Day 120: Hip Hip Heparin

Heparin seems to have become a standard treatment for ICU coronavirus cases without this result, but nevertheless a recent preprint found it reduced mortality among hospitalized patients in Spain. Though the preprint has its issues, heparin has been successful enough that it seems unlikely a more controlled study will come along to clear things up.

On the historical front, the CDC has released some interesting Evidence for Limited Early Spread of COVID-19 Within the United States, January–February 2020, including a brief phylogenetic analysis of the multiple introductions of the disease into the US. The negative results are particularly significant, considering that quite a few Americans deeply believe they had coronavirus in December or January, but the data doesn't seem to support such early spread:

Two influenza vaccine effectiveness study networks with sites in six states (Michigan, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Washington, and Wisconsin)* retrospectively tested respiratory specimens from patients with acute respiratory disease for SARS-CoV-2 by RT-PCR. At the Washington site, none of the 497 specimens collected during January 19–February 24 tested positive; the first specimen that tested positive was collected on February 25. At the five other sites (Ann Arbor and Detroit, Michigan; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Temple, Texas; Marshfield, Wisconsin; and Nashville, Tennessee), none of 2,620 samples collected during January 19–February 29 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

The New York Times has even more details of the viral genealogy work that has untangled the various introductions of COVID-19 from Wuhan into the US and Europe.

Massachusetts cases are up 0.8% today. PlagueBlog notes that the City of Somerville is still lying to residents about having a mask policy that matches the state's; wearing a mask in public is not required in Massachusetts unless you cannot socially distance, you are indoors at an essential business, or you are on shared transit.

Elsewhere on the mask front, the WHO is still anti-mask despite rumored changes to their website. ("As described above, the wide use of masks by healthy people in the community setting is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks.") Finland's Health Ministry also came down on the anti-mask side, finding "minimal benefits" and non-minimal risks.