Corona-zona

  That is a screenshot of the NBA finals in Milwaukee on Sunday night.  Commentators said 10,000 Bucks fans were on hand outside the Fiserv Forum (what a terrible name!) to cheer on their team.  A similar "watch party" took place in Phoenix. I'm guessing every single one of the people pictured are in the 18-24 age range.  Here's what the CDC says about the age demographics of people who are fully vaccinated: People 18-24 have the lowest vaccination rate of any age group, and the rate is basically the same for those with one shot.  And there they are, without masks, in close quarters, screaming and yelling, generating and inhaling each other's aerosolized saliva plume s.  In other words, what you see in the picture is a superspreader event in the making.  Such events are making a comeback .  Earlier this month I blogged about one such event in an Illinois summer camp.  An even larger outbreak occurred in a Texas church camp.  Other eve...

  A Central Illinois summer "camp" for kids had an outbreak of COVID-19 affecting 85 people at the facility, and cross-infecting 11 people at a conference being held nearby. According to reports , most of those affected at Crossing Camp in Rushville, about 60 miles northwest of Springfield, were kids. One kid was hospitalized. The camp was not checking the vaccination status of kids attending, and reportedly only a few of the attendees and staffers had been vaccinated.  The camp said it was following CDC guidelines for cleaning and sanitation.   A few comments about this.  First, what is it with Illinois and mass infections?  Three months ago I blogged about another event that took place in a bar by someone who knew they were infected. Aren't Midwesterners supposed to be cautious and pragmatic?  Illinois ain't Florida! Second, a kid was sent to the hospital. This shows that the virus is still not to be taken lightly, even for young people.  ...

  Racist attacks against people of Asian descent are up, including those targeting old ladies with sneak attacks and stabbings. You may ask, why now?  It's undoubtedly because of the efforts or an orange racist (and ex-President) to label SARS-CoV-2 as the "China virus." He is so wrong about about so many things, it should come as no surprise that he's wrong about this, too.    According to a recent report , researchers are now finding evidence that the virus detected in Wuhan in December 2019 had a progenitor that had been spreading worldwide well in advance of the Wuhan event. They determined this using tracing of relations of mutations called  phylogeny . “We have found progenitor genetic fingerprint in January 2020 and later in multiple coronavirus infections in China and the USA. The progenitor was spreading worldwide months before and after the first reported cases of COVID-19 in China,” said one researcher. Another added that the timeline suggests the p...

  An article just published in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR; basically a journal for CDC scientists) describes a super-spreader event in Central Illinois in February. It shows why it's still too early to behave like the pandemic is behind us. The article describes an "opening event" at a bar in a rural Illinois county. I assume it was Douglas County since their Department of Public Health is named in a footnote.  The event was held indoors in the poorly ventilated bar. The bar has six employees. Though they don't know the exact number of people attending the opening, the bar holds about 100. Fourteen days after the event the county's daily case rate more than doubled.   According to the article, "[o] n February 12, through routine testing and contact tracing, local health department staff members identified a cluster of cases linked to the bar event, including a case in an asymptomatic attendee who received a confirmed COVID-19 d...