2020.04.01

Official Numbers

The Johns Hopkins dashboard shit the bed today, it’s showing 150,000 fewer infected than yesterday. I think it might have accidentally lost US numbers. In any case, I’m not putting in the effort to figure out the real numbers. I will wait and hopefully this is fixed by tomorrow. If not, I will find a new source

In my City:

• 305 confirmed infections in my city
• 16 confirmed infections in my ZIP code (Δ 0)
• 3 confirmed deaths in my city

Updates

• The FDA has approved a two-minute antibody test. Company says they can ship 1.5 million per week
• SARS-CoV-2 can be caught and transmitted by cats. Preprint, very preliminary, we can’t really conclude anything more than “more research is needed. But these scientsts blew a bunch of coronavirus up a cat’s nose, and then that cat got sick, and then that cat sneezed on a different cat, and that cat got sick. This is more or less the gist of the paper. Note that it is likely that cats are not very good hosts for the virus, and you should definitely not start culling cats to stop disease spread or anything
• Italy publishes daily summary infographics. This is today’s graphic. Really interesting to me that they’re reporting almost 12,000 deaths, but ONLY TWENTY EIGHT were people under the age of 40. They also show an overall breakdown by symptom severity and post that almost 20% of infected people have basically no symptoms (“paucisymptomatic” means “even more mild than the mild category”, I assume it’s no different from spring allergies or something)
• I spoke too soon yesterday about the churches. Texas governor has declared churches essential, meaning that you can still go to church during lockdown. You definitely shouldn’t go. But you can.
• COVID wing in a hospital in Italy is empty for the first time in a month. Maybe they’re over the peak?
• Jesus Christ, the US is at 5000 deaths. That was fast. Really, really fast. Doing some quick back-of-the-envelope math with a friend the other day, we estimate that it will peak at 10,000 per day for a week or two, given current trends. This assumes significant distancing/lockdown remains in effect
• “China lied, people died” is now officially within the Overton window. I swear to god if we ever find out that this was a lab accident, I am going to dedicate the rest of my life to frustrating and antagonizing every journalist, every expert, and every politician, that I meet