Views from the Outside

 Luke 22-26 (ESV) 22 One day he got into a boat with his disciples, and he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side of the lake.” So they set out, 23 and as they sailed he fell asleep. And a windstorm came down on the lake, and they were filling with water and were in danger. 24 And they went and woke him, saying, “Master, Master, we are perishing!” And he awoke and rebuked the wind and the raging waves, and they ceased, and there was a calm. 25 He said to them, “Where is your faith?” And they were afraid, and they marveled, saying to one another, “Who then is this, that he commands even winds and water, and they obey him?” My dog doesn't like thunder.  The change in pressure doesn't worry him, wind and rain don't even wake him up and lightening doesn't seem to worry him, but thunder drives him mad. I try to look at it from his perspective: thunder is loud and the walls will shake under a good thunderclap and perhaps even the floor vibrates a little and he can

 Not much going on on the Covid Front.  Over the past winter, there was some murmur of concern over the dreaded "triple-demic" which would be RSV, the Flu and Covid.  But with cold weather in the rear-view mirror, that was clearly a bust.  Here are the current graphs for ER visits for those three, from the CDC's website. The CDC doesn't track Flu incidence by month and year like they do with Covid, but they do have a yearly comparison of hospitalizations, comparing this year's estimate to previous years (as the dots on the y axis.  The spread is pretty crazy, going all the way up over 600K, but I highlighted where their actual estimate for 2023/2024 is showing that it was probably not that significant of a season. In a previous post, I speculated that RSV was some new thing that no one really understood.  The name "RSV" kind of looks like Respiratory ... Virus and so I think it's just the flu but apparently it's something else altogether.  But it