Day 274: White Halloween

The post-apocalyptic COVID landscape is the perfect setting for a white Halloween during which practically immune children are afraid to go trick-or-treating outdoors because of coronavirus. Also on Halloween in Massachusetts, the ever sketchy New England travel bubble was dealt another severe pinprick by the tit-for-tat addition of Connecticut to our quarantine list.

Massachusetts cases were up nine-tenths of a percentage point today.

Day 273 Retrospective: SNOVID-19

On Day 273, the US recorded 101,000 cases (by the Worldometers count), setting a local record, if not a world record. BNO also noted a weekly record of 500,000 cases. Despite some shuffling of the higher ranks (and plenty of panic), Massachusetts remained at #21 in US case counts. Cases were up about 1%.

"SNOVID" appears to have been coined by oldgrimalkin on Reddit, in honor of the unseasonable snowfall in Massachusetts on the day before Halloween. Also of coronaviral note on the 30th were a confirmed COVID case and a presumptive case in two captive Tennessee tigers. The victims, while seemingly recovered and unlikely to get within six feet of anyone, remain in quarantine.

Day 271: Reverse Marathon

India at 8 million cases is gaining on the USA's 9 million and change, while #5 France is planning a new lockdown for Friday. Most notable in the recent surpassers of #55 China is #54 Austria, a nation of only 9 million people none of whom are in the habit of eating bats.

Most notable among recent cancellations is the "postponement" of the second Boston Marathon to fall victim to COVID. It matters not that Massachusetts has fallen to #21 in case counts behind #20 Indiana despite our alleged COVID backsliding (otherwise known as "autumn"). Speaking of the weather, Chicago will "suspend" indoor dining starting on Friday, making for no dining out at all considering their climate.

The ever sketchy New England travel bubble has been dealt a severe pinprick by the addition of Massachusetts to Connecticut's quarantine list.

Day 268: Doubling Down

Thursday's cities and towns data (for Wednesday) reveals a slowdown of tourism COVID cases on Nantucket and the Cape. The red city rate (8 cases per 100k per day) remains below the state average (still 9 cases per 100k); this week's big outlier was Lawrence at 46 cases per 100k per day. (Middleton at 62 cases is just another small town outlier.) The data also includes county-level summaries for most real counties, plus the fake COVID county of Dukes and Nantucket.

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Day 264: More COVID Fatigue

On the COVID fatigue front, the Commonwealth seems to have tired of Wednesday as cities and towns day, and now will be releasing the data on Thursdays, allegedly by 4pm.

Day 262 Retrospective

Monday was notable for the COVID alert messages from the Commonwealth that were intended for residents of "red" cities, but went out to inappropriate people in wildly inappropriate numbers. Here at PlagueBlog headquarters, we got several alerts for both Everett and Chelsea, despite not being located in Everett or Chelsea, nor having set foot in Chelsea since before the plague began. PlagueBlog notes that spamming the wrong people is a good way to get your message ignored.

Day 257: In the Red

Since last we met, the US has exceeded 8 million cases, and several small-to-middling countries have passed the China point, including Portugal, a nation of ten million (only 1/144th its size). Despite the best efforts of Maryland and Indiana, Massachusetts remains at #20 among the states in case count.

Speaking of Massachusetts, there has been much hand-wringing today over the increasing "redness" of the state. It's not about politics but about cities and towns with average daily case rates of 8 or more (per 100,000) over the past two weeks. In fact at 9 cases per 100k the whole state is currently in the red, with outliers having case rates of up to 100, so the current rating system doesn't say much about a particular town's performance. Bigger, denser cities have more cases for the obvious reasons.

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Day 251: More Great Barrington

Brazil (at #3) has reached 5 million cases; #2 India is approaching 7 million, and at a pace that puts it in position to overtake the US eventually.

Governor Whitmer has been digging up Spanish Flu laws in an attempted end-run around last week's state supreme court decision striking down a 1945 law and her coronavirus restrictions along with it. PlagueBlog senses that this is not the right legal or temporal direction to be going in, and that the "burn your masks" lawyer will be back before their supreme court sooner rather than later.

AIER, after letting slip their involvement in the Great Barrington Declaration, has been reporting on the reaction to it, from scientists, the media, and the social media peanut gallery. Off-Guardian was not involved in the declaration, but assembles a lot of prior art of scientists and health care workers recommending against lockdowns.

