Day 222: On the Brink

The world has reached 28 million coronavirus cases. Portugal had a bit of a spike today with 646 confirmed cases, the highest since April 20th.

Time reports that the daycare industry is on the brink of collapse:

Millions of American parents, who are already struggling to shell out an average of about $10,000 per toddler per year for childcare, may wonder why their daycare center is in such dire financial straits. But the industry as a whole was barely profitable even before the pandemic hit.

Unlike call centers that were able to cut down on building expenses by downsizing or going remote or retail stores that skimped on staffing, daycare facilities went into the pandemic with little fat to trim. State regulations require that they keep high adult-to-child ratios, maintain ample square footage for space to play and learn, and in some places, hire staff that are trained in early childhood development. These measures are important: Research indicates that early childhood education shapes everything from adult brain volume to reading proficiency. “That has an impact on our future labor force and their economic potential, which ultimately is tied to our country’s economic potential,” explains Katica Roy, a gender economist.

But childcare providers perform this crucial service for pennies on the dollar. The average daycare operator grosses just $48,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whereas the standard daycare worker makes just $24,000. Usually these jobs come with little or no paid time off, and no employee-sponsored healthcare.

It's one of those industries where COVID-unemployment pays better than having a job, so hiring back unemployed workers is proving to be something of a challenge.

The largest fake numbers of the pandemic so far are those being modeled for the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, a harmless outdoor event in South Dakota that has, allegedly, infected about half the number of people who attended (260,000 vs. 500,000). The state of South Dakota has attributed only 124 cases and one death to exposure at the rally, and the governor has expressed some ire at being the target of extreme COVID modeling.

Here in Massachusetts, the state labor relations board has ruled that teachers in the Andover school system accidentally went on an illegal strike back on August 31st when their union got about half of them to refuse to enter schools for training on safety grounds. Also, cases were up about 0.15% today.

Day 221: Constitutional Issues

Sweden, a nation of ten million people, has finally surpassed China, a nation of one billion people and the source of the novel coronavirus, in case count, putting them at #38 and #39 respectively. In #3 Brazil, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the president, has recovered from coronavirus with the help of hydroxychloroquine. In #41 the Netherlands, three more mink farms have been found infected and are being culled. (PlagueBlog hopes they don't do the same with people.)

Germ Boat #34 is HMS Queen Elizabeth, a UK aircraft carrier, currently grounded in Portsmouth over "fewer than ten" cases among the crew.

Here in the US, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have "walked back" their promised national mask mandate over that pesky constitution thing. Also, the right to bear nerf arms is under attack in Colorado, where a 12-year-old's green nerf gun was spotted briefly during fake online school, leading to a police visit, a five-day suspension, and his eventual withdrawal from the Hitler Youth school.

Massachusetts' cases are up a seventh of a percentage point today.

Day 220: Labor Day

It's a holiday here at PlagueBlog Headquarters. The biggest news is that, as usual, practically everyone is deficient in Vitamin D and would be doing better every day in every way if they just took a whole lot more of it. (PlagueBlog recommends 4,000 IU a day or more.) A couple of recent studies consider it in coronavirus in particular, but the answer is the same as for every other ailment: more is better.

Massachusetts' cases are up a fifth of a percentage point today.

Day 219: Death in Mexico

India has reached #2. The New York Times reports that #8 Mexico has racked up 122,000 excess deaths, in addition to their 67,000 official coronavirus deaths. They even ran out of death certificates in several areas of the country.

Massachusetts' cases are up three-tenths of a percentage point today.

Day 218: But Will They Fix the Toilet?

The world has reached 27 million coronavirus cases. Despite breaking another daily record, India remains at #3 behind Brazil.

In Massachusetts, cases are up about a third of a percentage point today. Also in local news, eleven students were "dismissed" from Northeastern University in Boston for failing to socially distance themselves in their temporary dorm space at an unnamed Westin in Boston (presumably the Westin Copley Square, as the Westin Waterfront is further away and rumored to be completely closed). Their tuition and housing fees for the semester will not be refunded.

Speaking of which, Pew Research reports that a majority of American young adults are living with their parents for the first time since the Great Depression. That's 52% of 18–29-year-olds. There are more gory details at the link.

The Mises Institute contemplates America's new landlord, the CDC. PlagueBlog seriously doubts that the CDC will address tenants' plumbing issues in a timely manner.

