This is a quick follow-up on a COVID post I did last week, noting evidence of a new mini- or moderate- surge after the trough of the last month or two. I had said that my impression was that the driver was mainly the relaxation of mitigation measures — both as policy from governments and people individually changing their behavior. That seems less clear than I thought. There seems to be more evidence that the Omicron subvariant BA.2 is a key driver, perhaps the key driver. The evidence still seems muddy because BA.2 appears to have only a moderate advantage in infectiousness. And its share of cases has grown fairly slowly against the original Omicron strain. So there’s a lot about the dynamics of this latest trend that are not clear to me. But just let this stand as a partial correction or update on the earlier post which focused on declining mitigation. Be safe out there.

A few of you asked for book recommendations to read more on the subject of my post this morning about Ukraine and the homeland of the speakers of proto-Indo-European, the ancestor language to the languages spoken by just under half the world’s population. There’s a long answer and a short answer. But the short answer is the better one. The book is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World by David W. Anthony.

This is hard to make sense of. But let me give you a brief update. A short time ago the Russian paper Komsomolskaya Pravda published an article which cited official Russian military numbers of killed in action in Ukraine as 9,861. That is a mind-blowing number. In one month Russia would have lost 2/3rds of the soldiers it lost in a decade in Afghanistan. But then a very short time later the article was pulled and replaced by a 404 error. Then it was reposted without any numbers.

What lends some credibility to these numbers is that that is in the ballpark of many Western estimates for Russian fatalities. I’ve been watching expert Russia watchers debate this in real time on Twitter and they seem to disagree on whether this was a real number that was rapidly pulled or whether it was just a complete goof, a typo.

From the outset of the Ukraine Crisis, Ukraine’s relationship with Europe and potential integration into Europe via the European Union has been a, perhaps the, cornerstone issue. I got to thinking about this over the weekend since almost every European language originated in the country we now call Ukraine. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t argue that what I’m describing has any particular relevance to the current crisis. But it’s a fascinating prism through which we can look at our connections to the distant past. The language which I am now writing and which you are now reading originated on the steppeland just north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea. In other words, in the region we now call Ukraine and some adjoining parts of Russia and perhaps Romania. This is true of English — a loose hodgepodge language — but not only English. All European languages except Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian and Basque start there. (Maltese, an official EU language, is derived from Arabic, a Semitic language. Turkish is an Altaic language so it depends what you count as “Europe.”) And not just Europe. This is also the origin point for the languages of Iran, much of Central Asia and northern India (including Hindi and Urdu). This is not to mention the Spanish, Portuguese and French that are spoken in the Western Hemisphere outside of Anglophone Canada and the United States.

I mentioned last week that a significant part of high energy prices which have fueled inflation have been driven by the refusal of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies to increase supply and moderate prices. As we discussed last week, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, has been fairly open about the fact that he sees no urgency about cooling oil prices as long as the U.S. government has not provided him with immunity for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi or total support for its war in Yemen.

Just this morning, the Saudi Foreign Ministry put out more of what amount to threats if the U.S. doesn’t back its war in Yemen. From Al Arabiya …

I mentioned a few days ago that one of the most promising innovations of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. is the use of wastewater analysis to predict the ebbs and flows of pandemic waves. The technology isn’t new — it’s just testing sewage water. It’s not that no one had thought about it or done it before. But the society-wide crisis of the COVID pandemic has demonstrated its utility and potential in dramatically new ways. So two thoughts: We’ve seen the potential of these approaches already. Mandates and other interventions are now maniacally polarized. But the federal government should be using this strategy to create a simple and easy to understand forecasts of COVID prevalence. I knew that cases were likely to rise a week ago because I follow wastewater analysis trends and also follow patterns around the world. But it shouldn’t be that hard. It should be available in something like a weather forecast, done in a systematic fashion, made available to the public through all the logical channels. It could and should be like weather reports or the daily and weekly allergy forecasts you can find online.

A Note from TPM Reader JI from Finland …

Then the very important point related to the role of the USA in the current Ukraine affairs (sorry I cannot write this rant in English in a short format). This is a point of view of a person living next door to Russia, having a long cultural experience about their behavior.

TPM Reader PT has some thoughts and questions on two versions of the Ukraine War he’s seeing from the Times on the one hand and various government analyses, outside expert analyses and comments from military analysts.

I’ve mainly been following the Russia-Ukraine war via various sources on Twitter, including the UK’s MOD and US DOD updates, plus some maps, knowledgeable sources, etc. From these I’ve learned that Russia has barely advanced at all in several days, that they appear to be unable to advance into the country because they’re limited by round-trip distance their supply trucks can cover on 1 tank of fuel, that their logistics and armor are getting picked off, that their Air Force has underperformed to a degree that nobody can really explain, that they’re losing an average of over 1000 soldiers per day (where losses include injuries and defections as well as deaths). CW in these sources is that Russia’s forces will probably lose all capacity for offensive action in the next couple of weeks unless something changes drastically in their favor. In other words, what Ukraine is doing in combat, and what the rest of the world is doing to assist them, is working.

Then I go to the NYTimes website. None of the above is reported.

Rep. Don Young (R) of Alaska has died at age 88.

We’re trying for a strong close to week one of our annual TPM membership drive. I’ve spoken to a number of you who had been planning on signing up or were on the fence and have now taken the plunge during this drive. I totally get this. I have places I want to subscribe to or sign up for and I’ve been meaning to do it for months and still somehow haven’t. So if this is you, please stop what you’re doing for just a minute, like right now. Actually take out your wallet and click this link and sign up. Like this moment. Three minutes later you’ll be back to whatever you were doing before. But please, if this is you, just do it this moment. You’ll feel good about it and, really, Prime and Prime AF, are pretty awesome.