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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.

As Kate Riga noted repeatedly during her coverage of Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) made a point of injecting some QAnon-adjacent claims about Jackson into the public record Monday.