 The United States has reached a strange pandemic crossroads. On the one hand, new Covid-19 diagnoses have fallen by more than 90 percent from Jan. 14. Then, nearly 807,000 cases were reported daily. On Sunday, Feb. 27, that had dropped to roughly 65,285[1]. As the crush of cases has […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 46

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comFeb. 5, 2022 I was idly glancing at my Covid-19 spreadsheet on Friday morning when I noticed something truly startling. The U.S. recorded 20,301,167 new Covid diagnoses in January of this year, exceeding the 20,024,800 cases that were found here throughout all of 2020. Just one month into the new year, 2022 […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 45

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comDec. 31, 2021 Well, it’s safe to say that 2021 did not turn out how I’d hoped it would. I’m sure hundreds of millions of people around the world feel the same way. Covid-19 vaccines arrived with nigh-miraculous speed at the tail end of 2020 and, despite major early problems with distribution, […]

Apocalypse last year (and now): A Yale professor and a magazine journalist document the ongoing Covid-19 outbreak in ‘Apollo’s Arrow’ and ‘The Plague Year’

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJuly 30, 2021 Although the world is still beset by Covid-19, even in nations where wide swaths of the population have been vaccinated, the publishing world began to produce volumes on the pandemic last year. One of the first to appear, in October, was Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 44

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJuly 11, 2021 I’m going to nitpick a tweet that I dug up yesterday. I’d seen it a few days ago, and I initially intended to use it to make a point in Saturday’s blog post about the continuing Covid-19 disaster. I ended up not including it, but I’d already dug into […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 43

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJuly 10, 2021 When people drive by a car crash, they tend to take a look. The phenomenon is called rubber-necking — motorists turning their heads to inspect something on the side of the road. This usually causes traffic to slow, and sometimes leads to additional wrecks. But if people saw car […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 42

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJune 29, 2021 I like to think that I’ve been exceptionally careful during the pandemic for someone who does not work in the field of either health care or biological sciences. For more than a year, the only person I spent time with indoors without a mask was my parent. My in-person […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 41

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comJune 28, 2021 The state of the pandemic in America continues to improve. However, further progress is not guaranteed. The nation is averaging nearly 11,700 new daily Covid-19 cases this month, the 15th-highest rate over the 18 months of the crisis. Only the first three months of 2020 were lower. Indeed, new […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 40

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMay 23, 2021 Most of my posts about the Covid-19 crisis have been focused on the United States. That’s partly because this is where I’ve lived all my life, but it’s also partly because from April 2020 through the first quarter of 2021, the U.S. suffered from the novel coronavirus more than […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 39

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMay 18, 2021 I wrote yesterday that I expect to feel more comfortable going unmasked in public as time goes by. I’ve currently taken long walks or hikes without wearing a mask for the past three days, but I plan to continue masking indoors for at least a while. I expect that […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 38

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMay 17, 2021 On Sunday, I took a long walk without wearing a mask for the first time in a number of months. It felt odd. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention abruptly changed its guidance on Thursday, May 13, announcing that fully vaccinated individuals need not wear masks or social […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 37

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comApril 29, 2021 I wanted to take another look at the current condition of the novel coronavirus outbreak in the United States, something I last did a month ago. When I did a gut check before starting this new status report, I had a cautiously positive outlook. Vaccinations have continued at a […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 36

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comApril 26, 2021 After I got my second Covid-19 vaccination and was released from my observation period…  Wait. Actually, a quick story about that. I sat down in a chair in the observation room. A young woman was sitting to my right when I arrived. She was still sitting there when they […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 35

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comApril 26, 2021 I received my second vaccination dose this morning. It came as a major relief: I will be considered fully immunized in two weeks, at which point my chances of becoming seriously ill with or dying from Covid-19 will be extremely low. My immunity evidently won’t last forever; I may […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 34

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comApril 15, 2021 UNC Health’s vaccination clinic was set up at the Friday Center for Continuing Education, a University of North Carolina facility that I’d visited once years ago for an event that has faded from memory. I left my house around 4 p.m. on Monday, April 5, and arrived a little […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 33

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comApril 14, 2021 If you read my previous blog entry, then you know that I made obsessive efforts to reach the UNC Covid-19 vaccination clinic’s surplus dose hotline on Friday, March 26, and Tuesday, March 30. I was unsuccessful despite placing around 200 calls. Then came Monday, April 5. The clinic sent […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 32

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comApril 13, 2021 Toward the end of March, a Twitter post retweeted by someone I follow in this part of North Carolina called my attention to an account with the rather unwieldy handle uncstandbycovidvaccine, a.k.a. @uncstandbycovi1. The account’s purpose is stated bluntly in its biography: End of day COVID vaccine standby account. […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 31

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 31, 2021 Dr. Deborah Birx, one of President Donald Trump’s top advisors on the novel coronavirus pandemic, recently said that the U.S. suffered far more Covid-19 deaths than were necessary. It caused something of a stir. “I look at it this way — the first time we have an excuse,” Birx […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 30

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 30, 2021 Author’s note: A few hours after I originally published this post, I added a footnote to the fourth paragraph so I could incorporate a short list of tweets from conservatives who want to reopen society and/or oppose social distancing. I also changed the phrase “Republican-leaning” to “conservative-leaning” in the […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 29

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 29, 2021 I have some good news and some bad news about the state of the novel coronavirus pandemic in America. First, the good news. The rolling-week daily coronavirus death rate has dropped by more than half this month. The moving seven-day per diem of 2,042.9 deaths on Monday, March 1, […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 28

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 21, 2021 In my previous post, I explained why the continued declines in new Covid-19 diagnoses and new Covid-19 deaths don’t allay all of my concerns about the pandemic. One big issue — one of several — is that testing in the United States has dropped by nearly a quarter. I […]

Covid-19 diary: Part 27

By Matthew E. MillikenMEMwrites.wordpress.comMarch 19, 2021 Nearly every day since Dec. 3, 2020, one of the first things I’ve done in the morning has been to check Covid-19 trends and tweet about them. This grew out of my interest in comparing the pandemic death toll to those of other disasters in American history. (Click on […]