COVID Transmissions for 10-28-2020

Oct 28, 2020

Good morning! It has been 346 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

I’m working on this week’s in depth piece, which will focus on predicting vaccine clinical trial readouts, and why they take so long to read out. Today in headlines, I’m focusing on Europe where the situation is…not good.

As usual, bolded terms are linked to the running newsletter glossary.

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Now, let’s talk COVID.

Europe is in a really bad situation

I think it’s been easy to focus hyperlocally, so I wanted to bring over some of the latest European COVID-19 trends to look at how things are going over there. Hint: it’s not great.

Let’s look at daily new cases by country, comparing the beginning of the pandemic to now. The source for all of these is worldometers.info/coronavirus

France:

Image is a bar chart, showing a recent spike in cases that exceeds the earlier spike in March substantially, cresting over 40,000 per day while in March it was far less than that. It does seem to be coming down a bit—probably due to disease control measures instituted in France.

Italy:

Image is another bar chart, and again a recent spike far exceeds the early pandemic totals. Italy has risen above 20,000 cases per day; early in the pandemic it peaked around 5,000. Concerningly, the trend doesn’t seem to be slowing in Italy yet.

Germany:

Image is another bar chart, and again a recent spike far exceeds the early pandemic totals. Germany has risen above 10,000 cases per day; like Italy, early in the pandemic it peaked around 5,000, though Germany had a shorter period in which these case levels were sustained. The trend in Germany doesn't seem to be slowing yet either.

UK:

Image is another bar chart, and again a recent spike far exceeds the early pandemic totals. The UK is now over 20,000 cases per day. Earlier in the pandemic it was well under 10,000. The UK is not known for having had a great initial response, unlike some other European countries. And yet we can see that it is getting much worse now.

Switzerland:

Image is another bar chart, and again a recent spike far exceeds the early pandemic totals. Switzerland spiked to over 15,000 cases in one day, while in the early phase of the pandemic it had very low daily case numbers, well below 5,000.
It looks like part of this may be a single outlier day, but it's still concerning.

Sweden:

Image is, thankfully, the last of these bar charts. We see again that a recent spike has begun to exceed earlier numbers. However, this one is a little different. Sweden has maintained a relatively high moving average for daily cases and hasn't fallen below the numbers seen at the beginning of the pandemic.

I’m closing on Sweden because this country adopted an approach geared towards herd immunity, and it’s apparent that it had a case burden that never quite returned to baseline. It also seems to have had overall smaller numbers, but let’s keep in mind that Sweden is a much smaller country than many of those covered on this list (Switzerland being the only exception). If scaled to population size, Sweden had about 11,500 cases per million population whereas Germany has had only 5,500 over the course of the pandemic. Clearly that is not ideal, although I will admit I chose a particularly unfavorable comparison here.

The reason I bring this up is not to shame Sweden for its approach—although I have done that in the past—but rather to illustrate that even despite the relative lack of disease control measures in that country, the spike that is manifesting in the rest of Europe appears to be manifesting there as well. This may imply some kind of seasonal effect; I just don’t know. Either way it’s not a good situation.

The only thing that slightly tempers the bad news here is that death rates are, generally, down in Western countries. These spikes are still quite high, though, and I anticipate that this will be small comfort to anyone who does happen to die of this disease.

I think it’s safe to say that international travel between the US and Europe is not advisable right now. I can only hope that the situation improves, and that many countries take serious efforts to get this back under control.

Local flu vaccine shortages

CIDRAP has a story on local shortages of influenza virus vaccines in the US: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/10/flu-vaccine-demand-creates-minor-regional-us-shortages

This story notes that the problem is in the delivery system, not the availability of supply. I also hope that this is indicative of people taking the flu seriously this year. The flu is a deadly illness and needs to be taken seriously. If you are healthy in the ways that allow you to receive the flu vaccine, it’s time to get vaccinated for it, so you don’t end up in a hospital with flu around the same time that COVID-19 cases are surging wherever you are.

Get it taken care of now so that you can avoid any issues with vaccine shortages.

What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:

Watching

My wife and I watched through the show Schitt’s Creek recently, which was recommended to us by no less than 20 people. If you haven’t seen it for some reason, I really recommend it. One thing that I found incredible about it is that it envisions a small town America that doesn’t seem to have racism or homophobia; not in a way that denies the existence of these things, but in a way that shows there’s another path.

It’s also extremely funny, though a bit slow to hit its stride.

Join the conversation, and what you say will impact what I talk about in the next issue.

Also, let me know any other thoughts you might have about the newsletter. I’d like to make sure you’re getting what you want out of this.

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