Hello My Fellow Californians:
In reading Daniel Defoe’s eerily prescient A Journal of the Plague Years, written in 1722, I came across the following quote about how the poor were deceived into using charms and deadly “cures” by quacks, posers and charlatans:
How the poor people found the insufficiency of those things, and how many of them were afterwards carried away in the dead-carts and thrown into the common graves of every parish with these hellish charms and trumpery hanging about their necks, remains to be spoken of as we go along.
www.gutenberg.org/...
What! Trumpery?? Could it be? I hurried to the online dictionary.
Trumpery: “Nonsense." “Twaddle”. “Showy but worthless.” “Attractive articles of little value or use”.
Defoe, you really were a genius. How did we manage to let this slip by? If it had been on “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” where two people have to make up the definition of a word, no one would have believed this was the actual definition of Trumpery.
BY THE NUMBERS
Cases: Decreasing. 5,181 Wednesday, 5,340 Thursday.
HOW IS YOUR COUNTY DOING?
Your county gets off the state’s Watch List if they are in the Grey area — fewer than 100 cases per 100,000 of population (for 14 days).
The current winners: Alpine and Modoc Counties, with a total of ZERO cases over the last 14 days.
Second place: State of Jefferson, with many counties below 100.
Worst place: Central Valley. Just awful.
Second worst place: Southern California, Inland Empire. Still over 300 cases per 100k.
Doing better: Los Angeles.
Missing: San Francisco. Don’t ask me, they left it off the map. They’re at 141.
Central Valley:
A Times analysis found that of California’s counties with the 12 worst per capita case rates over the last two weeks, eight of them are in the eight-county San Joaquin Valley. Merced County has the one of the worst rates statewide, reporting 565 cases per 100,000 residents in the last 14 days. By contrast, L.A. County has about 209 cases per 100,000 residents; San Francisco, 141 cases per 100,00 residents; and San Diego County, 116 cases per 100,000 residents.
www.latimes.com/...
Bay Area:
Cases are down for everybody, even Sonoma.
The Los Angeles Times tracks the outbreak every day; you can find your county HERE.
Hospitalizations:
This is the most reliable metric of how we are doing.
Most counties are keeping recent increase under 10%. Except Imperial County: Imperial has had a 12.4% increase in hospitalized patients. Not good.
Others whose numbers are increasing: Sonoma (5.9%), the OC (.3%), San Diego (1.8%).
Mortality:
Still stubbornly high. We should start to see those numbers decrease soon. Thursday: 140; Wednesday, 134. State total: 12,690.
Mortality by County over the last 14 days.
The ten worst counties over the past 14 days in terms of deaths per 100,000 of population:
- Inyo 44.2
- Imperial 17.2
- Merced 14.1
- Stanislaus 10.8
- Amador 10.6
- San Joaquin 7.9
- Kern 7.7
- San Bernardino 7.2
- Mono 7.1
- Mendocino 6.9
The Central Valley remains one of the hardest hit areas.
Merced County also has one of the worst mortality rates among all counties over the last two weeks, reporting 38 deaths. On a per capita basis, that works out to 14 deaths per 100,000 residents; L.A. and Orange counties are reporting 5.5 deaths per 100,000 residents, and San Diego County and San Francisco, fewer than two deaths per 100,000 residents.
www.latimes.com/...
Some of these numbers are deceiving. Inyo only has 18,000 people, Mono has 14,000, Amador 39,000, so even a few deaths skews the percentages.
Conclusions:
Cases statewide are coming down, but there are hotspots in the Central Valley and Inland Empire. Hospitalizations are down statewide, but mortality has yet to significantly drop. As cases decline, hospitalizations and mortality will follow.
TESTING NEWS
Two big pieces of testing news.
1. The Governator with great fanfare announced a deal with PerkinElmer of Massachusetts to double the number of daily tests done in California by November. You know, the old, lobotomy-style 24-48 hour PCR tests. The big deal is that they will be cheaper ($30) and have a 1-2 day turnaround time.
Why?
The Gov loves his numbers and wants to double capacity. So why not invest in the new rapid tests? The PCR test is too slow for anything except prisons, nursing homes, and other situations where everyone is essentially sheltering in place. It’s certainly not a useless test, but it’s not going to reopen the economy.
- Will these tests help you open your business? No. In the 48 hours between the test and the results, you or someone in your office could get reinfected. Or you could be infected when you get the test, you just won’t find out for two highly infectious days.
- Will they help us reopen schools? The same risks apply.
At least the contract provides that the company can switch to other, faster tests as they become available.
Argh.
2. The FDA has issued emergency approval for another rapid COVID test — the so-called BinaxNOW -15 minutes, $5, made by Abbott Labs. Don’t get too excited. It’s designed for the testing of symptomatic people ONLY.
