President Trump
visited
a coronavirus swab production line in Maine, did not wear a mask, and the company threw away the entire day's production. Sounds like a sensational news piece, right?. Not really - the facility was not planning to run that day and only ran production as a backdrop for Trump's tour. So while they did throw away the day's entire production, that was like ten minutes worth. The Twitter crazies reacted to the headline and did not bother to read the article. Shocker.
Although, with swabs such a hot commodity, you do have to wonder why that production line wasn't scheduled to run on a Friday.
COVID-19 Vaccine Status
WHO has a
summary of all the major vaccine candidates
in the pipeline. Kind of disappointing that only China is working on an inactivated virus candidate. Most vaccines throughout history have been either an inactivated virus, or a live, attenuated (unable to replicate) virus.
Most of the vaccines on this list here are using new and unproven technologies. Seems like the worst idea if you need something to work reliably and scale quickly. America's Operation Warp Speed is mostly supporting companies with fancy, unproven technology, so odds are China is going to have the first vaccine made at scale.
If you were China would you be clamoring to share it with America?
U.S. COVID-19 Case Numbers
50 states is a large enough number that you can cherry-pick state-by-state evidence to either support or oppose lockdowns or any other theory you may have. That didn't stop us - one thing that looks interesting is to consider indoor states vs outdoor states.
In winter, the northern states are indoor states where people are in closer contact more often. That's a part of why it made sense for the north to lockdown more so than the south when the pandemic first hit America. But now the opposite is true and Arizona, Texas & Florida are the major indoor states. Generally speaking we are seeing large, sometimes
scary spikes
in these hot weather states and continued drops in more moderate climes.
It could just be happenstance that this indoor/outdoor split has arisen, only time will tell. But unlike the flu, people with COVID-19 usually don't know they have it and can spread it for weeks. So a lack of an indoor/outdoor trend for flu can't be totally translated to this new disease. If the northern states start to see a big uptick in case counts in a couple weeks, that should put our indoor/outdoor theory to rest.
Nationally, case numbers are plateauing at 20,000/wk, but with steep drops in the Northeast and Midwest it means steep increases elsewhere. This is a bad sign for southerners this summer (and probably for northerners this fall/winter.) Good luck re-implementing a lockdown anytime soon.
Antibody Testing
COVID-19 antibody testing is still an insane scramble of hundreds of shady actors. When a company
pivots
from vaginal dryness creams, orgasm-enhancers and erectile dysfunction lozenges to COVID-19 antibody testing overnight, beware. Fierce Biotech has a
very good write-up
on the current situation with antibody testing.