Day 217: The Vaccine

India has also reached 4 million cases, is still setting daily records, and is looking to take over the #2 slot from Brazil any minute now. The news is all over #4 Russia's "Sputnik V" vaccine, especially the Lancet paper that no one actually links to.

New Zealand has had their first COVID-19 death of the winter, a man in his 50's who was part of the Aukland community outbreak. An editorial out of Britain looks at the coronavirus moral panic (or failure of nerve, as the author puts it) from a non-crackpot perspective, not that crackpots haven't made the same arguments (when they're not talking about Bill Gates' microchips).

In the US, Salongate continues to entertain; PlagueBlog has heard rumors of constituents stringing up curlers and hair dryers outside her house. In New York City, there's now a $2 billion class action lawsuit against Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio over the ongoing ban on indoor dining in the city.

The New York Times reports on layoffs becoming permanent. Bloomberg reports that stocks are down.

P.S. Massachusetts cases are up a sixth of a percentage point today.

Day 216: More Zombies

Yesterday's data change at the MDPH not only raised 4 COVID-19 victims from the dead, but also set Massachusetts back about 7,750 cases. A mysterious lack of such CDC-based corrections in other states means that Massachusetts is suddenly #16 in case counts, newly behind #13 Alabama, #14 Ohio, and #15 Virginia, with #17 South Carolina close behind. [They surpassed us as well later in the day.]

The cities and towns data considers only confirmed cases, so should not be affected by this change. Watch this space.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point today. Some cities and towns are up a bit as well this week, but the increase doesn't particularly correspond to the Stop the Spread cities any more. The map:

(Pop out.)

Day 215: Is That Even Legal?

It's not the first time we at PlagueBlog Headquarters have asked ourselves whether some random governmental action allegedly against coronavirus is legal, but this one is an all-caps kind of moment: The CDC Issues Sweeping Temporary Halt On Evictions Nationwide Amid Pandemic. You can read some kind of preliminary copy of the order here. (It's in Courier, so it must be official.) It's effective from publication later this week to December 31st. No compensation to landlords is included, though one imagines that banks will not want to foreclose on such properties and become the unfortunate landlords themselves.

PlagueBlog eagerly awaits the coming lawsuits.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases were down 6% today due to a change in the definition of probable case that the state has applied retroactively. (Worldometers seems to have dug up the revised numbers, reporting 22 deaths and 288 new cases, which is up about a quarter of a percentage point as usual.)

Day 214: Pinteresting

Russia (at #4) has hit one million cases, while #2 Brazil is nearing 4 million. Belgium has taken over China's #37 spot. In the US, #14 Alabama is creeping up on Massachusetts and may beat us tomorrow if they're unlucky. (Massachusetts' cases are up about a quarter of a percentage point again today.)

Pinterest has eaten the $90 million fee to get out of their future lease of a future office building in San Francisco, the latest in an ongoing flight from the city not paralleled in similar markets elsewhere.

On the drug front, a paper in Clinical Medicine Journal extols the virtues of heparin against COVID-19. Although they merely speculate about its benefits, they do cite a preprint of a retrospective study that provides some evidence of its antiviral and anti-inflammatory effects in the wild.

Day 213: No Health Service

India is making the news in its press to reach #2 in case counts by breaking all daily records with almost 80,000 cases yesterday. They also recently beat Mexico to become #3 in total deaths. (To be fair, Mexico has less than 10% of the population of India.) Elsewhere over the weekend, Oman and Kuwait surpassed China, leaving #38 Belgium as the last straggler, currently only six cases behind China.

In Britain, the NHS (National Health Service, though an alternate interpretation of the acronym is included in the title of this post) is even further behind on providing health care than usual, with the Telegraph reporting a two-year wait for a phone call from a specialist. The Daily Mail appears confused by Deputy Chief Medical Officer Jenny Harries admission that the evidence for masks is weak.

In Australia, a Perth resident is on his way to jail for sneaking out of a quarantine hotel to infect visit his girlfriend using a ladder and an accomplice. His lawyer claims the quarantine rules were "confusing." PlagueBlog recommends rethinking the legality of any plan that requires a ladder and an accomplice, unless home repair is also involved.

