BobRingReflections

The current COVID-19 pandemic apparently started in the Wuhan region of China in December 2019, and by early 2020, had spread to all continents (except Antarctica), leading to almost 120 million people infected and over 2.6 million deaths, at the time of this writing.  Also, in early 2020, a world-wide effort began to develop a vaccine to prevent COVID-19 infections - a miraculous effort that in less than a year - in record time - produced two 95%-effective vaccines, with vaccination efforts beginning in the U.S. in late December 2020.   This is the story of COVID-19 vaccine development.   I will cover a description of COVD-19 characteristics, the research over the last 25 years that enabled such rapid development of a vaccine, the development timeline for the principal two U.S.-approved vaccines, other vaccines available or in development, the potential benefit to future vaccines of the recent stupendous efforts, and a snapshot of COVID-19 infections, deaths, and ...

I was born on March 29, 1940 at 5:35 am.  I know that because of the existence of an accurate calendar that depicted the year, month, and day of my arrival, and a clock that displayed the early morning hour and minutes past the hour.  (And because someone, other than me, wrote it down on my birth certificate.)  So where did accurate calendars and timekeeping devices come from?  That is the subject of this article. My principal resources were Britanica.com, “Calendar Chronology,” and ScientificAmerican.com, “A Chronology of Timekeeping,” along with numerous other online sources. Prehistoric Peoples The only measures of time available to primitive peoples were the solar day (the space between successive sunrises) and the lunar month (the space between two successive new moons).   So, they reckoned the passage of time, counting suns, or days, and moons, or months.   They counted “years” broadly, noting when leaves began sprouting on a particular tree or ...