COVID19 Update - Day 126

US Tests: 41,764,557

US Cases: 3,413,313

US Deaths: 128,740

Worldwide Cases: 13,273,537

Worldwide Deaths: 577,843

This, sadly, was entirely too predictable:

Local news reports from Texas and Arizona say that officials and hospital chains have begun in recent weeks to order extra, mobile morgues. The reasons differ, but they either come as a response to death rates starting to overwhelm storage capacity for the dead or as local officials anticipate and prepare for the same.

FEMA told TPM that it is sending 14 “mortuary support units” to Texas in response to a July 11 request from the state’s department of emergency management. The units, a FEMA spokesperson said, “are in transit and should arrive at the state by early next week.”

Local officials in Texas have been agitating for the mobile morgues as death counts rise.

“I am now having to order additional body bags and morgue trailers. People have to understand how real it is,” Barbara Canales, Judge of Texas’s Nueces County, told a Corpus Christi TV station last week.

The staggering scope of how badly the pandemic response is being managed, and the magnitude of the body count from easily-preventable deaths will haunt this country for generations.

As it should.

HOWEVER!  There is also some good news today!

A COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Cambridge biotech Moderna in a collaboration with the National Institutes of Health spurred immune responses in healthy subjects who received it, although it caused mild side effects in many of them, according to the first published data about the small, early-stage clinical trial.

The vaccine, which was the first of at least 21 to enter clinical trials, produced antibodies in all 45 patients who received two shots 28 days apart in March, said the study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Three groups of 15 volunteers received varying dosages.

“These safety and immunogenicity findings support advancement of the mRNA-1273 vaccine to later-stage clinical trials,” the article said, using the identification number for the experimental vaccine.

The vaccine was developed by Moderna and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which ran the Phase 1 trial. Moderna reported some of the results in mid-May, and the vaccine is in mid-stage trials, with a final stage scheduled to start on 30,000 adults July 27.

“No matter how you slice this, this is good news,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US government’s leading infectious disease specialist, told the Associated Press.

I understand that this is a process, and that there's still a long way to go before any vaccine might be ready to administer to the general public.  Nevertheless, some progress is better than no progress!