Since the pandemic started, I've worn a face mask when entering all public buildings and stores. There have only been a handful of times I forgot to do so, or remembered while in the store and then put one on.

I don't go out shopping very often - generally 4 to 6 weeks apart. Sometimes I stop and think, has the world changed since the last time? Is is still worth wearing a face mask to reduce the risk of catching Covid and getting long-term side effects? Is the risk low enough to dispense with the precaution? I haven't been sick with anything in 3 years and don't really want to break that streak. I don't care if people don't see my face; maybe I could go on forever like this. But I also feel self conscious, especially at first, and tend to avoid looking at other people even more than otherwise, when wearing a mask.

The South Carolina DHEC website that had been tracking SC COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations stopped doing so as of July and now only shows vaccination stats.

The CDC site still has a tracker:
United States COVID-19 Hospitalizations, Deaths, Emergency Department (ED) Visits, and Test Positivity by Geographic Area

A Positive Covid Milestone (2023/07/17)
"In a sign that the pandemic really is over, the total number of Americans dying each day is no longer historically abnormal."

But: Early COVID-19 Indicators Show Increase: CDC Data (2023/07/24)
"Coronavirus emergency department visits and test positivity are on the rise."

It's been 9.5 months since my last booster shot. Per the following CDC page, I'm not currently eligible for another.

Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines
"New vaccines expected in fall 2023
On June 15, 2023, an FDA advisory committee met to talk about COVID-19 vaccines and additional strains of the COVID-19 virus. They recommended that COVID-19 vaccines should be updated to provide protection against the Omicron variant XBB.1.5 for use by the fall of 2023.

A couple weeks ago I decided not to wear a face mask in the first store I went in. I already had second thoughts while walking up to the entrance. What if I get stuck in line behind someone who is coughing and/or sneezing? It's always easier to have a face mask already on in a situation like that, than to have to consider other people feeling antagonized by my action of putting one on in their presence. But I knew the store wouldn't be crowded, so I went through with it, maskless. But I wore a mask in the next 2 larger grocery stores I shopped in.

The following week, my work supervisor told us he had caught Covid at a conference. He said it was his first time of having gotten it.

cdc-and-states-are-misreporting-covid-19-test-data (article from 2020/05/21)
"We’ve learned that the CDC is making, at best, a debilitating mistake: combining test results that diagnose current coronavirus infections with test results that measure whether someone has ever had the virus."

I haven't been able to correlate the daily South Carolina numbers that are reported in different places. Maybe the above kind of thing is part of the reason why.

The way SC has reported COVID-19 numbers on its daily report page has changed a few times.

This website captures daily screenshots of the above page, so one can check the numbers from prior days (the site also captures data reported for other states):
https://covidtracking.com/data/state/south-carolina#historical

Since June 10, the SC page distinguishes between viral and antibody tests in the "COVID-19 Testing in South Carolina" section. Before then, it either didn't distinguish them or wasn't including numbers for the antibody tests.

Since June 10, that same section has included a timestamp, which shows that those numbers are as of midnight of the previous day.
By contrast, the top of the page has always listed a time (usually between 3pm and 6pm of the current day) when the page was last updated; I think the numbers shown in the top box are what's been reported as of that time.

From May 22 to June 9, the "COVID-19 Testing in South Carolina" section has included caveats:
"Total negative tests is the cumulative number of all tests without positive results. This total includes individuals who may have been tested once and individuals who have been tested multiple times.
Total positive tests is different than the total number of positive cases in the state. The number of cases is the number of individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19 at least once. Some of those individuals have been tested multiple times for various reasons, and the total positive tests captures all of the positive test results in the state. One positive test may have been tested multiple times, with potentially multiple positive results"

Since June 10, the section has a simpler caveat, which I think is saying the same thing:
"This table represents volume of tests received and not distinct individuals tested. Individuals could have multiple tests."

The daily news releases list the percent positive rate. For example, yesterday:
"The total number of individuals tested yesterday statewide was 5,794 (not including antibody tests) and the percent positive was 13.3%. When the percent positive is low, it may indicate that more widespread testing is being performed and the percent positive may more accurately reflect how much disease is present in the community."

