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Redefining death seems like an extreme way to improve statistics, but I'm sure this will be picked up by more governments. In the U.S., standard measures of excess deaths indicate we have already passed the 200,000 mark. What little I can learn from Russia suggests excess deaths there are about...

Florida is again showing what not to do. Our governor has blamed a spike in numbers on a lab that dumped months worth of data on one day. Some results date back before the July 4th holiday. This gets into politics so it may not always be on the free pages. Here's one link to The Ledger and...

New Zealand's bad news is that they still don't know how this family was infected. They may have community spread. Meanwhile, the U.S. is busy putting children back in schools with inadequate protection, testing and tracing. Nonsense about children being immune, or suffering no serious...

I can't seem to get away from U.S. news about bungled responses to the crisis. A Georgia school which featured in national news for a total breakdown in distancing has temporarily stopped face-to-face classes after a number of staff tested positive. That was only the first week of their school...

I just learned that a friend who is acting as city manager for a small Florida city needed to be tested to avoid spread among people providing essential services for city government. This is supposed to be a high priority to prevent a breakdown in government. It took 9 days for results to come...

In epidemiology it is standard to estimate how many cases you are identifying, versus the number implicitly in the community. We have had serious problems with political denial there is ANY community spread or ANY asymptomatic spreaders. As an example, we just had our governor authorize the...

It turns out a percentage of asymptomatics are actually presymptomatic, something that shouldn't surprise anyone with experience with epidemics. What is scary here is that even people clinically considered to never show symptoms could have viral loads in the upper respiratory system as great as...

While I will agree in the sense that one virion inside a cell can cause infection, the probability the virion will survive to reach and enter the cell is lower than 1.0, so the probability of an infection innate natural defenses cannot counter goes up rapidly with the number of virions...

Florida is now celebrating lower case numbers, forgetting testing was shut down for the hurricane. Today we posted *only* 7,650 new cases and 120 deaths. The weekly total of deaths still looks like it will be a new record (1,294 for the last 7 days today). Until that number heads down, I won't...

Just happened to run across this study from Yale about reopening colleges with residential students. Here's a description. From a scientific standpoint this is entirely reasonable; you need to catch positives before they infect others, which can come in two days. From a political standpoint it...

Florida's surge slowed somewhat over the weekend. We had a day with *only* 62 deaths, and 7,104 new cases. Outdoor testing sites were shut down on Thursday to prepare for a tropical storm, so there will be a continued drop in case numbers that has nothing to do with slowed infection rates. For...

Florida set another grim record today with 257 more reported deaths, but *only* 9,007 new cases. What is going on now, with more deaths in long-term care, is a continuation of the problem that developed early in the pandemic, and was hidden for a month or so. To avoid having infected workers...

Florida has again served as a cautionary example. Today the State DoH reported 253 deaths, yet another one-day record. We also have 9,956 new cases. If case numbers have really plateaued I would like to know why. The best explanation is that people are responding to news to protect themselves...

I said I wasn't going to keep posting depressing Florida numbers unless they served some other purpose. Here are two such numbers: yesterday the state reported a record 186 deaths due to COVID-19. Today we broke that record with 216. Our 7-day average for new cases is still over 10,000 per...

Sweden and its neighbors are not used to making a big deal out of borders. A friend in Sweden whose business involves work on ferries told me customs stopped him for a check when he came back to Sweden from Denmark. (He routinely carried his electronic tools with him when he went on service...

In hopes of improving my own mental hygiene, I'm going to stop posting daily results for Florida, unless it serves some other purpose. This state is now outpacing entire countries and continents in infections and deaths. No one should infer that my absence is at all ominous. Please note the...

Florida finally had a day with fewer than 10,000 new cases, 9,344. We also had *only* 77 new deaths reported. Orange County had 421 new cases and 5 more deaths. This is part of a pattern of weekly dips in reporting. I expect numbers to go up by midweek. There have been 872 deaths reported...

Florida update: 12,199 new cases today, and 124 newly reported deaths. This is the real thing, and state half-measures continue.

Here are some research paper links that may belong in another thread. I'm hoping an administrator will find the right place. I'm dealing with other concerns at the moment. BGR has a description of the paper in Nature Communications which details the discovery of an RNA cap which disguises...

There's a reason I used antibody tests above. People with symptoms or contact with an infected individual are typically given a nucleic acid test, so that test has a bias toward higher rates of infection. (It also has a delay of a week or more, particularly during a surge.) People getting the...