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Hi everyone, this is John Mandrola from the Heart.org Medscape Cardiology and this is this week in

Cardiology for January 15th 2021.

This week COVID left atrial appendage closure, a potential clue in A-Fib, SGLT2 in ambition, and Ace Arbs.

First up is COVID. Again, it's still not a very good situation.

Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that we had a record number of deaths in one day, more than 4,000. Now I look at the Johns Hopkins data page

often and it looks like both the US and California case curves have stopped

rising. I hope, hope this is a plateau in possible fall in cases.

The big news this week seems to be the emergence of a more infectious variant of the virus.

F Perry Wilson from Yale has a nice explainer

on why a more infectious virus is so bad,

even worse than an emergence of a more deadly strain of virus.

It all gets down to math and exponential growth.

Even though the chance of dying from the virus is low, say 0.5%,

...