Day 136: Riding the Second Wave

The world is at 8.1 million cases, with 439,000 dead. Massachusetts cases are up a tiny fraction of a percent today (0.082%), with still no wave of protest-COVID (because respiratory diseases do not spread easily outdoors, folks, no matter how much science you've forgotten or how afraid you happen to be). Nevertheless, you can get a free test for coronavirus from the state if you attended a protest.

While there has been a lot of worry about a second wave, actual full-fledged second waves are hard to come by, even in countries now entering winter. One country that's almost certainly on its second bout of coronavirus is Iran, which is peaking again after an initial high in early April. Mid-June has produced about 2500 cases a day and a death rate that has risen to over 100 a day. The main cause to doubt the wave is the long-term issue of generally unreliable data coming out of Iran, due to low testing rates and an abrupt stoppage of province-level reporting back in March "after hard-hit areas posted numbers that were multiples of official data."

Reuters reports another 40 cases in China, 27 of them in the Beijing outbreak. It's unclear how many of them are asymptomatic. The wetness of the wholesale market(s) at the center of the outbreak is also unclear, though ProMED reports at least one sold pangolin in the past.

On the news-unfit-to-print front, the Spectator picked up on Stanford professor John Ioannidis' impressively low estimates of the IFR (infection fatality rate) of COVID-19. They dared report it as being possibly lower than the respiratory disease that dare not speak its name flu. Also, another preprint is out on the protection smoking provides against coronavirus.

The FDA has revoked its emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. The drugs remain approved for other uses in the US, and any physician can still prescribe them for an off-label use like COVID-19 prophylaxis or treatment. Whether anyone will is another question entirely.