Day 78: No Evidence of Immunity

The world stands at 2.33 million cases with 160,000 deaths. The US has exceeded 738,000 cases and 39,000 deaths. The situation in Spain seemed to have calmed down over Easter, but is active again now and may only take another day or two to hit 200,000 cases. The UK, at 114,000 cases, remains in sixth place but is still a contender to surpass the flattening continent. Both Turkey and Iran are looking to surpass China's revised numbers soon.

In the US, the Navajo Nation has made the news with 1,042 cases (none recovered) and 41 deaths, surpassing a handful of states although their total population, about 357,000, is less than that of any state.

If you were hoping for more pretty pictures today, I can only point you toward these charts of the Massachusetts data by something innocuous, who also posts them to Reddit daily. Massachusetts is up 6% today. While we remain in third place in case count, three states behind us have more active cases than we do. Pennsylvania in particular has over 3,300 more active cases despite having 4,600 fewer cases overall, so looks like it could catch up to us soonish.

The Telegraph reports that the WHO has cautioned against relying on serology to prove immunity to COVID-19:

There is currently no evidence to support the belief that people who have recovered from coronavirus then have immunity, the World Health Organisation has said.

Senior WHO epidemiologists warned despite the hopes governments across the world have piled on antibody tests, there is no proof those who have been infected cannot be infected again.

Germ Boat #25 is the nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, flagship of the French navy, with more that 1,000 cases, nearly half of the ship's crew. The outbreak grew "exponentially" around April 4th, and the ship has now returned to its home port of Toulon for disinfection. Attempts to trace the outbreak to prior stops in Brest and Cyprus have not yet yielded a definitive answer.

Germ Boat #23, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, continues to make the news for its 60% rate of asymptomatic cases. There is little other test data for groups of young, healthy people.

Boston's Pine Street Inn homeless shelter made the news on Wednesday when testing of the entire population revealed a 38% positive rate (146 cases), all of them asymptomatic. One person was moved to a hospital, and the rest were isolated in temporary facilities. No news of symptoms has emerged since.

The hand-wringers are wringing extra hard about whether the virus came out of a lab, perhaps because Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier, discoverer of HIV, is in the made-in-a-lab camp. The suspect Wuhan lab has now denied it came from there.

PlagueBlog should note that the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo remains current, due to the discovery of three or four new cases (two deceased, one receiving treatment, and one known only from the WHO case count) a full forty days after the last case had been resolved and two days before the outbreak would have been declared over.