Day 61: April Fools

The civet saw its shadow, so we're expecting six more weeks of quarantine. Or something like that.

PlagueBlog is saddened to report the death of Star Wars actor Andrew Jack from coronavirus, and hopes he was able to leave a Do-Not-CGI order behind.

The world has exceeded 911,000 cases, and the US has surpassed the 200k mark and is already at 205,000 cases with 4,500 deaths. Italy is at 110,000 with 13,000 deaths, and Spain at 100,000 with 9,000 deaths. New York State is at 83,000 cases with 1,900 deaths, with New Jersey the runner-up at 22,000 cases but only 355 deaths.

There's an interesting preprint at medRxiv correlating the varying rates of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality across countries with their rates of tuberculosis vaccination:

BCG vaccination has been reported to offer broad protection to respiratory infections. We compared large number of countries BCG vaccination policies with the morbidity and mortality for COVID-19. We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination (Italy, Nederland, USA) have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies. Countries that have a late start of universal BCG policy (Iran, 1984) had high mortality, consistent with the idea that BCG protects the vaccinated elderly population. We also found that BCG vaccination also reduced the number of reported COVID-19 cases in a country.

You can check out your country's BCG vaccination policy at the BCG World Atlas. Most notably, Spain had a child vaccination program from 1965 to 1981 only, though it appears that Basque children may still be getting vaccinated.

The Bozeman Daily Chronicle reports an undue touristic interest in Montana. The governor has expressed legal qualms about closing the border, trusting in the usual quarantine period instead. PlagueBlog recommends applying the National Guard to the issue instead.

The AP reports that Wisconsin is calling out the National Guard to staff polling sites for their primary next week, even though even Bernie recommends postponing the primary. PlagueBlog also recommends they save the Guard for a real election.

CNN Philippines reports that Duterte has declared open season on quarantine protestors. PlagueBlog is surprised it took him this long.

Time expresses the usual doubts about China's numbers, though in slightly different language than the usual urn-focussed story. Instead, Time opens with China's moving case counting standards:

After several days of trumpeting just a handful of new COVID-19 cases, on Wednesday China once again switched up exactly what that means, and included asymptomatic infections of the coronavirus in its official statistics for the first time.[...]

It was the eighth different definition of what constitutes a COVID-19 infection in China’s official statistics since the outbreak began in late December, with critics arguing that the lack of clarity has made it harder for other nations to adequately understand and prepare for the disease.

P.S. Our numbers are in: Massachusetts is up 1,118 cases (17%) to 7,738, with 33 additional deaths (122 overall). The state conducted a hundred-odd tests while Quest did 2,300 or so. Over 50,000 people have been tested; about 15% were positive.

The governor has also launched an independent investigation of the situation at Holyoke Soldiers' Home.

P.P.S. WFSB Hartford reports that a six-week-old baby has died of coronavirus there.

P.P.P.S. Something I didn't notice in our numbers at first was the death of 31-year-old Riley Rumrill of Suffolk County, an former Alabaman with pre-existing conditions (apparently asthma and obesity), and our youngest victim to date.

P.P.P.P.S. Also, there seems to be another Holyoke Soldiers' Home-level outbreak of stupid going on at the Life Care Center of Nashoba Valley in Littleton, MA. The town felt the need to publicize the facility's bad behavior in a press release.