Day 770: Zero COVID, Anyone?

Somerville suddenly and unceremoniously dropped our mask mandate last Saturday, citing the mood at the CDC. This isn't as exciting as it sounds, because we're increasingly a city of condominiums largely served by shops in neighboring Cambridge. Their indoor mask mandate ends this coming Sunday.

The bats have come home to roost in China, where their Zero COVID policy is working about as well as it did for New Zealand:

On Friday, the authorities in Hong Kong said that the city’s hospital mortuaries had filled up so quickly amid a sharp Covid outbreak that body bags were being crammed into wards with patients who were still being treated for the virus.

“For some of the bodies, we have not been able to move them from the wards to the mortuary,” said Sara Ho, the chief manager of patient safety and risk management at Hong Kong’s Hospital Authority. “It may cause some concerns among patients.”

Massachusetts cases were up a twentieth of a percentage point yesterday. There were no body bag buildup concerns among our 290 hospitalized COVID patients.