COVID Transmissions for 7-20-2020

Jul 20, 2020

Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment.

It has been 246 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

Housekeeping note: I’m going to be playing around with format a little bit this week. Some of the elements of the newsletter may become more intermittent or only appear on certain days (for example, I may not do an in-depth piece every time, or may only do them on certain predictable days). Please give me some feedback on this choice:

Transmission of COVID by children:

A new contact tracing study from South Korea has proposed that children 10–19 years old transmit COVID-19 just as well as adults. Reported in NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/health/coronavirus-children-schools.html

And full study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases: https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/26/10/20-1315_article

Meanwhile, a Nordic study suggests that open schools are not a substantial source of new infections: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-19/covid-s-spread-in-schools-is-questioned-in-latest-nordic-study

Study itself here: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/contentassets/c1b78bffbfde4a7899eb0d8ffdb57b09/covid-19-school-aged-children.pdf

I think this latter study has issues. It compares Sweden (which did not shut much of anything down) to Finland (which did), and concludes that there was no reduction in risk to teachers from closing schools. I am not entirely sure how they reached this conclusion because teachers exist in the world as adults and the differences between the two countries in terms of the rest of teachers’ daily lives are undoubtedly confounding. Since this study appears to be some kind of whitepaper and not an actual published manuscript, I am skeptical.

In the meantime, Israel saw a large outbreak in cases connected to a school after reopening: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/06/03/868507524/israel-orders-schools-to-close-when-covid-19-cases-are-discovered

I intend to go more deeply into the risks involved with children and school reopenings later in the week.

Immune response to vaccines:

Rumors have been reported that “cellular” immune responses, mediated by T-cells, also appear alongside antibody responses in early trials of the ChAdOx vaccine. At this time these are just rumors and I cannot find any reliable research report confirming them. The nature of the T-cell responses also does not appear to be available anywhere. For this reason, I am not linking anything, just noting that there really is no evidence to go on supporting this claim.

Death projections:

Last week it was forecast that by November 1st, total US COVID-19 deaths will reach 224,000. Forecast details here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tommybeer/2020/07/15/new-ihme-model-projects-more-than-224000-coronavirus-deaths-in-us-by-nov-1

Image is a graph showing the projections for total COVID-19 deaths in the US from IHME; due to column size limitations it is essentially unreadable but shows approximately 224,000 deaths by November. Full model here: https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america

This is a staggeringly high number and extremely depressing, but there are a couple of glints of silver lining:

We could shave 40,000 deaths off of this number by wearing masks
It took 5 months to get to ~135,000 deaths in the US; in the next 4 months they are predicting 90,000 or so additional deaths, and this appears to reflect a small decrease in death rate

Neither of these are a great win, I recognize, but we have to take the good where we can find it.

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

Reading

The Broken Earth Trilogy by N. K. Jemisin Books in Order

Earlier in the pandemic, I read NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, which contains a lot of things about disaster survival and politics surrounding racism. It’s very relevant to our times and I think helps to process the difficulties around us. Would recommend if you haven’t read it already.

https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/articles/n-k-jemisin-broken-earth-trilogy-books-in-order/

Viewing

I checked out the Netflix film The Old Guard this weekend; it’s based on a Greg Rucka comic book. Interesting premise where undying warriors do covert things in hopes of making the world better. Charlize Theron headlining. As action films go, it’s fun.

Cooking

Due to equipment limitations, the garlic scape pesto had to be postponed.

Instead, I went with some roast chicken thighs and a sautéed mix of farm share vegetables:

The chicken thighs got a dusting of paprika and chipotle powder, then went in the oven for about 45’ at 350F. My oven runs hot so if you want to try it yourself, be mindful of the doneness.

The veggies are about a half cup to a cup of onion diced, cup of zucchini cubed (cut this in advance, salt it a bit, and give it some time to air-dry, or it’ll be too wet), a…bunch…of turnip greens given a quick rough chop, and a half cup or so of minced fennel greens, seasoned with salt, lemon pepper, and lemon juice, and cooked in olive oil. I let the onions go a little translucent in the olive oil on medium-high heat for a minute or two, then cranked the heat a bit and gave them some quick color with a splash of the lemon juice. After that, I lowered the head and added in the zucchini tossed with a bit more olive oil to coat the cubes. I left that to get a little color for a bit, stirring once or twice for an even cook, and then added the turnip and fennel greens on top and stirred them in until tender.

What do you think of the prospect of school reopenings, based on the news about children transmitting the virus?

Also interested to hear any requests for future in-depth articles.

Viral Transmissions

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