Amazingly, the announcement coincides with three TRUMPISH chicaneries.
1. Trump’s convention speech, which I did not and will never watch, in which I assume he touted this new test. He certainly made a big deal of it all day Thursday. I thought the news feeds were going to drown me with gushing about this new test being a “game changer” for no reason except....
This is the card used for Abbott’s new rapid test, and the get-out-of-jail app.
2. The CDC’s announcement two days ago that asymptomatic people exposed to COVID do not need to be tested. Hmm, that makes this test much more timely since it doesn’t test asymptomatic people ...
3. A multi, multi-million dollar purchase by the White House of the entire production of this test for the entire year.
What!
- Will this test help you open your business? Not ours. It’s for testing people who are symptomatic and suspected of having COVID. It is NOT authorized for testing the 40% of asymptomatic people who have COVID, only for confirming a suspected COVID diagnosis.
- Will it help open schools? Only if you want the school nurse to test the entire school every day and even at that miss all the asymptomatic carriers. So, no, in my book.
- Will schools and businesses use it anyway so they can reopen, knowing full well it is missing at least 40% of infected people? You can take that to the bank.
- It’s a good step forward for hospitals, prisons, and sick people. Not for most of us. It is not a game changer, if you think it will re-open the economy.
- The Good:
- Cheap (around $5) and fast (15 minutes)
- Apparently uses a “simple nasal swab”. I.e., you don’t feel like you are getting a lobotomy.
- Doesn’t need a computer to decipher results — uses a card of some sort.
- Has a nice app to give you results.
- The bad:
- It’s for people who are suspected of having an active infection, in other words, who are showing symptoms. It is not for asymptomatic patients. These, of course, are the ones you want to know about before you go to a movie theater, restaurant, or your job. It has been tested on people within the first 7 days of having symptoms. So it COMPLETELY misses at least 40% of all active cases right off the bat — the asymptomatic spreaders.
- As Abbott Labs explains in the fine print,
“ It is intended for the qualitative detection of nucleocapsid protein antigen from SARS-CoV-2 in nasal swabs from individuals suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider within the first seven days of symptom onset.”
- It has to be administered by health care personnel (Not an at-home deal). Including: doctors, nurses, school nurses, medical assistants and technicians, pharmacists, employer occupational health specialists, and more with minimal training and a patient prescription.
- It exposes health care personnel to a risk of getting COVID. I imagine you have to have haz-mat gear to administer this test. And we are running out of PPE.
- It is less accurate than the PCR tests. The BinaxNOW COVID-19 Ag Card demonstrated sensitivity of 97.1% (positive percent agreement) and specificity of 98.5% (negative percent agreement) in patients suspected of COVID-19 by their healthcare provider within the first seven days of symptom onset.
- Negative tests have to be confirmed with another test. So what exactly is the point?
Abbott joins three other rapid tests that have been ok’d by the FDA in recent weeks.
MASK WARS
Ya think SDSU students are taking the pandemic seriously?
San Diego State has been planning for their reopening for months. Too bad their best-laid plans are being waylaid by partying students who refuse to wear masks.
San Diego State University on Thursday pressed students to wear masks and practice social distancing as the number of students testing positive for COVID-19 rose to four during the first week of fall classes.
….
On Saturday night, Union-Tribune reporters observed that many SDSU students were not wearing masks or practicing social distancing on and near campus, including many who were clustered on the lawn on the south side of Prebys Student Union.
The Daily Aztec, SDSU’s independent student newspaper, reported, “Large groups of students, many not wearing masks, were seen walking along College Avenue and Montezuma Road late into the night over the weekend. University Police were called to Piedra Del Sol Apartments and Fraternity Row Aug. 22 at 10:50 p.m. and 11:08 p.m. respectively in response to reports of large gatherings, UPD spokesperson Raquel Herriot said in a statement.”
Good luck down there.
SS, DD.
The A/C system in a Korean Starbucks apparently spread the virus to 27 patrons — but none of the mask-wearing staff.
- There is a great article in WebMD about how the Manchurian plague in the early 20th Century was quashed with a combination of masks, quarantining, and tracing — with the main thing being masks. Masks were the radical concept of a young Chinese doctor named Wu Lien Teh, who realized this was a respiratory plague spread between people. He invented the precursor of the N-95 mask and basically saved the planet. The plague killed 60,000 people in 4 months — and then died out, in large part thanks to the work of Dr. Teh.
There is also some excellent info in the article about countries and cities that mandated masks. They work!
IN THE NEWS
- Latinos of working age have seen a five-fold increase in COVID death rates over the last three months. The death rate among late middle-aged Latinos is 25 times higher than among young adults.
