Some material advantages of keeping a journal – Handling money matters for seniors – Falling numbers for respiratory diseases – Evening statistics
This journal helped me to save money yesterday. I received a bill in the mail for $380 from the PM Pediatrics for Virginia facility. This puzzled me, since I do not have children and could not recollect having made any doctor’s visit at the date of the alleged appointment. To be certain on this last point, however, I inspected the journal entry for the day and discovered that on September 10, when I was supposed to have made a visit there, I actually had been on a flight to Denver to begin the vacation in Rocky Mountain National Park. So I called them up to ask why I had received such a bill, and they told me that it was for a COVID test I had taken at their facility.
Now it is true that the facility does offer COVID tests for adults and children alike, and indeed I did take a couple of tests from them about two years ago, at a time when testkits for home use were not readily available. I pointed out, however, that a COVID test should not cost $380, and in any case it was physically impossible for me to have taken one on the date they claimed to have seen me, since I was thousands of miles away. They quickly agreed to withdraw the bill altogether.
I doubt if it was a deliberate attempt at fraud; in all likelihood someone made a mistake in accounting. But such an incident demonstrates how vulnerable seniors are in matters such as these. There are all sorts of scams directed at them, both via telephone solicitors and Emails, as well as outright errors such as the one I met with today; and it requires constant vigilance to combat them. Seniors, especially those who are unfamiliar with the Internet, are by far the most likely to be taken in. In my father’s last years I had to handle virtually all of his accounting for him, just as I’m doing now for my mother.
The so-called “tripledemic” has not materialized. Cases for both influenza and RSV have gone steadily downward over the past six weeks. COVID hospitalizations trended upward during December, but these also appear to going down in recent weeks. It is difficult to be certain on account of the reporting lag from various hospitals, but the fact that so high a percentage of the populace has already been infected and that nearly 70% of all Americans are fully vaccinated has rendered us much less vulnerable than we were during the winter of last year. In Virginia, on several days during the past couple of weeks there have been no deaths at all. On some few days (November 20th, December 4th, December 18th, among others) there have been no COVID deaths across the entire country during a 24-hour period.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide: 670,772,387; # of deaths worldwide: 6,726,970; # of cases U.S.: 103,482,187; # of deaths; U.S.: 1,125,020. Today’s death toll from COVID world-wide was less than 1,500. A year ago the death toll for this date was nearly six times that amount, so the intensity of the disease is definitely subsiding.