Linked List: May 21, 2020

Thursday, 21 May 2020

The CDC and Several States Are Misreporting COVID-19 Test Data ★

Alexis Madrigal and Robinson Meyer, reporting for The Atlantic:

The upshot is that the government’s disease-fighting agency is overstating the country’s ability to test people who are sick with COVID-19. The agency confirmed to The Atlantic on Wednesday that it is mixing the results of viral and antibody tests, even though the two tests reveal different information and are used for different reasons.

This is not merely a technical error. States have set quantitative guidelines for reopening their economies based on these flawed data points.

Several states — including Pennsylvania, the site of one of the country’s largest outbreaks, as well as Texas, Georgia, and Vermont — are blending the data in the same way. Virginia likewise mixed viral and antibody test results until last week, but it reversed course and the governor apologized for the practice after it was covered by the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Atlantic. Maine similarly separated its data on Wednesday; Vermont authorities claimed they didn’t even know they were doing this. The widespread use of the practice means that it remains difficult to know exactly how much the country’s ability to test people who are actively sick with COVID-19 has improved.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Ashish Jha, the K. T. Li Professor of Global Health at Harvard and the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told us when we described what the CDC was doing. “How could the CDC make that mistake? This is a mess.”

Jiminy.

Android Action Blocks ★

Seems like a very cool accessibility feature primarily designed for people with cognitive disabilities. “Blocks” are Google Assistant recipes saved to the home screen as one-tap actions. Loosely, it’s sort of the Android equivalent of Siri Shortcuts, but their integration with the home screen is quite different.

Hamster Research Shows Masks Effective in Preventing COVID-19 Transmission ★

The University of Hong Kong:

The study, released on Sunday, shed light on an ongoing heated debate on whether wearing masks would help prevent the transmission of the deadly coronavirus.

In each set of the experiment, hamsters were separated in two groups and placed in two cages, with one of the groups infected with Covid-19. In the first experiment, no surgical masks were placed between the two cages. In the second one, a surgical mask was placed closer to the healthy hamsters. In the third experiment, the mask was placed closer to the infected, as if the healthy ones or the infected were wearing masks.

With no partition in between the cages, two-thirds of the healthy hamsters were infected a week later. In the following two experiments with masks in between, the infection rates were lowered to one-third and one-sixth respectively.

Wear it for others, wear it for yourself. The more we learn, the more important mask wearing appears to be. We should be universally celebrating that something so simple, so cheap, with no side effects worse than fogged-up glasses, is measurably effective at stopping the spread of COVID-19.