Sunday, August 02, 2020

Day 184: Coronavirus at Altitude

It's been another quiet news day, except for a state of disaster in Victoria, Australia, with a curfew and mounted police patrolling Melbourne. Here in Massachusetts, cases are up a third of a percentage point, and we are apparently at the end of the delay issues and back to our months-long "plateau".

Speaking of plateaus, the winner of the say-something-new-about-COVID Olympics is a preprint at medrXiv "showing that the incidence of COVID-19 on the American continent decreases significantly starting at 1,000 m above sea level." (That's about three-fifths of a mile in anti-masker units.) The source data seems fairly well broken down by altitude (as these things go) compared to similar international comparisons of, for example, vaccination coverage, and they also controlled for population density. The effects of altitude extend beyond lower incidence to lesser severity and reduced communicability of the disease.

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