Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I was confident that someone would point it out and thought why not me.

Seems like a complicated subject, have you tried yelling at it?

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

The current Supreme Court is a dangerous, rogue court.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

In after Baud. Damn.

The lights are all blinking red.

We cannot abandon the truth and remain a free nation.

Michigan is a great lesson for Dems everywhere: when you have power…use it!

Hey hey, RFK, how many kids did you kill today?

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

People are complicated. Love is not.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

The willow is too close to the house.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

Following reporting rules is only for the little people, apparently.

You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Wednesday-Thursday, July 29-30

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update: Wednesday-Thursday, July 29-30

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  3. 3.

    Amir Khalid

    Malaysia’s daily numbers. Eight new cases. Five cases from local infection, all Malaysians. Three cases from imported infection: two Malaysians returning from Kazakhstan and the Philippines, and an illegal immigrant from Indonesia who was screened ahead of transfer to detention. Cumulative total 8,964 cases.

    Five more patients recovered and were discharged, total 8,617 recovered, 96.1% of the cumulative total. The number of patients with active and contagious cases being isolated/treated in hospital is up to 223; three are in ICU, and one of them is on a respirator.

    No new deaths, total remains at 124 deaths: 1.38% of the cumulative total, 1.42% of resolved cases.

    DG of Health Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah noted that of the schoolchildren who had tested positive, per media reports, one had not been to school, and testing at the school attended by the other child did not turn up any other positive cases. Thus there were no clusters at their schools.

    This was not brought up at today’s media briefing — just concluded as I write this — but yesterday Dr Noor Hisham noted with concern the huge, very emotional crowd of UMNO party supporters that gathered at the KL Court Complex for the verdict and sentencing of disgraced former party leader and PM Najib Tun Razak — a potential superspreader event. He said the Health Ministry would be monitoring for any outbreak.

  4. 4.

    NotMax

    Countries reporting more than 10k new cases over most recent 24 hours:

    U.S. ~76k
    Brazil ~69k
    India ~52k
    South Africa ~11k
    .
    Total cases reported worldwide leaps past 17 million.

  5. 5.

    mrmoshpotato

    @rikyrah: Once again, thanks for doing the COVID-19 beat.
    I check this every morning.

    Same here.  Thanks for the daily updates.

    And thanks to Amir, terben, Sloane, Robert, YY, and others for their updates from overseas.

  6. 6.

    mrmoshpotato

    politically inconvenient to an administration that purported to be able to solve anything and make america great again

    Is “politically inconvenient” a nicer way of saying Dump is a traitorous, Soviet shitpile mobster conman who’s sucked the Kremlin’s asshole since at least 1987 and is intent on destroying the US because he’s owned by the Russkis?

    Just asking.*

    *Not really just asking.

  8. 8.

    Amir Khalid

    Who is Ann Widdecombe, and whence her really really bad idea to have shops allow mask-free shoppers at specific times?

  10. 10.

    WereBear

    I had that half-second this morning: the one where you are awake but you haven’t snapped into real time mode. Then I remembered, “Oh, yeah, we’re in the hellscape.”

    If we are going to pin down the King Vampire, I think it’s the asshole who gave Trump national exposure as a tycoon on the reality show “The Apprentice” for 15 seasons.

    That’s who the Republicans went nuts for as a successful racist/sexist businessman. That’s why we are in the crevasse we are in. I wonder how much money that guy made.

  13. 13.

    YY_Sima Qian

    Yesterday, China reported 102 new domestic confirmed cases and 20 new domestic asymptomatic cases.

    Ürumqi in Xinjiang “Autonomous” Region reported 96 new confirmed cases (only 8 are previously asymptomatic, already under quarantine), and 18 new asymptomatic cases.  2 case in critical condition, and 22 in serious condition, 1 critical case has stabilized to serious condition, and 2 serious case has stabilized to moderate condition. The Ürumqi outbreak so far has 414 confirmed cases (412 in Ürumqi, 1 each at Kashgar and Xinjiang Construction Corps), and 143 asymptomatic cases (140 in Ürumqi, 2 in Changji Prefecture, 1 in Xinjiang Construction Corps), plus 1 asymptomatic case exported to Shaoxing in Zhejiang Province. There are 12313 close contacts under quarantine and medical observation.

