Hannah, who last sent me questions in 2023, has broken her silence to write

"I was thinking about the post you made on May 17th, 2024, about taking your first COVID test. I remember thinking at the time that there can't be that many people left in the US who haven't taken a COVID test before, and I'm sure the number is even smaller a year later. I know a good chunk of people in the US say they haven't had COVID before (I only know two people who haven't had it) but I just think it's kind of wild that there are people out there who have never even tested for it."

For the record, I still haven't COVID (so far as I'm aware), so add me to your list, Hannah. And I haven't tested since that post in May 2024. But I agree with you, there really can't be many people in America who haven't been tested by now.

Nearly a billion tests had already been run in the US before widespread reporting ended in 2022. According to the CDC, the disease is still killing hundreds of people a week, so I assume testing remains widespread in medical facilities today. If you find someone who hasn't been tested in 2025, they're probably under 3 years old (although they do have tests for babies now, so even untested toddlers seem unlikely given how often rug rats get sick).

Hannah continues

"While I was looking for that post, I saw the one from January 24th, 2025. Why do you know that fact off the top of your head (that 10x more people in the US die every year from cattle than from sharks)? Do you peruse CDC data in your free time? Or did you hear it and then go to the CDC website to corroborate it? Or are you worried about getting killed by a cow? I'm just curious.

I'm flattered that anyone actually reads these posts thoroughly enough to criticize the sanity of my reading habits.

I know lots of facts off the top of my head. I should; I've been collecting them for almost 50 years. (I asked my parents for The Book of Lists for Christmas while I was still in elementary school.)

I'm pretty sure I first heard the cattle death statistic on Twitter, back when it was called Twitter and someone else owned it. And as I am prone to doing, I corroborated the basic veracity of what on the surface appeared to be an outlandish statement before repeating it. (I'm as gullible as the next Internet user, but I don't like repeating lies if I can help it.)

I do like to do research of that sort. Finding facts is fun, even when they run counter to my expectations. So, yeah, I've been known to deep dive in the CDC's data from time to time for giggles, just as I every once in a while wade through the Georgia Historic Newspaper archive when the mood strikes. Is that odd behavior? Doesn't seem so odd to me.

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Just in case you had the crazy idea that you could minimize your chances of being killed by a shark by staying away from the water....

youtu.be/p_NS2H55dxI

And don't even get me started on what happens if you try to avoid hamburgers.

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Today, while casually discussing bulls with my father (as one does), I mentioned that ten times more people in the United States die every year from cattle than from shark attacks. My father asked where I got my data, and when I told him it came from the CDC, he told me the CDC lies about its death numbers and should never be trusted.

I immediately assumed he was talking about COVID, which is a topic he likes to downplay, so I tried to be diplomatic and agreed that the pandemic was chaotic and the CDC was an imperfect organization hindered by politics and could only report what it was told by states like New York and Florida, which were both sued for intentionally misleading the public about COVID cases. I also agreed that the CDC even admitted that their numbers were sometimes flawed (sometimes by man, many thousands) and had to revise their numbers over time based on updated data and data collection methodology. I concluded that the CDC's numbers were probably now as close as we were going to get to accurate numbers and could still be useful.

And he said, "Of course they're correct now. Two people resigned over it."

Whether he was implying that those two noble souls refused to participate in the CDC's malicious miscounting or were taking responsibility for it, I cannot say. Whatever the case, if he was now agreeing that the current data set was useful and could be used for rough analysis why did he say it could never be trusted in the first place?

By this time I had already had enough of his bullshit, and I just couldn't take any more. So I stormed out. Was my response rational? No, definitely not. But it's the best I can do some days.

For the record, if you can believe anything these days, the CDC counted specifically 22 cases where people were killed by cattle in each year between 2003-2008 (in just four states!). Meanwhile, the International Shark Attack File (ISAF) indicates that sharks kill fewer than 10 people globally annually, and only about 1 per year in the US. So I was wrong, you're statistically about twenty times more likely to be killed by a cow than a shark.

Some days I just can't be right about anything.

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