COVID-19 day 100: 📈 1,039,909 cases; 60,966 deaths : 29 April 2020
Jet Blue will require passengers to wear masks starting 04 May; airlines have been negligent in requiring masks of flight crew; context for news about Gilead’s antiviral treatment remdesivir
It’s day 100 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. The CDC now reports more than 1 million US cases; their data lag Johns Hopkins and state departments of health.
Three German research institutions have made an exceptional, joint statement about COVID-19 data and mathematical analyses.
The number of reproductions must therefore be kept below 1 until a vaccine is available.
In other words, each person who is infected should not infect another person; some will need to infect zero for the number to drop below one. (R2 means an infected person infects two other people.)
🦠There will be a slight change in reporting going forward. I will continue to publish data daily. Introductory commentary on an issue (a mini-deep dive) will be periodic/minimal. Global and state news will be more bulleted. If you have a specific issue you’d like to see addressed, comment on a post or @ me on Twitter; I will see that faster than a reply to the newsletter email. 😉
Wednesday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,039,909 (1,012,583) cases and 60,966 (58,355) deaths in the US, an increase of 2.70% (2.44%) and 4.47% (3.75%), respectively, since Tuesday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 3.15% and 6.8%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 28,183 (26,771) cases and 2,026 (1,898) deaths
That case rate is 314.17 per 100,000; the death rate, 184.19 per million.
One week ago, the case rate was 262.59 per 100,000; the death rate, 150.94 per million.
Note: numbers in (.) are from the prior day and are provided for context. I include the seven-day average because dailies vary so much in the course of a week.
🤓Recommended reading
▪️ Meet the 101-year-old who was born on a ship during the 1918 flu pandemic and just beat coronavirus. CNN, 28 April, 2020.
Why it’s important: look at that headline!
▪️ The False Hope of Antibody Tests. The Atlantic, 28 April 2020.
The idea of reopening the country based on antibody tests runs into the technical limits of the tests themselves. Scientists don’t know exactly how long immunity to COVID-19 will last and what level of antibodies confers immunity. “There are just unknowns for an individual,” Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and a co-author of a recent report on antibody testing, told me. “The ‘get out of jail free’ card we’re hoping for, it’s just not how it should be sold,” she said…
Of particular concern here is the false-positive rate: If the prevalence of COVID-19 is quite low in the population—say, 5 percent—and a test can identify people who are truly negative with 95 percent reliability, half of the “positives” it returns will be false positives. In other words, half of the people the test says have antibodies wouldn’t actually have them.
Why it’s important: the concept of 95% reliability and antibody testing returning 50% false positive is difficult to internalize for many (🙋♀️). Plus we don’t know if antibodies convey immunity. The known unknowns is a big N and disorienting for a culture that avoids ambiguity. Oh, and FDA “is dealing with a flood of inaccurate coronavirus antibody tests after it allowed more than 120 manufacturers and labs to bring the tests to market without an agency review (emphasis added).”
🔬Research and medical news
Context for news about Gilead’s antiviral treatment remdesivir
Gilead study (preliminary): helped half of the 397 patients with “severe” COVID-19 symptoms; no control group.
NIH study: the randomized, controlled trial involved 1,063 patients improved the time to recovery from 15 days for placebo to 11 days for patients treated with remdesivir. Anthony Fauci:, “very important proof of concept”
China study: randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, trial at 10 hospitals for “severe” COVID-19 “was not associated with statistically significant clinical benefits” but suggested a “numerical reduction in time to clinical improvement” compared to placebo for “patients with symptom duration of 10 days or less”
💃🏼Life hack
How to check your on your coronavirus check from Congress
⓵ Around the country
🗽New York. Watch for another spike in cases after thousands attended a funeral in Brooklyn; Rabbi Chaim Mertz died of COVID-19.
⛱Florida. Medical examiners were regularly releasing coronavirus death data that showed more cases than state data, until the state made them stop. The state has held the data for nine days.
✈️ JetBlue is the first major US airline to require that passengers wear a face covering (nose and mouth), beginning 04 May 2020. The requirement covers check-in through disembarking at their destination. (People are still flying?)
In what has to be the craziest news from the skies, on Friday, United was the first major airline to require flight crews to wear masks. For American Airlines the mask requirement will begin on 01 May. Delta Air Lines airlines has begun handing out masks to passengers (what? where did they come from and why aren’t they in hospitals instead?) and has begun requiring them of flight crew this week.
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have identified COVID-19 cases and all have at least one death.
⓶ Around the world
Data are reported cases and deaths from Johns Hopkins; Vietnam has not reported any deaths and has 270 cases.
The number of affected countries/territories/areas jumped from 29 at the end of February to 208 today. Although early reports tied the outbreak to a seafood (“wet”) market in Wuhan, China, analyses of genomic data suggest that the virus may have developed elsewhere.
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
▪️President Trump issued an executive order, using the authority of the Defense Production Ac, to compel meat processing plants to remain open during the pandemic. Employees, and local public officials, aren’t so sure about that.
▪️The sharing economy, represented by Uber, Airbnb and WeWork, is folding under physical distancing practices. Remember that much of the value of these networks was retained by those who built the applications, which took digital crowdsourcing into the physical world.
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⓸ Case count
There is a lag between being contagious and showing symptoms, between having a test and getting its results. The virus was not created in a lab.
🌎 29 April
Globally: 3 018 952 confirmed (66 276 - new) with 207 973 deaths (5376 - new)
The Americas: 1 213 088 confirmed (33 481 - new) with 62 404 deaths (2193 - new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 3,194,663 (3,117,204 - yesterday)
Total deaths: 227,671 (217,193 - yesterday)
Recovered: 973,460 (928,970 - yesterday)
🇺🇸 29 April
CDC: 1,005,147 (981,246) cases and 57,505 (55,258) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,039,909 (1,012,583) cases and 60,966 (58,355) deaths
State data*: 1,033,157 (1,005,592) identified cases and 55,225 (52,525) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 6,026,170 (5,795,728)
View infographic and data online: total cases, cases/100,000 and deaths/million.
* Johns Hopkins data, ~11.00 pm Pacific.
State data include DC, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands
⓹ What you can do
Stay home as much as possible, period.
Digestive problems may be a symptom.
Resources
👓 See COVID-19 resource collection at WiredPen.
📝 Subscribe to Kathy’s Daily Memo :: Daily Memo archives
🦠 COVID-19 @ WiredPen.com
🌐 Global news