June 30, 2020
HARRISON COUNTY JUDGE SIMS:
June 29, 2020 – 17 new cases (16 are in a long-term care facility) and 30 recoveries to report today. The graphic shared below from the Health District was created using data from last night. We had one additional positive come in last night that is included in today’s numbers.
Please let this jump in our numbers be an encouragement to you to practice excellent hygiene and prevent the spread. Join me in praying for all of these affected.
At least four laboratory experiments suggest that the mutation makes the virus more infectious, although none of that work has been peer-reviewed. Another unpublished study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory asserts that patients with the G variant actually have more virus in their bodies, making them more likely to spread it to others.
The mutation doesn’t appear to make people sicker, but a growing number of scientists worry that it has made the virus more contagious. (Especially in Europe and the US)
SARS-CoV-2, the novel coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19, can be thought of as an extremely destructive burglar. Unable to live or reproduce on its own, it breaks into human cells and co-opts their biological machinery to make thousands of copies of itself. That leaves a trail of damaged tissue and triggers an immune system response that for some people can be disastrous.
This replication process is messy. Even though it has a “proofreading” mechanism for copying its genome, the coronavirus frequently makes mistakes, or mutations. The vast majority of mutations have no effect on the behavior of the virus.
“… most places where the original virus was dominant before March were eventually taken over by the mutated version. This switch was especially apparent in the United States: Ninety-six percent of early sequences here belonged to the D variant, but by the end of March, almost 70 percent of sequences carried the G amino acid instead.”
(J. Harris: The way I read this is that Cotton is OK; leave the surgical N95 masks for health care workers. BUT, there are now good surgical quality masks availble most anywhere in the US, so why not use them if possible? I’ll looking hard at shields. More later on shields.
Some Experts Say Face Shields Better Than Masks for Coronavirus Protection
(J. Harris: God will forgive me for quoting from the AARP, perhaps, but good article on masks VS shields. I just order two shields, after a hot 1.25 hour meeting in a mask).
FROM JOHNS HOPKINS:
- Covid-19: Oxford Team Begins Vaccine Trials in Brazil and South Africa to Determine Efficacy (BMJ) Vaccine developers at the University of Oxford have begun testing their covid-19 vaccine candidate in multiple countries around the world, in the hope that it will increase their chance of determining efficacy.
- How to Forecast Outbreaks and Pandemics (Foreign Affairs) Despite some successes, serious gaps remain in the ability of infectious disease models to inform public health policy. That is because the country has no centralized system for disease forecasting; there exists no epidemiological equivalent of the National Weather Service. That is precisely what the country needs to succeed in the fight against COVID-19 and to avoid future failures and missteps of the sort that has marred the U.S. response to the current pandemic.
- U.S. Withdrawal from WHO Threatens to Leave it ‘Flying Blind’ on Flu Vaccines (STAT) Twice a year, influenza experts from 10 institutions around the world meet at the World Health Organization’s Geneva headquarters to pore over mounds of data. At the end of the weeklong meetings, they make decisions that affect people around the world: namely, which variants of the flu virus should be used for vaccinations the following season.
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What do you use to cut a Roman Emperor’s hair?…… Ceasers.
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