Looking back on 2021, looking ahead to 2022

We finished this year for the family the same way as last year, finishing a 1000-piece puzzle. Before the new year we will be sending Gaby back to NYC -- United let us re-book her out of Appleton (rather than Milwaukee) and to upgrade her to first class -- and we expect Jane to head back to Juneau early in the new year, after being with us since Thanksgiving, a spell that included a week in Portugal with Dena.

On Christmas Eve eve I Zoomed with the brothers and sisters and that even was followed by a lollapalooza of a Zoom with "the cousins," illustrating another change in holiday communications since the onset of the pandemic on March 12, 2020, two months after a great family weekend in Los Angeles. The cousin consensus was to marvel at the absence of detected Covid infections across the extended Lorenzi clan -- brother, sisters, nieces, nephews and grandchildren over these past 22 months.

Omicron has become a big story in the last six weeks or so, primarily due to its supposed rate of infections which has driven a testing regimen that, as has happened previously, the more you test, the more prevalence of the virus in the population, yet with little evidence that this 'version' much leads to severe illness, hospitalization, intensive care or deaths. The most common Omicron symptoms are a cough, runny nose, aches. While Covid has been more like a strong case of the flu that preyed on the sick, overweight, poor and otherwise unhealthy, Omicron is more like a cold, another virus for which there is no cure or prevention, just treatment.

Meanwhile, the 'brains' at CDC have been contemptuous of any treatments for Covid, seeming to think that the only 'final solution' is to eliminate Covid from the planet -- fat chance. And they seem to think that testing people will 'fix' things, when testing tells us very little about a person's likely outcome of the positive test, and nothing at all about the prospect of a negative test protecting the person from future infection. And highly 'vaccinated' states are experienced some of the highest rates of breakthrough or breakout cases, i.e., 'fully vaccinated' getting infected. And this all after the CDC, having established a protocol for identifying Covid as THE cause of death whenever the medical director has the smallest suspicion of its presence in a recently deceased, now they had to change the definition of a vaccine.

When the CDC redefined 'vaccine' as an impact reduction treatment rather than a prevention (Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”), I am waiting for them to re-define the common cold as Omicron.

The USA's problem is the fifty million fat, sick, old, diabetic seniors and when the median age of a Covid death is 80, you just have to scratch your head. The USA mortality rate has been climbing for ten years, so 'excess deaths' based on a five-year trailing average baseline are grossly overstated. I ran a regression on Covid mortality rates per million by state. First, I had to learn the fact that Covid mortality rates are lower than the Social Security Administration's mortality rate tables, e.g., about 17% for those over 70. And the regression found that a very large percentage of the variance in death rates could be explained by BMI and age. With over 94% of Covid deaths being accompanied by a slew of pre-existing comorbidities. The CDC confused correlation and causality; people dying with Covid does not mean that they died from Covid. Same for hospital beds filled with 'Covid' patients: A good percentage of those 'Covid' patients came into the hospital for something unrelated to Covid and were tested and found to be infected. That plus all the staff who quit, were laid off or were fired has had a big impact on the number of beds available, so percentages make a lot less sense.

As we face 2022, I worry more about war in Taiwan or the Ukraine than about the number of 'excess deaths' due to Covid. Eat right, exercise, take your Vitamin D, avoid sick people, wash your hands, don't smoke and lose weight seems to be the best preventive strategy.

We booked Edinburgh flat with business class flights (paid for with two-year olds vouchers), 24 May to 6 June. And I hope to be back in Florence in late August for another ten days. Before all that I hope to start the new year with a much better diet -- mo ice cream, no chocolate -- with the goal of getting below two hundred pounds before Edinburgh. And 2022 will be my first year on Medicare, along with a supplemental Plan F, with he hope of reducing and containing my healthcare costs while maintaining my health, which has been solid since we moved to Wisconsin.

After following 2020's record of over 1,300 miles walked, I am going to finish 2021 with just over 1,100. And that means almost 5,000 in the past five years, cataloged by Strava.