Day 192: 20 Million Strong

The world hit 20 million cases late yesterday. In the "with COVID, not from COVID" news, 11 patients died and 22 were hospitalized in a fire in the Hotel Swarna Palace in Vijayawada, India, which was being used as a temporary hospital. The Indian news, while strangely omitting the death and casualty counts, reports that the building lacked a required fire certification and that the smoke alarms and sprinklers were not functioning. Earlier last week in India, 8 COVID patients died in an ICU fire in Ahmedabad. Both fires were apparently caused by short circuits.

New research out of China estimates a slightly longer incubation period for COVID-19:

The estimated median of incubation period is 7.76 days (95% CI: 7.02-8.53), the 90th percentile is 14.28 days (95% CI: 13.64-14.90). By taking the possibility that a small portion of patients may contract the disease on their way out of Wuhan, the estimated probability that incubation period is longer than 14 days is between 5% to 10%.

The last sentence is unclear, but elsewhere they say that "about 10% of patients with COVID-19 would develop symptoms after 14 days of infection," so perhaps that's what they meant.

On the legal front, a happy couple in Akron, NY, won their case at the last minute in federal court in Syracuse on Friday. They claimed their first and fourteenth amendment rights were being infringed by the unfair application of the state limit of 50 people at "gatherings" to their wedding instead of the 50% capacity limit at "venues". (The party was larger than 50 people but smaller than 50% of the venue's capacity.) Reason has the details of the decision, which focused on equal protection.

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