Also in Australia, there appears to be a black market for the experimental feline infectious peritonitis drugs PlagueBlog covered last week. GS-441524 in particular is being produced in China for illegal sale to Australian cat owners, who spend up to $5000 (Australian) per cat to save their lives. Government warnings about the dangers of the unapproved drugs fall on deaf ears, since the alternative is a dead cat, and no drug companies seem interested in producing the drug for legal sale in any cat market, never mind the Australian one. There does appear to be some interest in using GS-441524 against COVID-19 in people, however, as it is closely related to remdesivir.

In local news, the Commonwealth has mandated flu vaccine for students, including college students, this fall, leading to a bit of a backlash from parents. Considering that 80% of minors in Massachusetts already get the flu vaccine (never mind mandatory vaccines), the reaction seems a bit misplaced. PlagueBlog is more concerned about the largely unvaccinated college population depleting needed vaccine supplies than anything else.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up a quarter of a percentage point today.

Day 212: Nothing Much

Massachusetts’ cases are up 0.16% today. That is all.

Day 211: 25 Million Strong

The world case count has hit 25 million, and Romania has made the jump past China to #34 in cases. Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point again. A wedding in Millinocket, Maine continues to make the news as a bit of a superspreading event.

The New York Times meanders around the topic of coronavirus testing, dissing the CDC's decision to stop testing asymptomatic people while dreaming of tests that are faster or more informative than the current binary PCR results. In particular, a PCR test can give some indication of viral load:

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On the pie-hole front, a forthcoming meta-analysis in the open access journal Obesity Reviews found that the obese were 46% more likely to come down COVID-19, 113% more likely to be hospitalized for it, 74% more likely to end up in the ICU, and 48% more likely to die of it. The researchers didn't have much new to say about why, but they did hit the irony button pretty hard with their concerns that the pandemic response is exacerbating the worldwide obesity problem:

In addition to COVID‐19's critical economic constraints, its impacts on diets may pose lifelong risks to populations around the globe. Food habits developed during this period, particularly the intake of ultraprocessed foods, represent a major health risk.

Day 210: Even the Bunnies

Oman has gotten very close to the China point, but is still lagging behind at #35. The US is now well past 6 million cases, and Alabama is slowly working its way towards Massachusetts' #13 spot, where it may arrive in less than a week. Death tolls for the summer wave remain significantly lower than those from the spring.

Amnesty International reports on the gunning down of at least seven young men in Angola by security forces, apparently over mask and lockdown-related offenses.

The Times reports that the six minors who have died of coronavirus in the UK were all seriously ill:

Three were newborn babies with other severe health problems. The other three were aged 15 to 18 years old and also had “profound health issues”.

Calum Semple, professor in child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Edinburgh, who is the senior author of the study, said: “The deaths that we did observe were children with what we would describe as profound co-morbidities — not a touch of asthma, not cystic fibrosis.”

These children’s underlying illnesses would have been considered as “life-limiting”, he said. “We did not have any deaths in otherwise healthy school-aged children.”

Note that that was six minors out of about 70,000 hospitalized patients studied (only 651 of whom were minors). In total there have been about 41,000 deaths in the UK, some presumably out of hospital. The headline and text of the news article imply that the study covered all deaths of minors in the UK, though the actual research didn't explicitly claim to be exhaustive, nor did it include Northern Ireland or any overseas territories at all.

The Lancet preprints an American case of reinfection with a provably different coronavirus strain. It isn't the suspected Wisconsin case but a case in Nevada. The patient was symptomatic with his first strain for about a month beginning at the end of March, then relapsed at the end of May and was eventually hospitalized with hypoxia and pneumonia. No resolution of the second bout was reported.

The paper also notes that he may have been reinfected by a household member, and that he is 25 years old with no immunological issues to explain the reinfection (though it is otherwise silent on his health status and any comorbidities):

The individual associated with these cases possesses no significant conditions of an immunological nature that would imply facilitation of re-infection. They were not utilizing any immunosuppressive medications. The individual was negative for HIV by antibody and RNA testing (data not shown) and had no obvious cell count abnormalities.

According to a new preprint, rabbits are susceptible to coronavirus. While the three in vivo test subjects were asymptomatic, they did shed infectious virus from their twitchy little noses for up to seven days. The results are of some interest to rabbit farmers, though probably not a public health concern.

Nature reports on a promising drug for both original SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, one that was previously shown to be effective against the coronavirus that causes feline infectious peritonitis.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point today.

Day 209: This Sort of Vague, Uneasy Feeling

Back in the height of the pandemic, CTV News reported on the phenomenon of losing track of time during lockdown. (PlagueBlog reminds readers that it's not a quarantine if you're not actually ill or the contact of a known ill person.)

