And the Quarterback Is Toast

UNC is putting all undergraduate face-to-face classes online by Wednesday at the latest. 

They are working on plans to get some students out of residence halls and some to disperse for home.

FYI: UNC is both larger than the U, BYU, or Utah State, but it also has a higher proportion of students living in campus-related housing. And North Carolina is a more spread out state than Utah, so most students are in for a substantial move home.

No word on new clusters. They are up to 130 positive test results amongst students, 5 amongst staff, a positivity rate of 13.6% (up from less than 3% last week), 177 students in isolation, and 349 in quarantine.

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This might be a good time to reiterate that people need to stop the BS about COVID-19 not affecting young people much. We can put forth a lot of subjective opinions about why minorities are being hit harder, but the objective fact is that death rates for minorities aged 44 and younger are higher than for whites over the age of 85. For some minorities it's even those under 34.

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There's also an entire sorority house at Oklahoma State under quarantine after 23 members residing there tested positive. 

Oh ... and there's a cluster on the Oklahoma football team.

FWIW: at the time that I write this, none of the news items linked above appear on the website of FOXNews.com or DrudgeReport.com. They are on CNN.com.

UPDATE: Between the time I wrote and posted this, and went back to another tab, DrudgeReport had gotten this news on their page.

This Is Not Photoshopped

You should click through and check out the headline for the editorial on page 3 from this morning's campus newspaper at UNC.

(My apologies, but Blogger is blocking me from showing an image of that source). Here's a link to a twitter page showing a photograph of the print edition.

Also interesting is the campus map on the first page showing the location of outbreaks that were known at the time the paper went to press.

Auckland Cluster

 A new cluster has popped up in Auckland this past week.† They have a few dozen positives, and about a hundred people in involuntary quarantine.

This is important for a few reasons. 

• New Zealand successfully eradicated COVID-19, and had not had a case in over 14 weeks.
• New Zealand is geographically isolated without COVID-19. Their response to the pandemic was to isolate themselves even further.
• Contact tracing has not yielded any solid leads about how the virus got to New Zealand this time.
  
• Initial genetic testing indicates that the strain is an older one, that is not that widespread around the globe. However, it still circulates in Australia and the UK, which have close relations with New Zealand. 
• The strain is not, and has not been present, in the United States.
• Lastly, the strain was not detected in New Zealand's initial outbreaks. 

They phylogeny on the strain is primitive at this point. Keep an eye on Nextstrain's dashboards for further developments. Disappointingly, they don't say too much about this strain yet.

So, we've got an isolated country that's buttoned down tight, and very aggressive about limiting contact ... and they still got an outbreak. Reddit has some speculation on what might have happened.

† Auckland is the largest city in New Zealand. It is a bit smaller than the Salt Lake City consolidated metro area (the "Wasatch Front" to locals).

UNC-Chapel Hill Clusters

The main campus of the University of North Carolina opened this past week. They already have 4 clusters of COVID-19 in student housing: 3 in the dorms, and 1 in a frat house. The first cluster was reported 2 days ago.

A Faculty Executive Committee has scheduled a special zoom meeting for Monday to make recommendations about how to go forward. Due note that on most campuses, faculty have the least power to make things happen.

Like Utah, North Carolina has a uniform COVID-19 policy statewide for higher education. A representative of faculty at UNC has written to the state government asking for that to be rescinded so that decisions can be made on a campus by campus basis.

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Clustering is significant, not because it drives total numbers up, but because it indicates a failure of systems in place (like social distancing, and better hygiene) to limit transmission.

That Chloropleth

Just a note: it was only on July 10th that Covidexitstrategy introduced a new color, bruised red, to show that Arizona's outbreak was worse than what we'd seen before. Here's today's map:

I seem to remember some people asserting that COVID-19 would go away in the summer because that's what the flu does. Umm ... yeah.

UPDATE: I just checked this on August 16th, and Utah has dropped down to the orangey-red level.

Iran Also Caught Lying About Their Numbers

This really isn't surprising, given that Iran has easily had the most publicly acknowledged infections and deaths amongst high government officials (mostly in February and March).

What is incredibly surprising is that the first death occurred on January 22nd. Given that estimates of the time from initial exposure to ultimate death are in the range are 17 to 21 days, this indicates initial exposure or someone who died in Iran to have occurred somewhere between January 1st and 5th. This addresses one of the huge riddles about the early course of COVID-19: given the large commercial connections between China and Iran, someone in Iran should've gotten sicker sooner than late February. Smoking gun confirmed.

Anyway, the BBC has published and official internal count leaked from Iran's government that differs from the publicly available, external official count.

The government's own records appear to show almost 42,000 people died with Covid-19 symptoms up to 20 July, versus 14,405 reported by its health ministry.

The number of people known to be infected is also almost double official figures: 451,024 as opposed to 278,827.

Due note that up until this time, that publicly available, external official count has shown for months that Iran has the worst outbreak in their region. The new numbers are worse.

The chart shows the new and old figures.

Iran has already been transparent that they are in a second wave that is worse than the first.

The data appears to be legit:

The data was sent to the BBC by an anonymous source.

It includes details of daily admissions to hospitals across Iran, including names, age, gender, symptoms, date and length of periods spent in hospital, and underlying conditions patients might have.

The details on lists correspond to those of some living and deceased patients already known to the BBC.

The BBC also makes clear that the undercount does not appear to be the result of innocent mistakes:

A level of undercounting, largely due to testing capacity, is seen across the world, but the information leaked to the BBC reveals Iranian authorities have reported significantly lower daily numbers despite having a record of all deaths - suggesting they were deliberately suppressed.

Due note that these new figures are smaller than the estimates that the dissident groups PMOI/MEK have been publishing for months.

How'd the K-12 School Opening Go?

The first K-12 school in the country opened on Friday.

They had a positive test result by mid-morning, and directed a bunch of exposed students to quarantine at home for 2 weeks.

Sounds like the MLB. For those reading this in the future, it's not clear how the MLB season will turn out, but right now they've completed 54 games in the AL, and 50 games in the NL. It's kind of hard to count the number of postponed games, because some they've tried to play, some have been postponed more than once, some future ones have been postponed, and so on. The best number I've seen is about 20. And the MLB Commissioner has indicated the season might have to be called off this week.

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I want this to be over.

I want life to get back to normal.

But that isn't happening yet, and no one should be surprised.

I do get that kids need to be in school, and parents need them occupied. And I get that the MLB has to have games to be financially viable.

But I wonder if we need to invent a new word here. I call it epidemiologically-retarded. All we are to the virus is a target. Just because it's small, and not as smart as us, doesn't keep us from being prey.