Corona-zona

  COVID-19 has ruined just about everything people enjoy doing together: Holidays, weddings, funerals, team sports, travel, meetings, and so on.  Why should orgies be any different?  Bizarrely, two stories on just that subject have popped up recently.   The first involves a swinger group.  They usually got together every year, but had been holding virtual events due to the pandemic.  Presumably frustrated with events where there was no actual swinging going on, they decided to hold an in-person convention in a New Orleans hotel. The organizer reported on his blog  that they were being really careful , with masks, temperature checks, hand sanitation, occupancy limits, etc. As you've probably already guessed, it resulted in a superspreader event with  41 infections among a group of 250-300.  The organizer shared the rules , I guess in case you want to host your own swinger-oriented superspreader event. The second story comes from Hu...

 A  study  released by the CDC in October concluded that masks (among other mitigation measures) helped reduce COVID-19 incidence in Arizona by 75 percent.  Back in the spring, Governor Ducey not only refused to put a statewide mask mandate in place, he signed an order preventing local governments from doing so.  Infections soared, as shown in the this screenshot of positive test percentage by day (from the very useful ASU Biodesign  dashboard ; Xs are daily values, the red line is a 7 day trailing average, and the grey line is cumulative positive tests): Then in late June, after Arizona had been  the worst place in the world  for coronavirus infections for several weeks, the governor  rescinded the order , local ordinances were enacted, and it became a rare sight to see anyone in a store or other indoor public space without a mask (at least in the Phoenix area).  As you can see from the graph, a couple weeks after this change the positi...