J Enders

The not fully vaccinated statistics show how needless this is.

Any chance you will be putting out new audio updates anytime soon? We miss the interviews and insights!

Interesting speculation about SARS COVID 2 convergent evolution from a researcher at Fred Hutchinson:

The last few updates including today have an audio problem either in the recording or on playback they become unlistenable about halfway to 3/4 of the way in. It would be great if that could be addressed because we’d love to hear the entire update.

The Louisiana Department of Health confirmed the state’s first identified case of a new, more easily spread variant of COVID-19 in the Greater New Orleans area, officials said. SARS-CoV-2 B.1.1.7., which is often referred to as the "U.K. variant" because of its prevalence in the United Kingdom, spreads more easily than other viral strains in the country, according to officials. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/coronavirus/article_d0dd2e9e-5835-11eb-8ca6-4b1adc56cc7a.html

Thanks these updates, the amount of information and misinformation out there is hard to keep up with.

Didn’t the UK espouse pre-vaccine herd immunity early on? Given our unofficial herd immunity policy in the US and even greater numbers it would seem we can expect similar problems.

Assuming hypothetically that federal “policy” regarding the pandemic remains unchanged after November 3, does anyone have a guess of what the upper range is for new daily cases in the US?

Please post a link to 5/1/20 radio interview. Changing date to 0501 in usual URL did not seem to work as of yesterday. Thanks

Thank you for posting this. Colleagues and I have been wondering whether lineage is Italian/US east coast, West coast or some kind of “gumbo”. Betting money was on Italian lineage. Large east coast student population was present at Tulane University in New Orleans, many from NY and New Jersey. Of course toss in Mardi Gras and huge influx of visiting tourists and anything was possible. The parishes (counties) represented cover nearly the whole state, not just New Orleans, with Caddo parish on the I-20 corridor 2 hours east of Dallas and, along the I-10 corridor to the south. Samples are a good geographic representation of what infecting the state.

You will want to take a look at the latest Louisiana numbers http://www.ldh.la.gov/Coronavirus/ Exponential increase continues 28% of positives require hospital (773) now showing numbers on ventilator 35% of those in hospital on ventilator (270)

I would certainly defer to Dr. Niman, but my understanding is that an RNA virus such as coronavirus is prone to error in replication i.e. mutation. This virus is highly transmissible and will therefore have achieved a large reservoir of hosts. A vaccine may work but may also introduce selection pressure such that mutations unfavorable to the hosts (humans) proliferate.

Louisiana COVID 19 Cases increase to 1,172, Deaths to 34. http://ldh.la.gov/Coronavirus/ Louisiana Department of Health now updating once (formerly twice) per day at noon CST.

Governor issues shelter in place order. https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/coronavirus/article_1b41aff0-6c6e-11ea-93a1-8f783b2c0340.htmlted b

LA Department of Health issued a late update- 763 cases & 20 deaths