I haven't figured out how that percent positive is being calculated, based on the numbers on the other page.

It seems to me that the percent positive rate should only be based on the viral test results of distinct individuals who have been tested. Or that it should at least not include repeat *positive* test results from the same individual who has previously tested positive. It probably also shouldn't include negative test results from individuals who previously tested positive (showing that they've fought the infection off.)
But the main page doesn't list those numbers. Maybe that is why I haven't been able to come up with a calculation that gives the same results.

The top box of the main page gives a "Total Positive Cases" number, which I *believe* (but am not sure) is the overall number of distinct people so far who have ever tested positive for either COVID-19 or the antibodies, not including repeat tests.
Comparing that number to the prior day's number would include not only the number of new people who have been diagnosed with COVID-19 since the prior day, but also people who have tested positive for antibodies, meaning they had COVID-19 in the past. So it wouldn't make sense to use that number to calculate a daily percent positive rate.


Ah, wait. There's another section of the main page, "Percent Positive Trends Among Reported COVID-19 Cases". It says: "The percent positive is the number of individual people that tested positive (770 as of June 12) divided by the number of individuals tested (5,794 as of June 12)".

Comparing the "COVID-19 Testing in South Carolina" sections for June 11 and 12 gives 957 positive viral tests out of 6019 tests. So the number of positive repeat tests must be (957 - 770 = 187). The total repeat tests must be (6019 - 5794 = 225). So (225 - 187 = 38) people must have previously tested positive and now tested negative... and/or maybe tested negative twice?

One thing that seems not to have been brought over during the times when I imported entries to my DW account from my LJ account, are the "memorable entries" or "memories". Ie., an indication of which entries I had flagged as memorable. On LJ, I had 5 posts tagged as memorable, but my DW profile shows 0 memories. So for anyone who is doing imports, I suggest you double-check that afterwards.

Last weekend, I deleted all my old entries from LJ using LJ-Sec. I wasn't able to delete them all at once - when I first tried, it gave an error about exceeding the posting limit for the hour. Then I used a work-around to do the deletes in smaller chunks. Even that way had issues, which I now realize may have been due to the LJ servers being overloaded, from all the other people who were using DW's importer at the same time.

(Or maybe LJ-SEC is just glitchy. While in the process of deleting my entries, I noticed that many protected posts were still there, even though I *thought* I had successfully deleted them all last month. That is similar to the issues I had last week - even when LJ-SEC didn't give errors, it wasn't deleting all of the selected entries. I had to delete LJ-SEC's User Data folder and refresh the entries, and try again multiple times until everything was finally gone.)

Based on the DW Stats page, there have been (holey-moley!) over 250,000 new DW accounts created between 2017-04-04 and 2017-04-14 (look at the "newbyday" values). There are now over 3 million DW accounts (look at the "size" values), although only about 1 in 20 of them (154,000) have been "active" in the last month (ergo, simply creating a new account isn't enough for it to be considered active).

Update, 2017/04/16: (See more info in comments.) It turns out those account numbers include OpenID ones automatically created when importing comments, so the actually number of personal accounts is much less. This other DW stats page lists the total number of personal accounts now at 726,000, of which 164,000 have been active in the last month. I didn't find anything showing how many new personal accounts have been created in the last 2 weeks.

..

After doing the deletes, my LJ profile still showed 5 memories, along with broken links. I had to do a separate step to delete the broken links. It didn't occur to me to take notes on which entries those had been. But I do still have a clue, based on what I had tagged them by, as that is one thing I had saved to my notes. So I can probably find them again if I want to.

Edited to Add:
I just realized why memories may not be automatically brought over as part of an import. I see now that you can also mark other people's posts as memorable, not only your own. Obviously, an import deals with your own posts, not other people's posts, so even if there was functionality for copying memories, it would need to be limited to your own posts. Or it would need to support pointing to external URLs, which could be a problem.