2020.03.25

Official Numbers:

• 466,955 confirmed infections
• 21,162 confirmed deaths
• 113,770 confirmed recoveries
• 81,661 China
• 74,386 Italy
• 65,285 US
• 49,515 Spain
• 37,323 Germany
• 27,017 Iran
• 25,600 France
• 10,897 Switzerland
• 9,640 United Kingdom
• 9,137 Korea, South
• 6,438 Netherlands
• 5,588 Austria
• 4,937 Belgium
• 3,251 Canada
• 3,066 Norway
• 2,995 Portugal
• 2,526 Sweden
• 2,433 Brazil
• 2,433 Turkey
• 2,369 Israel
• 2,364 Australia
• 1,862 Denmark
• 1,796 Malaysia
• 1,654 Czechia
• 1,564 Ireland
• 1,333 Luxembourg
• 1,307 Japan
• 1,173 Ecuador
• 1,142 Chile
• 1,063 Pakistan
• 1,051 Poland

USA

• Atlanta mayor says ICUs are at capacity. This is the part where this gets really, really bad
• LA is enforcing shutdown orders by killing utilities to commercial properties.
• Waffle House closes 365 locations in the US. My American friends inform me that this is Very Significant, as Waffle House never closes.
• Amazon Workers test positive at six U.S. Warehouses. I have been disinfecting the boxes that my packages come in, but I have not been disinfecting the things inside the boxes. I will have to change this protocol.
• Texas has hit 1000 confirmed cases.
• The governor of Kentucky is becoming something of a social media darling for his handling the coronavirus pandemic much better than other leaders. It is unclear to me what, specifically, he’s doing differently from other leaders, aside from implementing lockdowns earlier. But I’m informed that he’s an example of a good leader, and this is a good profile of his acts.
• Guy on /r/wallstreetbets says that a major hospital in NYC is at capacity and triaging ventilator access.
• A personal friend of mine reports that a friend of their father collapsed unexpectedly today. He later became diagnosed with Coronavirus. I consider this to be an ironclad proof that those ‘collapsing in the street’ videos from China are real. He also confirms that the hospital he was taken to is at capacity, and has no more ICU space
• We’ve graduated from quarantine cruises to quarantine aircraft carriers. “Three cases of COVID-19 have been identified among personnel currently deployed and underway on the USS Theodore Roosevelt

Europe

• Prince Charles tests positive. Poor guy is never gonna get to be king.
• Woman, 21, ‘with no pre-existing conditions dies of coronavirus’. This is one singular anecdote, and not data. I really wish we had more robust data about the relative severity risk by age bracket. But this is still concerning.

Science/Medical

• Men who are infected get their hormones all fucked up. Two months ago there was some preliminary rumours that male fertility might be impacted by this, but they were very preliminary and not very reliable. This seems to suggest that those rumours may have been real. It is unclear to me if this is a selection bias thing though (eg people with these imbalances are at higher risk of getting sick). It’s also important to note that these hormones are measured while people are sick, and it’s unclear if the disruption persists after you recover
• Face Masks: Much More Than You Wanted To Know. This blog is very high quality, generally reputable, and written by an actual M.D. He has done a meta-analysis of all the data available with respect to masks
• Prolonged presence of SARS-CoV-2 viral RNA in faecal samples. Stupid Lancet links have fucking parens in them and it breaks the markdown link formatter, so URL here: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(20)30083-2/fulltext). They found that evidence of viral RNA could be found in stool samples for, in one case up to 33 days after their respiratory tests became negative/their symptoms ended. This is concerning and requires more study, but it is also important to note that this study did not determine if those viral particles were still infectious or not. Shedding inactivated viral particles for a few weeks after you’re not sick anymore is not particularly unusual, and is not necessarily cause for alarm.
• Robin Hanson with A bunch of data suggesting that there is a dose-response relationship between initial viral exposure and severity of illness. If true, this could have some uncomfortable implications. For one: you’re likely to be exposed to a lower viral load from touching a contaminated handrail in public than you are from quarantining in a house with sick loved ones. If true, quarantine measures may dramatically increase disease severity. I do not endorse his conclusions as true, but he links a lot of interesting papers on the subject
• UK claims it’s days away from releasing millions of antibody tests. This changes everything. I didn’t realize that we had antibody tests outside of research labs at all. But they claim they have 3.5 million and are ready to ship them to pharmacies in days. This implies that they have a highly scalable process for manufacture. This implies that the US could license the tech and manufacture millions per week. We could test people and formally certify them as (very probably) immune to the virus. We could test people to figure out who is safe to let out of quarantine. If this could be deployed at scale, soon, then Trump’s insane plan to end lockdowns by Easter starts to look actually realistic (at least for the subset of population that is already immune)

Markets

• Indeed releases data showing how job-search numbers have changed during this crisis. They’re… not good, but surprisingly not as bad as you’d expect. Job postings are still above January levels.