Day 124: A Snowball Effect

The stats are largely unchanged. Massachusetts cases are up 0.42% today, and there is both good and bad news about cities and towns day: it seems that the CDC's desire for probably cases has not yet affected the cities and towns data, but on the other hand, the MDPH's penchant for rearranging the data has mixed things up again. So any pretty pictures will be delayed until tomorrow.

On the mink front, coronavirus has been found at three more mink farms in the Netherlands, through mandatory mink testing. The report fails to mention whether the minks' contacts have been traced. It seems that coronavirus paranoia may lead to culling of the unfortunate and mostly recovered mink.

The US has a new first canine case, since the previous pug case was later retracted. The new patient is a German shepherd from New York State whose owners tested positive and showed symptoms, respectively. The dog showed respiratory symptoms, but is expected to recover. A second dog in the same household had antibodies.

An anti-vaxxer has tackled the far simpler challenge of debunking the "lockdown lunacy" at his blog. It's a long read, partly because every time you think you've gotten to the most damning evidence against lockdowns and the like, he comes up with something even more damning. His citations will be familiar to anyone who follows corona-science—that is, you don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to have heard most of it before. PlagueBlog had not heard the quote from which today's title was taken, though:

It is what is known in science as positive feedback or a snowball effect. The government is afraid of its constituents. Therefore, it implements draconian measures. The constituents look at the draconian measures and become even more hysterical. They feed each other and the snowball becomes larger and larger until you reach irrational territory. This is nothing more than a flu epidemic if you care to look at the numbers and the data, but people who are in a state of anxiety are blind. (Yoram Lass)

There was also a new-to-us paper in there, a contact study for an asymptomatic Chinese patient in a healthcare setting who managed not to infect 455 contacts. The blogger does leap to a conclusion here (that asymptomatic carriers are never infectious), though this patient may merely have been past the period of infectivity or otherwise atypical.