Yesterday's weekly cities and towns data was the twenty-sixth such missive from the state. That's half a year, and the weekly reports only started in April. The coronavirus drama in Boston has actually been going on for 251 days since our first case, which is more than two-thirds of the year. Although the news just keeps on coming so does the COVID fatigue, so PlagueBlog will be reducing our publication schedule for the foreseeable future.

On to the data: while in recent weeks the Stop the Spread cities (with dotted borders) haven't been consistently ahead of other cities and large towns in case counts, this week you can see they're hotspots, along with Nantucket and the usual random smattering of small town outliers:

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Day 250: The Day the Movies Died

Wisconsin surged past Massachusetts yesterday, pushing us down to the #20 slot in case count. Though Maryland is at #21, Indiana is moving faster and may catch up soon.

Technically speaking, the movies will die tomorrow, when Regal closes all theaters in the US and UK. Parent company Cineworld is also closing all theaters, though this only affects the UK. They blame the lack of content coming out of studios, who have been holding back their big titles in hopes of better revenues post-pandemic. (PlagueBlog warns that there may never be a time after the pandemic.) Regal is the second-largest US movie theater chain. The largest chain, AMC, has kissed and made up with Universal Studios and plans to remain open.

The New York Post reprinted the Great Barrington declaration last night, and it's now surpassed 100,000 signatures.

On the irony watch, Father John Jenkins, President of Notre Dame and target of his own home-grown Stasi after he failed to wear a mask to the Rose Garden super-spreading ceremony, has added injury to insult by testing positive for COVID. A faculty no-confidence vote against him has been postponed for the moment, and students are circulating petitions for his removal.

Massachusetts' case numbers are delayed today, as is the weekly towns and cities data. In other local news, the mayor of Boston announced a delay in the phased reopening of Boston's public schools for off-line education, over a minor increase in the positivity rate here. Some have attributed our rising positivity to a drop in testing the well for COVID, rather than to any meaningful change in the local coronavirus situation.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases were up two-fifth of a percentage point today.

Day 249: Neo-Neo-Neovisicide

The reprieve for Danish mink has been called off, and now they're getting even more culled than the unfortunate Dutch mink. Besides recovered mink at infected farms, they're also culling every mink on farms within 5 miles of any infected farm, because somehow they pose a threat to humans. PlagueBlog hopes they don't kill all the human patients in hospitals within five miles of an infected hospital.

In England, the recent underreporting of 16,000 COVID cases has been traced to...Microsoft Excel:

Public Health England (PHE) collected data from commercial firms that analysed the swab results to see who tested positive or not, and receved the information in files with the values separated by commas.

Using comma separated values (CSV) in files is common practice for handling data.

PHE loaded the files into Microsoft Excel spreadsheet templates to be entered into a central system used for government contact tracing and reporting dashboards.

However, the PHE developers used the original binary .XLS file format for Excel which first appeared in 1987.

[...]

BBC reported that thanks to the old file format being used, each Excel template was limited to recording around 1400 cases.

Any further cases than that were ignored by template, and led to 15,841 going unreported between September 25 and October 2 which may have led to people being unaware of COVID-19 exposure in that time.

Massachusetts' cases are up about a third of a percentage point today. In other local news, Falmouth High School went virtual yesterday after an unknown number of virtually immune students "attended a party this weekend in Woods Hole while not wearing masks and not practicing physical distancing." As usual there was much hand-wringing from the puritan administrators of the school.

Day 248: The Great Barrington Declaration

Today Japan, a nearby island nation with less than a tenth of the population of China, has exceeded China in cases, taking on the #45 spot.

The Great Barrington Declaration is only surprising in that the authors had to travel in secret to Great Barrington, MA (a little town in the Berkshires featuring a weird castle, Bard College, and a perfectly average 14-day case rate) to formulate it. The declaration's "Focused Protection" amounts hiding grandma while acquiring herd immunity through normal living for healthy, low-risk young people and school children. They were also interviewed briefly on LockdownTV. The general public as well as other scientists and health care workers are encouraged to sign the declaration.

The Michigan Supreme Court struck down the Emergency Powers of Governor Act (the target of the petition from a week and a half ago) on Friday, though it's still unclear to the Governor whether and for how long her now-illegal orders stand. The attorney behind the case says to "burn your masks".

