Day 125: In Your Genes

It came out in the autopsy that George Floyd was still positive for COVID-19 on a PCR test, after having previously tested positive on April 3rd. "It wasn't immediately clear whether Floyd developed symptoms earlier in the year or was an asymptomatic carrier," though the autopsy revealed no particular post-COVID-19 damage. It did reveal "hypertensive heart disease, fentanyl intoxication and recent methamphetamine use." As with the flu taboo, PlagueBlog is not supposed to mention the effects of fentanyl; we will have to leave that to the defendants' lawyers.

The New York Times seems to have misread a recent preprint on the genetics of coronavirus susceptibility as clearing ACE2 of involvement in severe cases of COVID-19 and only pegging blood type. But ACE2 is still a suspect; its colleague SIT1 is just mixed in with chemokine receptors at that locus, so the paper doesn't come down on either one as hard as on blood type. (If you haven't heard about the blood type correlation before, A is bad and O is good, possibly due to nearby genes as well.)

Here's the weekly map again, still without the new testing and positivity data. The upshot is much the same as in the past few weeks: mostly plateau, with some big-looking increases in small towns and some ongoing activity in Southeastern Massachusetts:

(Pop out.)

P.S. Massachusetts cases are up 0.46% today.