Day 141: No Mask Day

No Mask Day would have passed us by as no more than an unnoticed domain (redirecting to an obscure FaceBook post), if not for a sort of reverse Streisand Effect where the pro-maskers at Scary Mommy thought reviewing the weak sauce that is mask science was somehow an effective debunking of No Mask Day and defense of mom, masks, and apple pie. (For baseball, masks, and apple pie, see this equally tendentious article in which Sports Illustrated does little more than recite raw case numbers from Georgia.)

It's also No Mask Day in Somerville, where the health department in the mayor's head has finally relented on the outdoors-everywhere mask requirement and gone back down to the statewide rule of wearing a mask outdoors only when you can't socially distance. PlagueBlog has seen a huge increase in the scoffing of the previous, crazier law recently, so maybe the mayor and his mental health department felt they needed to bow to the inevitable. Do note that Cambridge still has the more restrictive (and insanely detailed) rule, so exercise caution at the city line.

Elsewhere on the mask madness front, the Sacramento County sheriff's office will not be enforcing the governor's new mask mandate. They do intend to comply, so this appears to be a statement about the feasibility of policing mask use rather than an anti-mask tirade. Sheriffs in Tulare[, Modoc,] and Orange counties have made similar statements; as one might expect for that hotbed of anti-masking, Orange County's was the most aggressive.

There have been a lot of strange theories (e.g., BCG vaccine), symptoms (e.g., COVID toes) and susceptibilities (e.g., type I diabetes) associated with coronavirus, but I think this particular high-risk group takes the cake: bald men. A paper in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology documents the Gabrin sign, i.e., androgenetic alopecia or baldness, named after Dr. Frank Gabrin, the first American physician to die of COVID-19.

To extend a previous study of the same issue, a bunch of dermatologists assisting in the coronavirus crisis in several Spanish hospitals documented patients' level of baldness on admission for three weeks. (The only standard was hospitalization.) Of those seen, 42% of the women and 79% of the men suffered from alopecia. They estimated the population average was less than or equal to 38% for women and 31%–53% for males. They did no analysis of the significance of this finding, instead soldiering right on to their recommendations for anti-androgen therapy (though the rationale behind this approach is left to the reader to figure out from the references).

Massachusetts cases are up a quarter of a percentage point again today.