Massachusetts' cases are up almost two-fifths of a percentage point today.

Day 247: Stasi Fail

India made the BNO News with 100,000 COVID deaths, though by Worldometer's standards they've been there for a few days now. Nepal, a nation of fewer than 30 million souls (that is, 1.4 billion fewer than China), bordering China (due to the latter's occupation of Tibet), now, somehow, has reached the #44 spot, with more cases than #45 China.

On the because it worked so well for Germany front, the University of Notre Dame's Stasi-style snitch-on-a-classmate website has been repurposed by enterprising students to snitch on the university president for not wearing a mask to the Rose Garden super-spreader event. (It seems the "super" spreading may have happened at the debate prep, instead, where the now-infected Trump, Bill Stepien, Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks, and Chris Christie were present.)

Business Insider is optimistic about President Trump's condition, so here's a little humor about it from "Whiskey Fueled Tirade" at DuffelBlog: Walter Reed medics tell President to return during sick call hours:

Medics and corpsmen at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center responded with the poise and compassion characteristic of their profession when the president arrived at the military’s flagship hospital earlier last evening.

“I told him the same thing I tell everybody when they show up all sad-faced and mopey while we’re closing the clinic,” Spc. Will Farmer, a medic assigned to the hospital, said as he smoked a cigarette near the executive sick call entrance. “Take some Motrin, drink water, and come back at 0430 when sick call starts hours if you really think you need to be seen. I see it all the time. Last week some supreme court lady was trying to get an appointment after sick call hours.”

“He’s probably just trying to get out work, or a debate or something.”

In science news, ProMED reports on several papers suggesting Parkinson's Disease may be one of those allegedly unusual long-term COVID-19 sequelae. Although parkinsonism is better known as as a consequence of other viral infections like the flu, and so far there seems to be only the one case report from Israel, it is something to watch out for.

Massachusetts' cases were up about half a percentage point again today. In other local news, Patriots quarterback Cam Newton has tested positive. Today's game has been postponed until Monday after an opposing team member also tested positive. Also, Worcester has cancelled Halloween, apparently in accordance with CDC guidelines suggesting that virtually-immune children do boring stuff at a distance to avoid COVID instead of trick-or-treating.

Day 246: Even the Rose Garden

The world is at 35 million coronavirus cases, with #3 Brazil nearing 5 million. Japan (#45) is asymptotically approaching the China mark, while #46 Nepal and #47 Czechia chug along behind them. In the US, Missouri has taken the #18 spot from Massachusetts, and #20 Wisconsin is only a couple of days away from beating us as well.

The New York Times reports on the growing cluster of cases tentatively attributed to the Rose Garden ceremony for Amy Coney Barrett (or, more likely, the indoor reception that followed).

P.S. Massachusetts' cases were up half a percentage point today.

Day 245: Even the God Emperor

President Trump tweeted (of course) that he and the First Lady tested positive for COVID-19, following news that an aide, Hope Hicks, was infected. The meme-imperial couple are "well", which PlagueBlog takes to mean asymptomatic. Their quarantine schedule may affect the second debate. The Vice President and Second Lady have tested negative.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up four-sevenths of a percentage point again today. (That's 761 cases, keeping us just barely ahead of Missouri for another day.)

P.P.S. NBC has updates on the President's "low-grade fever" and trip to Walter Reed, as well as Melania's "mild cough and headache."

Day 244: Even the Neanderthals

An article in Nature claims that The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neanderthals. But not all post-Neanderthals have it; the particularly problematic genes seem to be more common in South Asians than in any other out-of-Africa group. (Africans rarely carry Neanderthal genes.)

MedPage Today reports that ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) wasn't as universal a failure for COVID patients as previously suspected. (It made ventilators look helpful.) It turns out that only about 40% of patients died in hospital afterwards. However, the follow-up on the allegedly surviving 60% wasn't really solid or long-term enough to be entirely convincing.

Forbes reports that Mississippi's mask mandate expired peacefully in its sleep last night.

Massachusetts' cases are up four-sevenths of a percentage point today. While the general grouping of our "red" cities (Lawrence, Framingham, Revere, New Bedford, and the Islands) hasn't changed much, things are getting a little more infected. (Also, maps from last week have been corrected due to PlagueBlogger error.)

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