Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The French have apparently returned from their long Armistice Day weekend (?) and have updated all their numbers for the past few days. As you can see, their death toll is continuing to skyrocket. It’s practically a vertical line now.

Here are the latest lab results for my M-protein level. As always, the lower the level, the better my cancer is under control:

So everything is fine. There was a tiny uptick in November, but it’s probably just noise.

Unfortunately, there’s a little more going on. Beginning four weeks ago, I’ve been sick constantly. I get something that feels like a normal stomach bug for a day or two, and then it goes away. But then it comes back. And goes away. And comes back. I’ve stopped counting, but I’m now on my ninth or tenth round. It seems to have nothing to do with food, nothing to do with an actual bug, and nothing to do with whether I’m currently taking my chemo med. (I take Pomalyst for three weeks on, then one week off. I’ve gotten the stomach problems both when I’m on and when I’m off.) Needless to say, perpetual rounds of stomach upset and diarrhea are pretty unpleasant.

The most likely cause is simply that a year of taking Pomalyst has finally produced this side effect, something that’s pretty common with chemo drugs. The usual reason for stopping a particular chemo med is either (a) it stops working or (b) the side effects finally become intolerable, and it’s possible that (b) has kicked in. In any case, I’ll discuss this with my doctor during my next visit.

Possibly related to this is that I’ve been deeply fatigued and depressed for weeks. Now, this could just be random. Moderate depression often comes and goes for no discernable reason. Or it could be physical, possibly linked to my stomach ailments. Or it could be due to external events. That doesn’t typically seem to be the case with me, but God knows there’s been plenty of reason lately. Between COVID-19; Trump’s tweeting; conservative malevolence; progressive blindness; climate change stagnation; and some personal stuff, there are plenty of reasons for me to feel unhappy.

Hopefully this will all go away eventually. In the meantime, it’s reduced my posting frequency for two reasons. First, I’m tired. Second, posting while depressed is a bad idea that mostly produces epic rants. This would probably be pretty entertaining for everyone, but not a good use of time or pixels. For now, I’m going to keep things slow and make sure to edit myself rigorously. I have never trusted myself when I’m in the throes of depression.

POSTSCRIPT: That said, I have no apologies for the headline to the previous post.

Tom Williams/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA

Today the White House told the Pentagon to begin planning for a substantial drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan. Mitch McConnell was not amused:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday slammed President Donald Trump’s plan for a swift reduction of U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan, warning that it would be a gift to America’s enemies and would undermine progress already made in the region. “A rapid withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan now would hurt our allies and delight the people who wish us harm,” McConnell said bluntly.

Let me get this straight:

• If Donald Trump orders a reduction of 2,500 troops from Afghanistan, McConnell is willing to publicly blast Trump in no uncertain terms as a threat to the security of the nation.
• But if Donald Trump loudly undermines the foundations of democracy by refusing to admit defeat in a presidential election, McConnell remains silent.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I already rate the Republican Party leadership at 0. I guess they’re now gunning for negative numbers.

By now you’ve all heard the news that the Moderna vaccine for COVID-19 has been 95 percent effective in early testing. Obviously this is nice to hear, and the only thing I have to add is that it’s good news for more than just its success against the coronavirus. Both Pfizer and Moderna employed an innovative mRNA technique to develop their vaccines, and the fact that they appear to be spectacular successes provides us with a ton of hope that this might usher in a whole new era of vaccine development. It’s too early to say anything for sure, but the prospects of a huge breakthrough in vaccine development are pretty exciting.

While we’re on the topic of COVID-19, however, a recent study provided another bit of good news. A team of researchers led by the Cleveland Clinic took a dive into a database of 26,779 individuals looking for possible associations between COVID-19 and other diseases and found something pretty interesting:

We found that melatonin was significantly associated with a 52% reduced likelihood of a positive laboratory test result for SARS-CoV-2 in black Americans after adjusting for age, sex, race, smoking, and various disease comorbidities.

A 52 percent reduction in positive tests is pretty spectacular. (White patients also benefited, but showed only a 23 percent reduction.) However . . .

WARNING: Every research result like this is tentative. It’s only one study, it might be biased, etc. In this case, though, the warnings need to be doubled or tripled. The researchers essentially just fed some data into a computer and looked for any two variables with significant correlations.¹ This is normally a big no-no and can’t be taken to prove much of anything. So take this result as very, very tentative.

So why did they do it? That’s easy: the purpose of a study like this is to identify things that deserve further study. By itself it might not provide strong evidence about melatonin, but it clearly identifies melatonin as something that should be the subject of a good RCT or other, more reliable, study designs:

Large-scale observational studies and randomized controlled trials are needed to validate the clinical benefit of melatonin for patients with COVID-19. It would be important, however, that the trials be designed with the understanding of the mechanism of the drug to be repurposed. For example, it would be obvious that drugs that decrease viral entry, e.g., part of melatonin’s action, would be beneficial in preventing infection or very early in the COVID-19 course, but may be inconsequential when utilized in severe or end-stage infection. Several randomized controlled trials are being performed to test the clinical benefits of melatonin in patients with COVID-19.

If the results eventually pan out, they’d provide us with two things. First, we’d have a cheap and easy way of reducing the risk of COVID-19. Second, it might provide a clue about why COVID is so devastating to Black patients.

And in the meantime, melatonin is cheap and harmless. Nobody should start taking without talking to a doctor. And don’t go nuts and assume that if you’re taking it you don’t have to wear a mask or socially distance yourself anymore.

