Day 115: The Minks Go on the Attack

Reuters reports a second case of mink-to-human COVID-19 transmission on mink farms in the Netherlands. The first case was reported last week, in an employee who'd been working without PPE before the mink epidemic was detected. The human has since recovered, but genetic testing puts the direction of transmission from the mink to the human rather than vice versa (as was initially suspected). No details of the new case are available.

Cats appear to be the current suspect in the initial infection of the mink, as some of the farm cats were found to have antibodies already. Cats are no longer allowed near the mink, and minks on all farms are getting antibody testing.

On the unspeakable front, it seems that about 50% of all coronavirus deaths in Europe have occurred among nursing home residents. The numbers were crunched by the Japanese, who remain immune to most of our coronavirus taboos, but here are the numbers as translated by ProMED:

Country	Total deaths	Deaths in nursing homes	% of deaths in nursing homes	Most recent data	Source
France	28 239	14 363 (3713 died in hospital)	50.9%	18 May 2020	Public Health Bureau
Spain	27 709	18 413	66.45%	18 May 2020	Spanish Broadcasting Corporation
UK	31 855	11 687	36.70%	10 May 2020	National Bureaus of Statistics, etc.
Germany	7935	2980	37.56%	18 May 2020	Robert Koch Institute
Sweden	2075	948	45.60%	28 Apr 2020	Health and Welfare Agency
Italy	N/A	2724	N/A	14 Apr 2020	National Institutes of Health

Even more unspeakable is Jeffrey Tucker's article at the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) claiming that the lockdown hasn't saved any lives, and we only tell ourselves that it did because of the sunk costs fallacy. He specifically cites fuller nursing home death data as part of his argument that locking down everyone was an expensive and counterproductive distraction from protecting those populations that were actually at risk.

Some of his data comes from the International Long Term Care Policy Network (latest data here), which finds that 41% of all COVID-19 deaths occurred in nursing home residents. A report on the available US data on Medium comes to a similar estimate of 42%, with a higher guess at 52% when excluding the outlier of New York.

It is true than any flattening of the curve before vaccines or effective treatments only saves non-COVID-19 patients from dying from lack of medical care in an overwhelmed system. It merely postpones actual coronavirus deaths, or possibly even increases them as potential patients age, sicken, fatten, and otherwise become more susceptible to the disease. (Presumably some of them would have survived an earlier bout of COVID-19.)

But without seeing next winter's coronavirus numbers, PlagueBlog would not jump to the same conclusion that none of our unused hospital capacity would have been used in the economically happier case of no lockdown. He does have a point about deaths resulting from the counterproductive drop in care as well as from the general deterioration of mental health under lockdown, but that seems to have had more to do with the general panic than with the government's role in locking people down per se. It's not so clear who is to blame for the panic—possibly social media qua virtual mob.

AIER is apparently based in Massachusetts, and dedicates an entire article to the Commonwealth as a cautionary tale of bureaucratic micromanagement demonstrating incompetence in the face of the Invisible Hand.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up 0.64% today, and Middlesex County was up only half a percent. Needless to say, Phase 2 of our multi-phase micromanagement plan has not been declared yet. The Atlantic has an article on this disturbing lack of peakiness to the peak; apparently the Commonwealth is a microcosm of a national plateau phenomenon.