Monday, February 08, 2021

Day 374: Even the Yanomamo

The Guardian reports that ten Yanomamo children died of COVID last month. It's unclear what the definition of "children" is in this case (it may include 20-year-olds), but they also report seven previous Yanomamo victims under the age of two out of 32 total deaths. So it's clear that real children are involved this time, though it's not as clear that these deaths were from coronavirus rather than some other communicable disease with similar symptoms. PlagueBlog speculates that this unusually high death rate among children may be related to the lack of off-target vaccine protection in the isolated population.

In other international news, WebMD reports the failure of AstraZeneca's vaccine against South Africa's variant coronavirus strain B.1.351. The CDC tracks variant strains in the US, only one of which (B.1.1.7) has reached Massachusetts.

Massachusetts' cases were up a quarter of a percentage point today, due to the usual Monday reporting lull (of Sunday's data).

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