Day 194: Canines and Cold Chains

New Zealand may have traced their outbreak to refrigerated shipping, as one of their four coronavirus cases worked in an Aukland cold storage facility. (Note that they are considering delaying elections over a 0.8 per million case rate.) China is also complaining again about COVID coming in on frozen seafood, though they don't say from where, and they do say they may have exported some of the contaminated imports.

Also in China, two more cases of COVID recidivism have come out. The more notable one involves a 68-year-old woman from Jingzhou who first tested positive on February 8th, recovered, and tested positive again on August 9th. Apparently she is ill enough this time to be receiving some unspecified treatment. News reports differ on whether she recovered from the first bout "a few months ago" or in late February, which would be over five months ago. The second case is of a man from Hulchun who was initially diagnosed on April 27th, recovered on June 16th, and tested positive on August 10th. He is also receiving treatment, though it's not clear from the report whether he initially sought treatment for COVID or for another condition.

A North Carolina dog who died of a sudden illness involving respiratory distress early last week has tested positive for COVID-19. A family member of the owner had tested positive previously, though the news reports do not note whether the human was ever symptomatic. The dog was an 8-year-old male Newfie. Autopsy results are still pending.

On the off-target vaccine front, a preprint reports somewhat promising results from BCG booster shots in a population that was immunized in childhood. A larger study of giving tuberculosis vaccine to adults in a naive population is underway in Australia, but results aren't expected until October (and may not be particularly significant unless their outbreak worsens before then).

Locally, the governor has backed off a bit on quarantining Rhode Islanders who live close to Massachusetts and tend to shop here (which is, practically speaking, all Rhode Islanders).

P.S. Massachusetts' cases were up a quarter of a percentage point today. To add insult to late reporting, the MDPH has buried the real case count even deeper (in an ethnicity pie chart) and removed the cases by county data altogether.