Local COVID-19 updates

[edschweppe]

As of 5PM today, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is reporting 47 newly reported confirmed deaths (6 less than yesterday - down 11.3%) for a total of 11,405 deaths, 3,995 newly reported confirmed cases (1,637 less than yesterday - down 29.1%) for a total of 306,928 cases, and 80,214 newly reported molecular tests (25,820 less than yesterday - down 24.4%). The seven day average positivity rate is 6.01%, compared to 6.13% yesterday. Excluding higher education, the seven day average positivity rate is 7.79%, compared to 8.04% yesterday. The number of estimated active cases was 81,282 (293 more than yesterday - up 0.4%). The state also reported zero newly reported probable deaths (same as yesterday) for a total of 252 and 349 newly reported probable cases (302 more than yesterday - up 642.6%) for a total of 12,342. Combining the confirmed and probable numbers gives 47 new deaths for a total of 11,657 and 4,344 new cases for a total of 319,270. There were 1,927 COVID-19 patients in hospital (53 more than yesterday - up 2.8%), 383 COVID-19 patients in ICUs (13 more than yesterday - up 3.5%) and 196 COVID-19 patients on ventilators (intubated) (8 less than yesterday - down 3.9%).

Of the Commonwealth's four "key metrics" listed on page 2 of the report, the 7-day average of newly confirmed cases is 3,074 (132 less than yesterday - down 4.1%), 1,857% above the lowest observed value of 157 on July 4 and 36% below the highest observed value of 4,775 on December 7. The 7-day weighted average of positive molecular test rate is 6.0% (0 less than yesterday - down 1.9%), 680% above the lowest observed value of 0.8% on September 21 and 78% below the highest observed value of 27.7% on April 15. The 7-day average number of COVID-19 patients in hospital is 1,836 (37 more than yesterday - up 2.1%), 1,084% above the lowest observed value of 155 on August 26 and 53% below the highest observed value of 3,874 on April 27. The 7-day average number of COVID-19 deaths is 44 (2 less than yesterday - down 4.3%), 300% above the lowest observed value of 11 on September 9 and 75% below the highest observed value of 175 on April 24.

Two weeks ago, the 7 day confirmed case average was 3,142, the 7 day confirmed deaths average was 35, the 7 day hospitalization average was 1,264, and the 7 day weighted average positivity rate was 5.4% (or 7.45% excluding higher education).

Day-to-day, these look like significant improvements - deaths, cases and positivity all down, and even the estimated active cases count is only up a tad. However, the number of newly reported tests is also down a lot, possibly due to our recent snowstorm either shutting down the big drive-through test sites or making them much harder for folks to get to. In either event, the number of COVID-19 patients in hospital keeps going up, and that's not good news at all.

In much better news, the FDA has approved an emergency use authorization for the Moderna vaccine:

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday issued an emergency authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine developed by Moderna, the second such vaccine to be cleared in the United States. Inoculations should begin within days, as was the case following last week"s authorization of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Pfizer and its partner BioNTech.

The decision, while widely expected, will help fuel the historic effort to rein in a pandemic that has so far infected an estimated 17 million people and killed more than 300,000 in the United States. Its authorization comes at a time when Covid-19 hospitalizations are hitting record highs, and the number of overall cases continues to soar.

"With the availability of two vaccines now for the prevention of COVID-19, the FDA has taken another crucial step in the fight against this global pandemic that is causing vast numbers of hospitalizations and deaths in the United States each day," said FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn in a statement.

[ ... ]

The FDA"s decision marks the first authorization for Moderna"s vaccine in any country, though the company has submitted its data to regulators in the U.K. and Europe. It also marks the first clearance of any drug or vaccine developed by Moderna, which was founded in 2010 to develop drugs and vaccines based on mRNA technology.

A number of other Covid-19 vaccine candidates are still in clinical trials, including those being developed by Johnson & Johnson, which is developing the only single-dose vaccine, AstraZeneca, and Novavax.

Meanwhile, the Boston Globe posted a nice explanation of just why indoor dining can be so effective at spreading the coronavirus:

When scientists think of the perfect setting for coronavirus transmission, they describe an indoor space where people from various households gather. The people might be six feet apart, but they are still sharing the same space and air with strangers for longer than they do in most public settings. It"s a place where people linger, take their masks down, and speak and laugh with one another.

This describes what one expert termed "superspreader destinations." Dine-in restaurants happen to fit the bill perfectly.

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"People talk a lot about superspreader events, but there are also superspreader destinations — types of places that are especially risky and lead to especially high rates of infection," said David Grusky, one of the researchers behind a recent Stanford University study that modeled the coronavirus"s spread in indoor spaces. "One of those types of places is full-service restaurants."

Even before states embarked on the long road toward reopening their economies, epidemiologists warned that the virus was likely to spread most rapidly indoors. Many listed indoor dining among the potentially high-risk activities that should only be resumed with extreme caution, if at all.

Since spring, Grusky and others said, emerging science has only reinforced disease experts" initial fears. Studies have drawn on mathematical modeling, cellphone data, physics, and epidemiology to confirm over and over that dining out during the pandemic carries tremendous risk.

But even as hospitalizations climb and officials across Massachusetts and the country roll back reopening, restaurant dining rooms in many places remain conspicuously, and often controversially, open.

[ ... ]

Massachusetts contact tracers have linked 84 COVID-19 clusters to restaurants, a small fraction of the state"s 23,888 known case clusters.

But scientists urge a careful interpretation of that data. Of identified clusters, nearly all — 22,487 as of Thursday"s report — are classified as "household spread," meaning two or more people living together became infected.

But that information "doesn"t really help us," said Samuel Scarpino, a Northeastern University epidemiologist. We know that people who live together are likely to spread the disease to one another, he explained, but the first household member to be infected had to get COVID-19 somewhere else, whether at work, running errands, or out and about in their community.

"What we have to do is figure out how to stop [COVID-19] from getting into the households," Scarpino said.

"It"s kind of scandalizing that we have so little information [from contact tracing] about the venues of transmission this late in the pandemic," said Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Lipsitch said contact tracing"s limitations are a national and even international problem, not one specific to Massachusetts.

But even with state contact tracing data offering little evidence of how and where coronavirus spreads, Scarpino and Lipsitch both felt confident in saying that restaurants, and indoor dining in particular, are risky.

Lipsitch stressed that several types of research help locate the most likely sources of COVID-19′s spread: modeling that uses real-world data to predict how many people will be infected under different reopening scenarios; case-controlled studies that compare behaviors of COVID-positive people to people who are not infected; and basic physical and epidemiological facts about how the virus itself is transmitted.

All of those types of research point clearly to restaurants as one particularly high-risk activity, Lipsitch said.

The town of Acton's current Google Data Studio dashboard is showing 69 active and 463 cumulative cases as of December 18. The most recent "newsflash style update" at 9PM on December 15 reported 433 cumulative cases with 63 individuals in isolation, 345 persons recovered and 25 fatalities.