    Part of the reason for the relatively rapid increase in case counts at Ürumqi is the fact that the city is conducting mass screening of all residents, and for the 2nd time in the hot spot Tianshan and Saybag Districts. Nevertheless, given the city has been under lock down for 13 days, which should have greatly limited transmission. Mass screenings should have caught the majority of infected cases within the past two weeks, rather than cases still peaking. It is possible that the 1st round of mass screening happened too quickly, before a large percentage of the infected patients had produced enough viral particles in their bodies to be sampled by swabs. Alternatively, perhaps in the haste to screen hundreds of thousands of residents per day, improperly trained or overworked medical workers may not have been consistently following swabbing procedures, leading to high percentage of false negatives. Either factor could be the motivation for the city’s authorities to conduct mass screening of Tianshan and Saybag Districts a 2nd time. Without any case information, especially if the new confirmed cases are primarily identified from close contacts or from community mass screening, it is difficult for me to assess the authorities’ containment measures against the pace of the outbreak. In theory, as long as the lock down is effectively sustained, it is only a question of time when the outbreak is wrestled under control.

    Dalian in Liaoning Province reported 5 new confirmed cases and 2 new asymptomatic cases. 4 of 5 confirmed cases were previously identified as asymptomatic, 1 is a traced close contact, all have already been under quarantine. The outbreak in Dalian has a total of 57 confirmed cases: 4 serious cases, 51 moderate cases and 2 mild cases; 30 are workers from the import seafood processing plant, 9 are their close contacts, 9 are residents of Dalian Bay sub-district, and 9 and close contacts of confirmed/asymptotic cases not directly connected to the plant. The city also has 32 asymptomatic cases: 25 are workers from the import seafood processing plant, 2 are their close contacts, 4 are residents of Dalian Bay sub-district, and 1 is a close contact of confirmed/asymptotic cases not directly connected to the plant. Additionally, 6 confirmed and 9 asymptomatic cases exported to the rest of China. 4.09M individuals in Dalian have already been tested since the start of the outbreak on 7/21. It appears that the Dalian outbreak is well on the way to be contained and eradicated, it has always been highly concentrated geographically, demographically and epidemiologically, despite exporting cases to 9 cities in 5 provinces and municipalities.

    Beijing Municipality added a 3rd confirmed case, the 1 year 4 months old grandson of the confirmed case from 7/27. 

    Yesterday, China reported 3 new imported confirmed cases, 1 imported asymptomatic case, and 1 imported suspect case:

    • Kunming in Yunnan Province – 1 confirmed case, a Chinese national returning form Bangladesh
    • Xi’an in Shaanxi Province – 1 confirmed case, a Chinese national returning form the Netherlands, via Brussels
    • Guangzhou in Guangdong Province – 1 confirmed case, a Chinese national returning from Zambia
    • Qingdao in Shandong Province – 1 asymptomatic case, a Chinese national returning from the Philippines
    • Shanghai Municipality – 1 suspect case, case information not published
    • Zhoushan in Zhejiang Province – on 7/28, a Panamanian flagged cargo ship had 4 crew members test positive on RT-PCR as confirmed cases, another 5 tested positive for IgM antibodies (out of total crew of 19, most are Chinese nationals); all 9 are in hospital under treatment or medical observation; for some reason these cases are not counted as imported or domestic cases, while other infected foreign crew members at other ports have counted as imported cases

    Today, Hong Kong reported 149 new cases, 145 from local transmission, 61 of whom do not have clear source of transmission identified. Hong Kong media is reporting rumors that the SAR government plans to delay the Legislative Council election by a year (currently scheduled for Sept.), though official announcement, yet.

  17. 17.

    JR

    @David C: The n’s are too small in both studies to make a decisive conclusion but common sense would suggest that everyone spreads the virus.

  18. 18.

    Brachiator

    @Amir Khalid:

    Who is Ann Widdecombe, and whence her really really bad idea to have shops allow mask-free shoppers at specific times?

    She is a right wing crank. A former Conservative Party MP, she later joined up with the BREXIT Party.

    She is notable for saying crazy things. She once compared the EU to slave owners.

  20. 20.

    There go two miscreants

    I will add my thanks for doing these. I generally read them early (often no comments yet) and check back later, especially to pick up the comments from folks in other countries.

  23. 23.

    Obdurodon

    In typical FTFNYT style, that graphic of cases in the US is a mix of useful and misleading. If it were scaled by population, a lot of the dense areas in the northeast would be white with a bit of yellow, while the Big Empty in the west would be yellow with a bit of orange. The Deep South would probably remain deep red, though, and perhaps that’s the key point.

