Anyone paying attention anymore??? China now has 108 million people under quarantine. These are different people from earlier this year, in a different part of the country. Oh ... and Wuhan had a bunch of new cases this week.
Antibody tests in Los Angeles county show a 95% confidence interval of 2.5% to 7.1% of the population as having been infected. The median estimate amounts to 367K infections. The number of current positive test results is a tenth of that.
STATNews has a piece showing an ugly side to Utah. Entitled "Utah went all-in on an unproven COVID-19 treatment, then scrambled to course-correct" it details how the state bought a large amount of chloroquine/hydroxychloroquine from a politically connected seller with scant evidence. The story had to be uncovered using public records requests. They cited this expertise:
“Our president came out and suggested the medications,” Babitz said. “So we’re very confident this could make a significant difference.”Babitz is deputy director of the state health department. The other two experts highlighted include the owner of a mail-order pharmacy based in Utah, and an MD from the U specializing in musculoskeletal disorders and the evaluation of commercial drivers". Ultimately a different division of state government (read between the lines here ... crossing into new turf usually requires executive action) order $800K of the drugs. All of this was done without going through the state epidemiologist, Angela Dunn, who Governor Herbert always put in a place of prominence at his press conferences. Folks, this is crony-capitalism, and it's what gives free markets a bad name. On the bright side, Utah is also pretty good about cleaning up its messes; the $800K purchase was eventually refunded.
Brazil has been in the news. The epidemic is getting larger there, and is being downplayed by their president. Not to encourage that, but it sounds like a lot of places around the globe, so I don't think it's that informative. Here's what I think is informative: it's autumn there, moving into winter, and a lot of the areas of Brazil where a lot of people live are temperate. We need to pay attention to this one to see how sensitive the virus is to the seasons.
FWIW: If you recall, I mentioned in class in the spring semester that I had a family member with COVID-19 like symptoms in January. We all got antibody tests last week. I'll let you know the results. Also, my brother in New York state thought he had it in early February; his test came back negative.
† For the life of me I cannot understand how some people in the United States can assert that the death tolls are overstated in some sort of shadowy conspiracy, when there is solid evidence from a number of different countries of governments covering up the true death counts. WTF.
UPDATE: The issue with Mexico is a nastier and less common one. Many countries and regions have had deaths occur so often that they have been unable to keep track of them, or to categorize them appropriately. Instead we now have solid evidence that Mexico is announcing official death tolls that ignore about 70% of the coroner's or attending doctor's medical diagnoses on death certificates. That's far worse, and in fact may be the worst case yet; since all we have about China and Iran is conjectures, accusations, and circumstantial evidence of undercounting.
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