Day 208: Settled Science Isn't Science

Columbia has sprung ahead of Mexico to 7th place in case numbers, though likely not on their own demerits but only through lack of testing in Mexico. Oman, Belgium, Kuwait, and Romania are queued up behind China for their chance to somehow surpass the case numbers of a country with a population of a billion where the virus raged uncontrolled and unacknowledged for a month. The US is teetering on the cusp of six million cases.

The science continues to fluctuate. Yet another study in favor of hydroxychloroquine has come out, this one finding a 30% lower risk of death in Italian patients administered HCQ during the height of the pandemic there. For a nearly-daily dose of HCQ science, check the HCQ paper tracker.

On the actually-wrong science front, a paper in JAMA has been corrected, perhaps beyond recognition. Mistakes were made, and some of the significant findings of cardiac damage from COVID-19 became insignificant differences. Whether the remaining results justify, say, cancelling football season (an alleged effect of the original publication) is unclear.

On the relapse front, Newsweek reports on several cases of reinfection with COVID-19 proven by genetic sequencing: one in Belgium, one in the Netherlands, and one in Hong Kong (with his second strain ex Spain). Rumor (pending the release of a preprint) has it that the relapsed Hong Kong case was asymptomatic, but the disease status of the new European cases is unclear. A relapse has also come to light in Wisconsin, where a patient exhibited unspecified different symptoms from his first bout three months ago, but no proof (or genetic sequencing at all) has been reported.

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