¹There was a little more to it than that, but you get the idea.

On Saturday I introduced you to a giant rubber lens hood for my camera. Its purpose is to eliminate reflections when you’re shooting through glass, and it works pretty well. The picture below is a good example.

This is a Merten’s water monitor at the San Diego Zoo, and it’s kept in a display case behind glass. Under normal circumstances there are reflections galore from the glass, since the Reptile House is fairly dim and there are lights all over the place. But the lens hood blocked all that, allowing me to take a picture with no reflections and a good look both below and above the water line. This is a nice little picture, and it was possible only because I had a giant lens hood.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

For the time being, I’ve stopped tracking the trendline from France since they aren’t reporting new numbers (or Johns Hopkins isn’t recording them). Until this changes, the chart for France only goes up through November 11.

Greg Nash - Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA

A federal judge has restored DACA—which protects immigrants living in the US since childhood—to nearly full operation. That’s great, and I’m happy about it. But I’m even happier about how it happened: the judge ruled that acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf had been illegally named to his position and therefore had no authority to water down DACA in the first place. The Wall Street Journal explains:

Acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf issued a memorandum narrowing the program to existing applicants, who would be offered renewals of only one year, rather than two, and closing the program to any new candidates….The judge, Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Eastern District of New York, ruled it was improperly issued because Mr. Wolf hadn’t been properly appointed to his acting position. The ruling is the fifth to find that Mr. Wolf is serving illegally in his acting role, following a Government Accountability Office report that found Mr. Wolf and his predecessor, Kevin McAleenan, both had been improperly appointed under federal law on job vacancies.

….The court’s ruling doesn’t have the effect of removing Mr. Wolf from his role but adds to a growing set of rulings that have found that, as a result of his improper appointment, Mr. Wolf didn’t have the authority to issue numerous immigration and other policies.

It’s nice to see that the rule of law continues to operate. Donald Trump can continue to appoint fake cabinet members because he’s too lazy to seek Senate confirmation, and no one will kick his imposters out of their offices. But if they try to do anything important, a court will jerk them back to reality and tell them they have no real authority. Good.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through November 14. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Once again, ignore the recent data from France. Their death rate is not going down. For some reason, though, they haven’t reported any new numbers for the past three days.

It is not even close to winter yet, but already there’s nothing but bad news on the COVID-19 horizon. First off, here’s a chart you’ve probably seen a bunch of times:

In the past three weeks, the number of new cases per day has increased by about 2.3x using smoothed 7-day averages. But maybe this is simply because we’re testing more? Nope:

The testing rate has been dead flat at about 1 million tests per day. So why is the case rate growing so fast? It’s simple: more people are getting infected:

Over the past three weeks, the test positivity rate has gone up about 2.2x. This accounts for the entire increase in the case rate. So what does this mean for the death rate?

Between October 1 and October 23, the case rate went up by about half. Add three weeks to that, and between October 23 and November 14 the death rate went up by . . . about half. So, since the case rate has risen about 2.3x in the past three weeks up through today, we can probably expect the death rate to increase about 2.3x between now and the end of November. That gets us very close to 3,000 deaths per day.

It might be less than that, since the case fatality rate has been slowly declining. On the other hand, it might be more than that since the current unsmoothed case rate is about 180,000 per day. If that’s a more accurate measure, we could end up well over 3,000 deaths per day.

What’s more, this is hardly the worst it can get. At the moment, there’s no indication that the case rate is slowing down, which means the death rate won’t slow down either. It will slow down eventually, especially if more people get scared and start wearing masks and quarantining and just generally acting like this is a serious problem. Needless to say, this would be more likely if state governors helped things along by shutting down indoor dining at restaurants and Senate Republicans made this more palatable by agreeing to a bailout of restaurants and other highly affected businesses. That’s in addition to other assistance, mostly but not limited to aid to the unemployed.

Our first COVID-19 surge in April made me swear off crude projections, since they mostly turned out to be wrong. Partly this is because this isn’t just a pure mathematical exercise involving exponential growth. It also depends on how strongly the government puts in place countermeasures and how well the rest of us accept them, and that’s nearly impossible to predict. So don’t treat these numbers as gospel or anything close to it. They’re more like a warning: if we continue doing the minimum necessary to fight the coronavirus, we’ll almost certainly see a skyrocketing death rate. A lot of this is already baked into today’s numbers, but not all of it. We can still do better if we decide to put partisan idiocy behind us and simply agree to fight the pandemic with every tool at our disposal.

POSTSCRIPT: If you’d like to see this all in scary map form, just click here.

Here’s a picture of, oh, I don’t know, I guess it’s the Citibank Building in downtown Los Angeles. It’s a panoramic shot stitched together in Photoshop, taken from one of the elevators of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel:

I know what you’re about to say: Sure, Kevin, whatever. Kinda boring. Still, you got surprisingly little reflection through the elevator glass. That was pretty lucky. But no! This took extra-special photographic gear, pictured below:

If you put the camera right up to the glass with this huge rubber lens hood attached, the hood blocks off all the reflections. This was very, very handy at the San Diego Zoo last month.

Now, as it happens I actually bought this lens hood in hopes of using it in the rain to keep water off the lens. I haven’t had a chance to try that yet since there’s been no rain lately here in Southern California, but I’m optimistic. And if we get heavy rain? Check this out:

That should do the trick! Assuming the wind doesn’t just blow the whole thing away and I end up like Mary Poppins.