  24. 24.

    PAM Dirac

    A few jackals have mentioned the In the Pipeline blog as a good place to get drug discovery and development information. For the last few months is has been almost entirely COVID 19 related. The latest entry is about the latest clinical trail data on using some existing drugs against COVID 19. Not very good news on IL-6 antibodies, despite some earlier positive results. He has an interesting insight that the ups and downs of the COVID 19 drug effort are illustrative of drug discovery in general and a good learning opportunity for those that have limited knowledge of how things work.

    The IL-6 hypothesis was a perfectly reasonable one, a solid idea from what we know about inflammation and about what was going wrong with patients who were being put on ventilation. But it’s wrong. A lot of perfectly reasonable medical hypotheses are wrong; this happens all the time and it’s why we have to run controlled trials rather than just running with what looks like it should work.

     

    I think this is the greatest misunderstanding the general public has about drug discovery: even the best, well supported ideas are wrong at least 90% of the time. If you want to have a good idea of how a particular therapy works in a given disease you MUST have clinical trials, and more than one. “Common sense”, what should work, consistency with well established models, expert opinion, computer models, all have a place in prioritizing what to bring to clinical trials, but are horrible substitutes for clinical trials.

  27. 27.

    Ohio Mom

    JR: I think it’s because a lot of people haven’t thought deeply about public school for decades, and retain their childhood impression that it consists solely of a teacher and a roomful of students but there can be almost as many adults who aren’t classroom teachers in a building.

    The principal, the assistant principal, their secretaries (the building’s gatekeepers); the cafeteria cooks and the custodians; special ed teachers supporting students mainstreamed in numerous classrooms; the educational aides (assigned to spec ed students, and/or supervising in the cafeteria and school yard); hopefully a nurse, either full- or part-time; and interventionslists such as speech-language therapists, OTs, PTs, pyschogists, social workers — many times these staff are part-time in a building and move among several schools throughout the week (or even a single day).

    And everyone involved in the sports teams, including referees (though I suppose you might get away with cancelling sports for the duration).

    Then there are the bus drivers, their supervisors, and the bus maintenance staff.

    Oh, and all the adults dropping off and picking up students, and delivering forgotten homework assignments and lunches. The people running the pre- and post-day care on-site, these can be private vendors.

    I might have left a category or two out but even so, that is a lot of potential vectors and Covid patients.

    The idea that a good number of these people move between buildings just make everything worse. You don’t need children to be the main vectors to make a lot of people very sick.

  28. 28.

    David C

    @JR: Yep. We should have a large enough N now to determine spread by age group in the US – unless that depends on contact tracing.

  29. 29.

    David C

    Noting the anti-IL-6 antibody tests, I do drug development as my day job, and the first lesson is that most promising drug candidates fail. The tricks are to have a robust pipeline to increase the odds of success, and to get to a definitive yes/no answer quickly.

    This series is why I check BJ first thing in the morning – and why I finally got on Twitter.

  31. 31.

    PAM Dirac

    @David C:

     

    the first lesson is that most promising drug candidates fail.

    Yes and most of the interesting ideas fail to make it to promising candidate and so on back. A major contributor to the high costs of drug discovery is the need to subsidize a great deal of failure.

  32. 32.

    Ken

    @mrmoshpotato: Not really just asking.

    Yeah, we saw the “Fox mark” – as the question mark is sometimes called, when it follows an editorial opinion and is only there to a allow bad-faith argument that it was not a statement, just a question.

  33. 33.

    Sloane Ranger

    There were 763 new cases in the UK yesterday and 83 deaths. The Government is worried that we might see the same increase in cases other European countries are experiencing and have increased the requirement to self isolate when coming from, or returning from abroad, from 7 to 10 days and are keeping the list of countries people can travel to under review

  34. 34.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Obdurodon: Yep, it always annoys me when they do not make it clear that , for instance South Dakota has a population of about 850,000  (in 77,000 square miles) and many of those people live in sparsely populated small towns and rural area, so they have an average of 10 people per square mile.  Connecticut on the other hand has 3.5 Million people and only about 5600 square miles. So our population density is about 730 or so, people per square mile ( just spit-balling I know my math skills suck…).  It’s like comparing apples to plums. Context is important.

    Connecticut population 2020

  35. 35.

    kindness

    I don’t think the people who refuse to wear masks because they don’t like being told what to do are going to go shopping at an appointed hour for the very same reason.  They don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves.

