Coronavirus Special Coverage

A collection of news posted throughout the week for those that want signal, not noise.

  • Previous coverage - all of our posts in this ongoing series.
  • Coronavirus status page - learn how to prepare for possible spread to your area. Scenarios, shopping lists, background info and everything else you need, all in one place.

COVID-19: key developments for Wednesday, April 22, 2020

There are now more than 2.6 million global cases.  The US has over 837,000 of those cases. The US had over 1,400 deaths in the last 24 hours.

Truck drivers keep the country moving, but truckers are getting hit by the downturn:

Global famine? The UN warns that widespread famine is possible. The Middle East, Africa, South America, and Haiti are the most at risk. The number of people suffering hunger could nearly double to over 250 million due to the pandemic and its effects on economies and food production.

Is trial and error an acceptable exit strategy? Strategies to relax lockdowns but still keep people safe are not easy to produce. The three primary means of control are social distancing, contact tracing, and border restrictions. Immunity will also play a role, but we don’t know how protective it will be. Dialing down our controls means lives will be on the line. Periods of easing control and tightening control back up again are likely.

Roche CEO says many antibody tests are garbage: he asserts that finger-prick tests produce too many false positives and false negatives. Here’s the rub: his company makes nasal swab tests. In addition, Roche makes antibody tests that require venipuncture by a health care worker. He might be right, but he might also be trying to tamp down the competition.

Governor Newsom orders more autopsies to determine how far back COVID-19 deaths were occurring in California. Some autopsies show CA had deaths as early as February:

There’s controversy over recent serology studies. No matter which study you look at, though, it’s clear that we do not have herd immunity anywhere.

You’ll want to view this whole thread… Las Vegas Mayor willing to use her constituents “as a control group”—when asked if she would be out shoulder-to-shoulder with casino workers adds, “Well, first of all, I have a family!”:

Six Southern states are working together to reopen. Many in the coalition are easing stay-at-home orders at the end of the month or early in May.

Chicken plant problems: scores of workers sick at one, and millions of chickens to be euthanized at another. Union urges shuttering of a third. I’m left once again to worry about food security in this country.

We mentioned Rick Bright’s leave yesterday, but it looks like it wasn’t voluntary:

California hospitals can resume non-emergent surgeries starting Wednesday.

An at-home testing kit for health care workers has been approved by the FDA.


  • 4 Comments

    • lemur

      Regarding the Roche CEO pronouncements, it may be that most finger-prick tests are garbage, not because finger-prick tests are inherently bad, but because if someone is going to try to market a garbage test, they’ll probably go for a finger-prick version. If my first goal is to maximize my profit, all other considerations be damned, I’m not going to try to market a test that requires going into a doctor’s office, or special equipment. These are all barriers to people buying my test. I’ll go for a format that I can sell directly to patients.

      Regarding the serology studies, a study from Sweden’s public health authority (Folkhälsomyndigheten) can be added to the list of bogus studies that recently came out. Sweden’s study though was pretty much retracted immediately. See:

      https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/folkhalsomyndigheten-drar-tillbaka-rapport

      10 |
      • Conrad B lemur

        Good point about finger-prick tests being the lowest barrier to entry, thus is the path “profit maximizers” would take.

        3 |
    • Oly Pen Aaron

      Great info as usual! Housekeeping note: the 3rd link (union/Shelbyville plant) in the chicken farm paragraph gives a 404 error. Looks like adding “www.” after the https:// will fix it. 🙂

      6 |