Day 211: 25 Million Strong

The world case count has hit 25 million, and Romania has made the jump past China to #34 in cases. Massachusetts' cases are up a third of a percentage point again. A wedding in Millinocket, Maine continues to make the news as a bit of a superspreading event.

The New York Times meanders around the topic of coronavirus testing, dissing the CDC's decision to stop testing asymptomatic people while dreaming of tests that are faster or more informative than the current binary PCR results. In particular, a PCR test can give some indication of viral load:

The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.

This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.

In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.

On the pie-hole front, a forthcoming meta-analysis in the open access journal Obesity Reviews found that the obese were 46% more likely to come down COVID-19, 113% more likely to be hospitalized for it, 74% more likely to end up in the ICU, and 48% more likely to die of it. The researchers didn't have much new to say about why, but they did hit the irony button pretty hard with their concerns that the pandemic response is exacerbating the worldwide obesity problem:

In addition to COVID‐19's critical economic constraints, its impacts on diets may pose lifelong risks to populations around the globe. Food habits developed during this period, particularly the intake of ultraprocessed foods, represent a major health risk.