COVID Transmissions for 8-14-2020

Aug 14, 2020

Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment.

It has been 271 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19.

Housekeeping note:

Headlines only today. Have a nice weekend everybody!

Glossary terms are bolded words with links to the running newsletter glossary.

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Now, let’s talk COVID.

Convalescent plasma results

STAT news has some early results from the Mayo Clinic trial of convalescent plasma: https://www.statnews.com/2020/08/13/large-study-suggests-convalescent-plasma-can-help-treat-covid-19-with-caveats

Earlier this week I shared a dose-dependent effect from a different trial. This one showed that patients who received convalescent plasma earlier in infection had a better chance of survival.

However, there was no placebo group in this study, so we can’t make conclusions about the efficacy of the treatment in a meaningful way.

Right now the study is a preprint and hasn’t been peer reviewed, so I won’t link it directly.

Highest daily US deaths since May

Sadly, CIDRAP reports that this week the US had its highest single-day death toll since May: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/08/us-sees-highest-covid-19-daily-death-toll-may

This is likely because we are now about a month from the largest spike in cases. Hopefully this means that the deaths will start to plateau or come down, just as new cases have largely done. However, it’s not clear that the current case counts entirely capture the extent of the outbreaks in the US, as the next headline reports.

“True” death toll

The fact is, we are never going to know exactly how many Americans, or humans in general, have died from COVID-19 because surveillance for the disease was and continues to be very poor in many countries.

The New York Times today reported an estimate, however: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deaths-us.html

Their work looks at estimates of all-cause mortality from the US CDC, and compares to previous years, to establish the degree to which deaths in 2020 are above normal. These are called “excess deaths.”

Now, excess deaths are not a pure way of looking at mortality data. The ongoing pandemic has had a lot of effects that can cause death. Medical services are less readily available, and people may be avoiding them for fear of the disease, which could lead to more emergencies and more deaths. Many surgical procedures were suspended during the early phases of the pandemic, which may have led the underlying reasons for the surgeries to get worse—and potentially to cause death. And finally, the effects of the pandemic lockdowns may have led to an excess of suicides.

However, we do know that many, many more people have died in the US during the pandemic than would die in a typical year. The above effects are unlikely to be responsible for the full number of excess deaths in 2020. And, also unfortunately, per the New York Times analysis, the number of excess deaths this year suggests that COVID-19 may already have killed more than 200,000 Americans.

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

Cooking

I had some heirloom tomatoes that were practically already going bad when they came from the farm share distribution, so I made a quick and rough tomato sauce tonight with that and some farm share garlic. Nothing fancy but it worked out. If I get more tomatoes, I might do a proper marinara sauce recipe and share it here.

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