Day 226, Otherwise Known As 1600000000

The world has reached 29 million cases. The Unix Epoch has reached 1600000000. The Australian government is under fire for a double standard that keeps the average person from attending their parents' funerals but lets Tom Hanks tramp into the country unimpeded.

Commentary in BMJ Global Health speculates that ADE (antibody-dependent enhancement) contributed to the severity of cases in Italy. It's fairly speculative, with no evidence that ADE is increasing the disease burden, and no way to distinguish between that case and one that would look the same such as previous immunity to other coronaviruses reducing the disease burden elsewhere. PlagueBlog would have thought we were beyond such basic speculation at this point, but apparently we are not.

An interesting paper in Science uses the genetics of SARS-CoV-2 to investigate flaws in the early pandemic response in the US and Europe:

Our results suggest that rapid early interventions successfully prevented early introductions of the virus into Germany and the US from taking hold. Other, later introductions of the virus from China to both Italy and to Washington State founded the earliest sustained European and North America transmission networks. Our analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of public health measures in preventing onward transmission and show that intensive testing and contact tracing could have prevented SARS-CoV-2 from becoming established.

There's also a University of Arizona press release about the paper.

Massachusetts' cases are up two ninths of a percentage point today.