Day 51: Next Stop, Italy

The US has reached 30,000 cases, putting us in a firm third place after Italy (53,000) and the source of it all, China (81,000). New York State alone has exceeded 15,000 cases (with 9,000 in New York City alone), leaving all the other states with their impaired testing capacities in the dust. PlagueBlog does not recommend closing the border with New York at this time.

On the plague ship front, The Patriot Ledger reports that hundreds of passengers aboard Germ Boat #15, the Silver Shadow, remain quarantined in the port of Recife (Brazil) after a single passenger tested positive. Despite promises of an airlift out for Americans this weekend, about a hundred remain aboard.

A sister ship, the Silver Explorer, earns Germ Boat #16 status by being in a similar situation off the port of Castro, Chile, after an 85-year old British man disembarked in the south and tested positive in Coyhaique. Silversea Cruises is a subsidiary of Royal Caribbean.

Chile has also refused docking to Germ Boat #17, the Azamara Pursuit, despite its having no verified cases aboard. Other South American ports have refused it entry, and it may need to make the entire 13-day sail back to Miami to offload its (for the moment) healthy passengers. Azamara Cruises is a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Caribbean.

P.S. Massachusetts' numbers are out for today: 646 cases, up 121 (23%) from yesterday, with 5 deaths (+3). The commonwealth is now providing age ranges on the case numbers. The curve is fairly flat and may be an archive of the testing priorities. Two more cases have been attributed to the Biogen conference, fifteen to travel, fourteen to local transmission, and almost 400 remain unsourced at this time. Positive results are down to 11% for the state lab and up to 7% for the commercial labs.

For some reason the DPH lumped Dukes County and Nantucket County together (with 1 case total), misleading some news outlets into claiming that every county now has a case.

P.P.S. I corrected some number comparisons above.