COVID Transmissions for 8-19-2020
Greetings from an undisclosed location in my apartment.
It has been 276 days since the first documented human case of COVID-19. I barely noticed that the one-month anniversary of this newsletter passed this week. Thanks for being here, everyone, and thanks for your stimulating comments and questions. Most importantly, thanks for getting the word out and encouraging people you know to sign up.
Housekeeping note:
Headlines only today. This has been a challenging week professionally and also in some personal respects. I will try to have an in-depth for tomorrow, though.
Glossary terms are bolded words with links to the running newsletter glossary.
Keep the newsletter growing by sharing it! I love talking about science and explaining important concepts in human health, but I rely on all of you to grow the audience for this:
Now, let’s talk COVID.
Lessons from the New Zealand eradication
The New England Journal of Medicine has a letter that I found today from physicians involved with New Zealand’s eradication of COVID-19, which as we know has recently come to an end with a new outbreak there. Even though that eradication has ended, I think it’s really interesting to see what lessons these physicians highlighted as important to their country’s success: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025203
Over 100 days without the virus is a success, even if it did eventually return. And I believe that if they do again as they did before, it’s possible for them to free their country of the virus again.
Cases dropping in the US overall, but schools and nursing homes still showing increases
New daily cases in the US are dropping. This can be misleading because the US is very large, and when large outbreaks begin to subside the overall national counts may start to contract even though new outbreaks are growing elsewhere.
Right now I don’t know of any specific new hotspots, but I have heard some bad things about individual schools needing to close essentially on the second day of school due to outbreaks. But there is no official tally of school outbreaks and apparently very little effort to compare which school reopening protocols are working and which are not.
At the same time, nursing homes have apparently seen a 77% increase in cases. Since nursing home residents are generally at quite high risk, that’s very concerning.
CIDRAP summarizes these items here: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/08/us-covid-19-cases-drop-schools-nursing-homes-still-problem
What am I doing to cope with the pandemic? This:
Cooking
I decided to work cabbage into an old recipe of mine. I took 1 cup of dry cannelini beans (you can use about 1.5 cups of canned), 2 cloves of garlic, about a tablespoon of olive oil, some parsley, some whole wheat penne, and a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes—oh and also about a cup of shredded cabbage—and turned them into this:
Image is a bowl containing pasta, a bean sauce of some kind, and numerous cherry tomatoes. One of the tomatoes is bright yellow, the rest are red.I minced and then sauteed the garlic in the olive oil until it started to brown a little, then added the beans and enough water to get them cooked (you might not need to do this if you’re using canned), and boiled that all together long enough for the beans to break down a little, but not completely, so they’d act as a thickening agent. About an hour into this, I added the cabbage. When the beans were nearly done, I just-undercooked the penne in oversalted water and then set them aside, reserving the pasta water (separate the penne first or it’ll get waterlogged while set aside).
After that was done, I added the parsley and the cherry tomatoes to the beans and let them simmer for a bit, just long enough to get the tomatoes a little pliant but not so long that their skins would start to break down. At the end of this process, I added the penne and its associated pasta water and let that finish cooking together for another couple of minutes.
The result was as pictured.
Reading
I finally finished Jeff VanderMeer’s Acceptance, the final book in his Southern Reach Trilogy. With dark fantasy mysteries, it’s hard to stick the landing as you begin to answer the questions that you’ve set up. I think VanderMeer manages a shaky landing, but he does get there. I’d still recommend the entire series.
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.
This newsletter will contain mistakes. When you find them, tell me about them so that I can fix them. I would rather this newsletter be correct than protect my ego.
Though I can’t correct the emailed version after it has been sent, I do update the online post of the newsletter every time a mistake is brought to my attention.
Correction: Yesterday’s email contained an error about the South Korean outbreak cluster, pointed out by a reader living there (how cool is that? This newsletter is international!). As it turns out, I misunderstood the CIDRAP article and thought that the church at the center of the current outbreak was the same as the one at the center of the previous outbreak there. This is not true; they are different churches. This has been corrected on the newsletter site.
See you all next time.
Always,
JS