The US has more than 3.7 million confirmed cases of Covid-19 and is therefore the country with the highest number of those in the world. What has been in the news lately is how states that rushed to reopen as quickly as possible, such as Texas and Florida, have had a steady and exponential increase in the total number of cases.

Next to California, which has also seen a sharp increase in the number of cases, mainly in Los Angeles county, those states are getting closer to matching the numbers of New York. It feels like a cautionary tale that "going back to normal" won't mean the pre-COVID-19 normal until there is an effective vaccine or treatment in place.

Fortunately an mRNA vaccine trial preliminary report in the NEJM stated the vaccine induced anti–SARS-CoV-2 immune responses in all participants, and no trial-limiting safety concerns were identified. Crossing our fingers for the next phases of those promising results.

Talking about exponential growth ... back on the 31st of January, when I heard the novel coronavirus mentioned in the news I blogged about how there were "9776 cases confirmed affecting 20 countries already, with the vast majority in China", regarding this '2019-nCoV' virus as it was known back then.

2.5 months later, this number has jumped to more than 1.5 million cases, becoming a pandemic, affecting most of the nations in the world. Italy and Spain were hard hit, as well as the US, a country that has become by far the new epicenter of this disease.

The strict social distancing rules have slowed down the transmission in the communities adopting these measures (with the unfortunate side effect of paralyzing the economies). Let's cross our fingers that all those efforts will contain this nasty virus.