The Count

Region	Cases	Deaths
World	30,235,984	948,338
US	6,844,652	201,751

Is Sturgis COVID-19 Study Really Wrong at 250k Cases? Exponential Growth Will Mess You Up When a recent paper suggested that the massive, maskless gathering at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally caused more than 250,000 cases of COVID-19, many, including some prominent epidemiologists, dismissed the findings as implausible. The 250K estimate may well be wrong. It may be too low.

Research News

SARS-CoV-2 remains in infectious for more than a week on refrigerated salmon. Chinese researchers stored cube of salmon contaminated with the virus for a week at 4 degrees C and found that the remaining virus was still viable in cell culture.

Republican Governors four weeks slower to impose mask mandates than Democrats After adjusting for the death rate and political leanings of the state's citizens, researchers at the University of Washington found that Republican Governors waited 30 days longer before imposing a mask mandate than their Democratic counterparts.

Ventilation systems play a key role in superspreader events An analysis of three events at a restaurant, on a bus and at a call center show the role of the ventilation system in defining the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Is low level exposure to SARS-CoV2 vaccinating us against severe SARS-CoV-2? * An opinion piece in the New England Journal of Medicine, which has been widely circulated, suggests that facial masking is shifting what would have been high dose exposure to the virus towards lower dose exposure. This is an interesting, if not entirely remarkable, hypothesis, but the authors provide little solid evidence to support it. The evidence they do cite related to lower rates of systemic infection among groups such as meat packers and antarctic cruise ship passengers do not consider other factors that might influence rates of asymptomatic COVID-19, particularly age, when comparing with other groups. They also do not consider the potential role of other factors such as social distancing and hand washing in reducing viral dose. Nonetheless, the hypothesis seems worthy of closer study.

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*peer reviewed.

Recent Posts Covid19- Ahead of the Curve.

HOW TO INFECT YOUR STATE IN THREE EASY STEPS It takes a special kind of magic to make South Dakota the pandemic poster child. With only eleven people per square mile, the state has almost the lowest population density in the country (46th out of 50). That translates to an average social distance of about 1,500 feet. So why do they have one of the highest rates of new infections in the country?