Day 179: Hydroxychloroquine on Repeat

In world news, Kazakhstan has crossed the China line, despite China's growing outbreak in Xinjiang. Next up is the Philippines.

In the US, Florida has joined California in besting New York in coronavirus cases, pushing the erstwhile #1 state down to an embarrassing #3. Texas is going to take a bit longer to join the club. North Carolina has made the jump to 9th place, knocking Massachusetts down to #10. Next up is Pennsylvania, which seems to be having enough of a revival to top us in a couple of days, as our cases are up only a fifth of a percentage point today (not to gloat).

Pennsylvania is taking this opportunity to destroy its restaurant industry re-limit restaurant seating capacity to 25%, which is predicted to lead to the closure of 7,500 restaurants. On the wider economic front, the NFL has cancelled its pre-season, and Forbes predicts a dim economic future for colleges.

The United Nations estimates that 10,000 children are dying of coronavirus-related malnutrition per month. (That's approximately 10,000 more children than are dying of COVID-19 itself.) The Director of the CDC notes that children and teens are at "far greater" risk of death from suicide, overdoses, and the flu than from COVID-19. He thinks sending them back to school is the only solution.

On the hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) front, PlagueBlog found this paranoid analysis of its star-crossed history as a coronavirus treatment to be an entertaining timeline of events. This site maintains a timeline of scientific papers about HCQ, with the results for humans (or lack of such) nicely summarized.