Steve Joordens, a psychology professor in the department of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, described [daily routines] as a sort of “anchor” that gives people a sense of where they are in time.

“They are kind of like a rhythm to our lives,” he explained to CTVNews.ca during a telephone interview from Toronto on Tuesday. “They tell us where we are within a given day, you know if it's lunchtime, but also within the given week, you know if it's Thursday or Friday, they feel very different than a Monday or Tuesday do.”

When suddenly all of those rituals are gone, as in the case of a pandemic, Joordens said it’s easy for people to lose that sense of where they are in the workday or the workweek.

“They also lose sense of who they are,” he said. “This is what a lot of people kind of feel too, is that they feel a little adrift. They’re not really sure what they're supposed to be doing and they have this sort of vague, uneasy feeling.”

Although by now we may all have daily routines of going nowhere and doing nothing, but the article addressed that eventuality with the help of a Manitoba psychologist:

On the other hand, Abdulrehman said even those people who do develop a routine in quarantine may be susceptible to losing track of time if there isn’t enough variety within it.

“They don't know what day it is because it's the same thing every day,” he said.

This is all to say that the staff at PlagueBlog headquarters somehow forgot it was cities and towns day yesterday, so we're a bit behind with the cities and towns data. We have, however, updated last week's map to show Stop the Spread cities (outlined in maroon) and to include the old whole-pandemic case rates in the popup info (though not on the map). This week coming soon...

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up three-tenths of a percentage point today. Our death toll has reached 9,008 (including presumptive cases). Here is the new daily/biweekly map:

(Pop out.)

Day 208: Settled Science Isn't Science

Columbia has sprung ahead of Mexico to 7th place in case numbers, though likely not on their own demerits but only through lack of testing in Mexico. Oman, Belgium, Kuwait, and Romania are queued up behind China for their chance to somehow surpass the case numbers of a country with a population of a billion where the virus raged uncontrolled and unacknowledged for a month. The US is teetering on the cusp of six million cases.

The science continues to fluctuate. Yet another study in favor of hydroxychloroquine has come out, this one finding a 30% lower risk of death in Italian patients administered HCQ during the height of the pandemic there. For a nearly-daily dose of HCQ science, check the HCQ paper tracker.

On the actually-wrong science front, a paper in JAMA has been corrected, perhaps beyond recognition. Mistakes were made, and some of the significant findings of cardiac damage from COVID-19 became insignificant differences. Whether the remaining results justify, say, cancelling football season (an alleged effect of the original publication) is unclear.

On the relapse front, Newsweek reports on several cases of reinfection with COVID-19 proven by genetic sequencing: one in Belgium, one in the Netherlands, and one in Hong Kong (with his second strain ex Spain). Rumor (pending the release of a preprint) has it that the relapsed Hong Kong case was asymptomatic, but the disease status of the new European cases is unclear. A relapse has also come to light in Wisconsin, where a patient exhibited unspecified different symptoms from his first bout three months ago, but no proof (or genetic sequencing at all) has been reported.

Massachusetts' cases are up a quarter of a percentage point today.

Day 207: Our Poor Decisions

The Boston Globe reports, again, on that little incident in the spring where Biogen, a Boston-based biotech company chock full of people who Should Know Better™, managed to spread coronavirus across the nation and the globe with their ill-timed leadership conference:

Now, a sweeping study of nearly 800 coronavirus genomes, conducted by no less than 54 researchers at the Broad Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health and several other institutions in the state, has found that viruses carrying the conference’s characteristic mutation infected hundreds of people in the Boston area, as well as victims from Alaska to Senegal to Luxembourg. As of mid-July, the variant had been found in about one-third of the cases sequenced in Massachusetts and 3 percent of all genomes studied thus far in the United States.

Biogen's special contribution is only part of the genetic data covered by the preprint at medRxiv. They document 80 "likely introductions" of COVID-19 to Massachusetts from four continents, and they also document an unusual outbreak at an unnamed skilled nursing facility in the area. (They didn't name Biogen, either, but everybody knows.)

Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point today.

Day 206: The MDPH Punts the Ball

Mexico is #7 in total coronavirus cases, with 560,000 cases and 60,000 deaths, which is bad enough, but the Mexican press paints an even worse picture. Like the mother country, their counting skills leave something to be desired, and some estimates place their case counts and death toll at as much as three times higher than the public numbers. While their "cratering economy" is allegedly due in part to austere fiscal policies, most of it sounds coronaviral in nature.

