Day 162: The One Percent

The US has made a couple of coronavirus records recently: yesterday was our first day with 70,000 cases, and today we hit 3.35 million cases total, which comes out to slightly more than 10,000 cases per million people. In other words, 1% of the population has been infected.

Elsewhere in the world, Argentina recently crossed the China line. Next in the queue is Egypt, with only a couple of days to go. Although Brazil is only racking up about half our daily case count at the moment, their daily deaths are well in excess of ours. In France, bus driver Philippe Monguillot, who was left brain-dead after an attack by fare-evading passengers he'd confronted for not wearing masks has died. While the Anglophone press has focused on the mask-evasion, the French press notes the fare evasion, and the prosecutors have called the five suspects "down and out drug users".

In the US, Texas seems to have pulled ahead of Florida despite a slightly lower average rate of cases. Georgia pulled ahead of Massachusetts yesterday, pushing us down to #9. (Our cases are up a quarter of a percentage point today). Pennsylvania at #10 is creeping towards the 100,000 case mark.

On the research (and weird symptoms) front, the Lancet reports a case of Kawasaki-like multisystem inflammatory syndrome in a 45-year-old man with coronavirus, "similar to what has been reported in children."

Although the cause of Kawasaki disease remains unknown, the most widely accepted theory is an aberrant immune response to an infectious trigger. Emerging reports depict the phenotype of MIS-C [multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children] as a combination of Kawasaki disease, toxic shock syndrome, and macrophage activation syndrome (or haemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), all syndromes of dysregulated immune responses. Our patient's presentation also included features typical of these different multisystem inflammatory syndromes.

The Conversation has a readable (if rambling) overview of the 20% ceiling of coronavirus infections, whether it represents a much lower threshold of herd immunity than the standard estimates (yes, if you're lucky), and what might be causing it (T-cell mediated immunity, either new or lingering from previous coronaviruses).