Day 236: Think of the Children

The world has reached 32 million cases. Massachusetts' cases were up two fifths of a percentage point today. Despite no appreciable change in our coronavirus status in the past two months, the governor of Maine has finally relented and will now allow Massachusetts residents to visit without a COVID-19 test. The governor has provided no sane reason for the change, though there seem to be some hallucinatory reasons:

Maine health officials said Massachusetts now resembles other exempt states like Connecticut, New York and New Jersey in terms of COVID-19 prevalence and positivity rate.

PlagueBlog is unsure how that can represent a change, unless the tri-state areas numbers have recently been getting worse.

Nature reports on a rise in stillbirth rates in some countries (none of which are the US) and attributes it entirely to COVID panic interfering with routine prenatal care. Note that the CDC has yet to report any overall change in the stillbirth rate in the US, though they have reported, inconclusively, again, about the risks of COVID-19 infection in pregnant women.

A report out of Sweden found little difference in pregnancy outcome between COVID-19 patients and uninfected patients in labor. There was slightly more pre-eclampsia among the infected and a bit more induction among the uninfected, but otherwise the deliveries and infants were similar or the same. They also noted that 65% of infected mothers were asymptomatic.