On the science front, a Korean study showed 79% greater risk of severe COVID outcomes from the use of proton pump inhibitors (a class of antacid already known to be associated with pneumonia).

Also, a study out of UC Davis found likely animal hosts of SARS-CoV-2 based on their ACE2 sequences. Not surprisingly, many old world primates share our ACE2, but they also found "12 cetaceans (whales and dolphins), 7 rodents, 3 cervids (deer), 3 lemuriform primates, 2 representatives of the order Pilosa (giant anteater and southern tamandua), and 1 Old-World primate" to be highly correlated to our ACE2 insofar as binding SARS goes, and 57 other species (including cats) with medium propensity for binding the virus. Dogs were low propensity. The American mink, which has proven to be the most susceptible of all animals, got their lowest rating of potential for infection: very low, as did another animal known to be susceptible, the ferret. They discussed the inaccuracy of their ferret result, but not the much more impressive miss on the mink. Make of that what you will.

Upon reflection, PlagueBlog realizes it was foolish to have ever expected backdated numbers from the MDPH, which has instead tossed all the weekend's cases into today's totals. While that still only puts the case count up half a percentage point, we prefer to report the average over the past three days (recalling that Saturday was a bit wedged as well): by this accounting, cases were up only a fifth of a percentage point per day.

It seems that even Miskatonic University has submitted its COVID-19 safety plans to the Commonwealth.

Day 205: The MDPH's Day Off

The Massachusetts Department of Public Health has taken today off of coronavirus reporting, due to the ongoing data changeover that reduced our Saturday numbers. Hopefully there will be a retrospective of the true weekend numbers on Monday.

Instead of gloating over our perpetually flatlined numbers, PlagueBlog will need to gloat over the state of New York State. The New York Post reports a quarter-mile lines at a food pantry in Queens this weekend. The Buffalo-Niagara Partnership surveyed businesses in Western New York State and found about half of them unable to carry on remotely. About 20% of them reported themselves as "at risk of permanent closure." A full two-thirds having reduced staffing in some way, with over 40% having furloughed or laid off workers entirely.

This is all despite record low numbers of cases and hospitalizations in New York State.

Day 204: More Misperceptions

India has reached 3 million cases, out of the world's 23 million cases (and 800,000 deaths). Panama has surpassed China, which is now only #35 in cases worldwide. In the US, #2 Texas has hit 300,000 cases but #3 Florida has not; #5 Georgia is over 250,000 cases (all college students, if the mainstream media is anything to judge by). Massachusetts (#13) hit 125,000 cases yesterday, with little further development today (a tenth of a percentage point) due to a shortened reporting period. (PlagueBlog readers are aware of how much the MDPH enjoys mixing things up every now and again.)

NPR reports on how voting is as safe as grocery shopping, if not more so, despite people's persistent misperceptions. They even cite a paper about Wisconsin's election in April, which produced no detectable surge.

The Hill also covered the Franklin Templeton poll results on real vs. perceived dangers of coronavirus; they give a bit more detail about the polling, but no pretty graphs.

Day 203: Fire Itself

CNN reports four deaths so far from wildfires in California, and implies (but never actually says) that some people may not be evacuating due to fear of coronavirus. One person refused to go inside a shelter over COVID and is sleeping in her car instead. One might hope that actual raging fires would put a damper on irrational reactions to coronavirus, but USA Today reports the gory details of the Red Cross shifting shelters, serving pre-packaged meals, and refusing donations over COVID concerns in California, as well as reporting an unspecified number of people sleeping in their cars instead of the shelters.

Franklin Templeton published some July survey data from Dynata (with a broken reference to the source) about just how far off the average American's opinion of coronavirus risk by age is from our actual risk by age:

Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19:

1. On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
2. Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
3. Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger
by a factor of 50; and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).

These results are nothing short of stunning. Mortality data have shown from the very beginning that the COVID-19 virus age-discriminates, with deaths overwhelmingly concentrated in people who are older and suffer comorbidities. This is perhaps the only uncontroversial piece of evidence we have about this virus. Nearly all US fatalities have been among people older than 55; and yet a large number of Americans are still convinced that the risk to those younger than 55 is almost the same as to those who are older.

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