Day 210: Even the Bunnies

Oman has gotten very close to the China point, but is still lagging behind at #35. The US is now well past 6 million cases, and Alabama is slowly working its way towards Massachusetts' #13 spot, where it may arrive in less than a week. Death tolls for the summer wave remain significantly lower than those from the spring.

Amnesty International reports on the gunning down of at least seven young men in Angola by security forces, apparently over mask and lockdown-related offenses.

The Times reports that the six minors who have died of coronavirus in the UK were all seriously ill:

Three were newborn babies with other severe health problems. The other three were aged 15 to 18 years old and also had “profound health issues”.

Calum Semple, professor in child health and outbreak medicine at the University of Edinburgh, who is the senior author of the study, said: “The deaths that we did observe were children with what we would describe as profound co-morbidities — not a touch of asthma, not cystic fibrosis.”

These children’s underlying illnesses would have been considered as “life-limiting”, he said. “We did not have any deaths in otherwise healthy school-aged children.”

Note that that was six minors out of about 70,000 hospitalized patients studied (only 651 of whom were minors). In total there have been about 41,000 deaths in the UK, some presumably out of hospital. The headline and text of the news article imply that the study covered all deaths of minors in the UK, though the actual research didn't explicitly claim to be exhaustive, nor did it include Northern Ireland or any overseas territories at all.

The Lancet preprints an American case of reinfection with a provably different coronavirus strain. It isn't the suspected Wisconsin case but a case in Nevada. The patient was symptomatic with his first strain for about a month beginning at the end of March, then relapsed at the end of May and was eventually hospitalized with hypoxia and pneumonia. No resolution of the second bout was reported.

The paper also notes that he may have been reinfected by a household member, and that he is 25 years old with no immunological issues to explain the reinfection (though it is otherwise silent on his health status and any comorbidities):

The individual associated with these cases possesses no significant conditions of an immunological nature that would imply facilitation of re-infection. They were not utilizing any immunosuppressive medications. The individual was negative for HIV by antibody and RNA testing (data not shown) and had no obvious cell count abnormalities.

According to a new preprint, rabbits are susceptible to coronavirus. While the three in vivo test subjects were asymptomatic, they did shed infectious virus from their twitchy little noses for up to seven days. The results are of some interest to rabbit farmers, though probably not a public health concern.

Nature reports on a promising drug for both original SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2, one that was previously shown to be effective against the coronavirus that causes feline infectious peritonitis.

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point today.