  36. 36.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    @Ohio Mom: Exactly!  Add in the delivery people that the kitchen staff and custodial staff have to deal with (food/milk deliveries, cleaning supply deliveries, deliveries of office and class room supplies, maintenance contracts who have to work on boilers, generators and the like)  people seem to think the physical plant runs and maintains itself by magic, yeah No.

  37. 37.

    Robert Sneddon

    Scotland is reporting no deaths from confirmed cases of COVID-19 over the past 24 hours with 17 new cases. Eight of those may be a new cluster centred around (in another irony) a pharmacy in Glasgow. Investigations are ongoing. The numbers of people in Scottish hospitals with confirmed and suspected COVID-19 remains at 260 with two patients in intensive care (I read that to mean on ventilation or similar invasive support).

     

    Scottish schools will be re-opening starting on 11th August with various precautions but it’s expected they will be operating full-time within a week or two. The other lockdown restrictions will continue, the next review will be in three weeks time but the prognosis is not that good.

  39. 39.

    Sloane Ranger

    @YY_Sima Qian: I wondered the same thing and have come up with no reasonable explanation. Possibly just to be different. We are, after all, exceptional!

  40. 40.

    wormtown

    @rikyrah: Me too.  This is the first thing I check out each morning.  Brought attention to some great people on twitter.  Thanks for doing this.

  41. 41.

    Robert Sneddon

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    Some countries are exempt from 14-day quarantine on arrival/return to the UK because the COVID-19 case numbers in those countries are very low — Japan is one example. However some of those countries, including Japan impose their own quarantine restrictions on people arriving FROM the UK. “Air bridge” countries where there is no quarantine on arrival in that country and on return to the UK are far and few between. Spain was one of them until a couple of days ago when rising numbers of cases there caused the UK government to abruptly take them off the exempt list. They have been warning people that the list of exempt countries can change at a moment’s notice, this didn’t stop a lot of folks heading off to Spain for a holiday last weekend and get bitten by the sudden quarantine reimposition.

     

    The United States is NOT on the list of quarantine-exempt countries, neither is China.

  42. 42.

    Taken4Granite

    @David C: most promising drug candidates fail

    I recall seeing a statistic on Respectful Insolence many months ago that estimates of the fraction of candidate drugs that successfully complete clinical trials range from 9-12%. That’s similar odds to what venture capital investors (I know a few) expect on their investments. And as PAM Dirac notes, that’s only considering the drug candidates that make it as far as clinical trials.

    The pharma companies, like the VCs, expect the return on the one successful investment out of ~10 to more than make up for the ones that fail.

  43. 43.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Amir Khalid: The problem is that it’s not obviously a bad idea if it could be properly implemented:

    • Set aside the last hour (or 1.5-2 hours) of business for the maskless patrons, with staff in full protection (masks, face shields, shields at checkout counters)
    • At closing, staff decontaminate selves & vacates, leaving store empty
    • Turn on A/C to exhaust inside air & replace with outdoors for 3-4 hrs to reduce airborne virus (&/or implement UV lighting in wavelengths toxic to virus) [1]
    • Staff returns 1-2 hrs before opening to restock & decon
    • First 1-1.5 hrs after opening reserved for high-risk

    But it would be nearly impossible to get that level of cooperation – or enforce that level of discipline (not to mention additional hassle for shop owners) over a high enough percentage of establishments for it to work. Hell, we can’t even get people to wear their masks properly – too many noses uncovered. [2]

    [1] I’m guessing this would be sufficient to eliminated surface contamination & reduce airborne virus to ambient outdoor levels

    [2] FWIW I spoke with an MPH last week & opined that most superspreaders were breeding the virus for export in their naval cavities & he replied,We know that already.

  44. 44.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Robert Sneddon:

    The United States is NOT on the list of quarantine-exempt countries, neither is China.

    Leaving China off the quarantine-exemption list is probably political at this point. Hong Kong alone is adding more cases per day than all of Mainland China (confirmed + asymptomatic, even with the active outbreaks at Ürumqi and Dalian). Trends in Japan and Australia (Victoria to be exact) are worrisome. Of course, there are very few Chinese looking to travel to the UK (or anywhere overseas, for that matter), other than for business, and it is the flood of Chinese nationals looking to flee the UK and the US that the Chinese government is trying to stem via the limiting the number of flight options.

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