California saw a five-fold increase in coronavirus death rates among Latinos of working age over the past three months when the state reported a surge in coronavirus cases after partially reopening its economy earlier this summer, according to a new study released Thursday by the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture, which is part of UCLA Health.
From May 11 to Aug. 11, researchers looked at the progression of coronavirus-related deaths across Latino communities in three different working age populations: Young adults (ages 18‒34); early middle age (35‒49); and late middle age (50‒69).
While COVID-19 deaths are burning their way through all Latino working age populations, the death rate is highest for late middle-aged Latinos. At 54.73 deaths per 100,000 people, their death rate is about 25 times higher than the death rate among young adults, which saw a 2.12 mortality rate. Early middle-aged Latinos saw a 14.23 coronavirus death rate, nearly four times higher than the late middle-aged population.
www.nbcnews.com/...
- The Foster Farms Chicken Processing plant in Fresno has been ordered to shut down because of an out-of-control COVID outbreak that has sickened hundreds of workers and killed 8 of them.
Merced County health officials say the facility is a hotspot for the virus in the county and a source of large proportion of the area's COVID-related deaths.
According to a statement released by the county, for Foster Farms employees, the case fatality rate is 2.2% while it's 1.3% for the rest of Merced County.
The outbreak started back on June 29th and the county says that it made trips to the facility and issued two formal directives to the company, ordering it to increase testing and implement safety measures.
However, it says those directives were not followed and spread of the coronavirus has continued, leading to the order to close.
Authorities have ordered it to close until the outbreaks are under control and it can reopen safely.
- Speaking of Fresno, the Immanuel private school held a huge non-masked rally in support of in-person classes, in violation of state health orders in the hard-hit county. A judge sided with the school on Thursday, which I expect to be overturned in short order. Miguel Arias, Fresno City Council President, blasted the schools’ leaders and parents and not maintaining safety guidelines related to the coronavirus. Arias called the rally “intentional” and “selfish” as the city of Fresno is trying to make it safe for children to return to school. The county has been a COVID hot spot for weeks and this does not help.
- LA County has reported cases of COVID among newborns. They have been monitoring pregnant women who have tested positive for months.
Los Angeles County officials on Wednesday reported the first cases of COVID-19 among newborns.
Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer reported that 1,200 pregnant women and girls between the ages of 14 and 52 have tested positive for the virus and two have died of complications. Of the 193 babies who were tested at birth, eight were positive.
The county has routinely updated COVID-19 numbers as it relates to pregnancies, but has never announced a positive case among an infant until now.
Of the women who tested positive, 80% were Latina — a community that has been disproportionately affected by the virus.
“This inquiry is a mirror image of what the Latinx community has experienced since the pandemic began,” Ferrer said last month.
About 79% of pregnant women who tested positive for the coronavirus were symptomatic. According to Ferrer, 25% tested positive during the first trimester of pregnancy, 35% during the second, 29% during the third and 11% while in labor.
Much is unknown about how the virus can be passed from a mother to a newborn. In July, researchers in Italy said signs of the virus were found in samples of umbilical cord blood, the placenta and, in one case, breast milk among 31 women with COVID-19 who delivered babies in March and April.
www.latimes.com/...
- The state has granted waivers to over 100 elementary schools to begin in-person instruction, the vast majority of them in San Bernardino, San Diego, and the OC. The list is HERE. Most if not all are private schools.
- In a highly unusual show of Red-Blue solidarity, California, New York, New Jersey, Texas, Arizona, and Florida will not follow the CDC’s new idiotic testing guidelines that specify that asymptomatic people who have been exposed to COVID need not be tested. This is, of course, in keeping with the White House’s multi-million dollar purchase of rapid COVID tests that are only for symptomatic people.
AND FINALLY….
It’s Karma.
Every GOP California state senator save one is in quarantine after being exposed by a non-mask-wearing gent named Senator Brian Jones who came down with COVID. To be fair, they were all eating lunch. To be unfair, they were probably not wearing masks even when they weren’t eating lunch. Because: Republicans.
What, me worry? Sen. Brian Jones (R) says voting remotely is unconstitutional! Too bad that all Republican Senators are now in quarantine just as the legislative session is ending….
I don’t know much about Jones, except that he recently authored a bill to strip the Insurance Commissioner of the power to reject increased premiums from insurance companies; and, according to his twitter feed, he vehemently opposes proxy voting by the legislature as unconstitutional (bet he wishes he had that one back), demands that schools open for in-person classes, approves of Trump’s cutting social security and medicare by cutting payroll taxes, and thinks we should let everyone get COVID so we can get to herd immunity, because — hey, only old people die and it’s just the flu. “People will get sick, people will get better,” said he in a radio interview.
Karma.
