Victoria drops below 200 new COVID-19 cases for first time in a month

And NSW has recorded just one new infection today, in what appears to be a happy turning point.

Welcome to The Medical Republic‘s COVID Catch-Up.

It’s the day’s COVID-19 news into one convenient post. Email bianca@biancanogrady.com with any tips, comments or feedback.

21 August

• Some good news from Victoria as daily new COVID-19 infections drop below 200.
• Consider mechanical ventilation and ECMO in deteriorating children or adolescents with severe COVID-19.
• If US hits one million COVID-19 deaths, will take life expectancy back to 1995 levels.
• Mandatory mask policies more fair and effective than voluntary guidelines, study finds.
• Latest confirmed COVID-19 infection numbers around Australia.

• Bravo Victoria! The number of new infections has dropped below 200 for the first time in over one month, according to the latest update. And NSW has recorded just one new infection today, which is a contact of a known case. Nice to have some good news going into the weekend.
• Children and adolescents with COVID-19 who are deteriorating despite respiratory support can be considered for invasive mechanical ventilation, according to the latest update from Australia’s National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce.
  The taskforce also said that clinicians should consider early referral for ECMO in mechanically ventilated children or adolescents with severe COVID-19, provided there are no contraindication.
• As the United States accelerates past five million confirmed cases of COVID-19 and more than 170,000 deaths, researchers have modelled the demographic impact if COVID-19 were to claim one million lives in the US.
  “It is possible to portray the death toll in a way that feels overwhelmingly large, but it is also possible to describe it in a way that makes the epidemic mortality seem almost negligible,” researchers wrote in PNAS.
  While one million deaths seems a long way from 170,000, the researchers noted that earlier projections suggested deaths could top two million if nothing was done to tackle the virus.
  Taking into account mortality rates for different age groups, researchers estimated that one million COVID-19 deaths would reduce overall life expectancy by just under three years, which is equivalent to life expectancy back in 1995.
• Mandatory mask wearing is a more effective, fair and socially-responsible way to reduce transmission of airborne viruses than voluntary mask wearing policies, researchers suggest.
  A weekly cross-sectional survey of nearly 7000 people in Germany – published in PNAS – found that mask-wearing increased significantly when a mandatory policy was introduced, despite there only being moderate acceptance of the idea. They also found that mask wearing was associated with other protective behaviours such as physical distancing, hand-washing and avoiding hand shaking.
  The authors also did an experiment where a subset of participants were presented with a scenario of being in a local grocery store with one other person, either in a situation of compulsory or voluntary masking and with the other person either wearing a mask or not.
  They found that regardless of mask policy, mask-wearing was perceived as being a socially good thing. However compliance was lower when masks weren’t compulsory, and those wearing them were stigmatised as belonging to an at-risk group. The voluntary policy was also viewed as being less fair, particularly by individuals at greater risk of COVID-19.
  “The results from both data analyses indicate that, independent from policies, wearing masks is a social contract wherein compliant people perceive each other more positively, and noncompliance is socially punished,” the authors wrote.
• Here are the latest confirmed COVID-19 infection numbers from around Australia, to 9pm Thursday:
  National – 24,236, with 463 deaths
  ACT – 113 (0)
  NSW – 3971 (5)
  NT – 33 (0)
  QLD – 1093 (1)
  SA – 462 (0)
  TAS – 230 (0)
  VIC – 17,683 (240)
  WA – 651 (0)