Day 34: Ex Boston

Channel 5 reports that we may have exported coronavirus to Tennessee in the person of a Williamson County (TN) man who flew from Nashville to Logan and back. Channel 10 reports he came to Boston for an international meeting "at Biogen" in Cambridge [reddit speculates this meeting was actually at the Boston Marriott Copley Square in the heart of Boston] last week, from which attendees took home both flu and COVID-19 (three positives so far). Our third Massachusetts case, also in Middlesex County (location of both Cambridge and yours truly) has been reported by the state as ex Italy but by NBC as ex Biogen, is awaiting confirmation by the CDC. PlagueBlog would like to thank you now for reading, because posting may come to an abrupt and possibly permanent halt at any time now.

Boston.com reports that the wayward New Hampshire medical worker "is now complying" with quarantine after exposing a bunch of Dartmouth Tuck Business School students at a mixer. One Tuck student "estimated that about a hundred business school students attended, along with 30 or 40 resident physicians associated with Dartmouth-Hitchcock, an academic medical center located near Dartmouth College."

In other local news, Governor Cuomo tweets that there are 5 new confirmed cases in New Rochelle, a couple in their 40's with three children who were friends of the previous family. There are also two untraced cases in New York City. New Jersey has two presumptive cases.

Texas has three new cases, two of them in Harris County (i.e., Houston). California is lousy with cases, but a notable one is one of the medical screeners from LAX. The CDC state-by-state map is updating daily again, possibly due to agitation from reddit. In less official but more accurate news-based counting, the US is up to 221 cases and 12 deaths.

An eight-month-old baby is a new Australian case, ex Iran. South Africa's first case is ex Italy.

On the bright side, the Diamond Princess has been downgraded to 696 cases and 6 deaths, due to some double-counting of cases.

P.S. Germ Boat #6 is another Princess Cruises ship, the Grand Princess. The story is similar to that of previous Germ Boats: passengers on a prior cruise later tested positive (including one death; these are some of the California mainland cases), so the current passengers have been condemned to a slow death by quarantine off the coast near San Francisco. Test kits are being flown in by helicopter.