COVID-19 day 103 : 📈 1,133,069 cases; 66,385 deaths : 02 May 2020
Why you should beware headlines like "deadliest day"; which counties lead in cases per capita; more on astroturf protests; do most of us really want to socialize in public spaces [updated]
It’s day 103 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. News media may be the death of us: lies, damn lies, and statistics, part two. More on those not-representative protesters. And re-opening may not be going like any governor anticipated.
This set of headlines greeted me when I checked in with Memeorandum:
The United States just had its deadliest day on record due to the coronavirus as states across the country begin to ease restrictions meant to curb the spread of the virus, according to data published by the World Health Organization.
That was the CNBC lede, which slyly linked “opening” with “record deaths.”
I did a double-take, and then looked at my Johns Hopkins data. US deaths on 01 May, 2,049 (11 pm Pacific). Checked CDC: 2,349. Checked state departments of health: 1,793.
I know why the reporter linked the data with re-opening, but it implies a correlation that’s crazy-making because of the lag between exposure, infection and death.
Both CNBC and The Hill (which regurgitated the CNBC story) focused on protests:
State leaders around the country continued to see protests from demonstrators who want to reopen the economy and return to their jobs. Demonstrations took place in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee and Washington on Friday.
Neither story notes that the protests are “manufactured,” not organic.
Neither story notes that a majority of Americans, Republican and Democratic, are not eager to venture out into the world.
First, the data:
Daily data on cases and deaths are notoriously … slippery. There are lags at labs, which may have a backlog or may have insufficient materials to run the tests; there are sample lags due to insufficient swabs; there’s the weekend, when fewer individuals are tested; there’s the lag in reporting from lab to agency. This is why so many data visualizations use three- or seven-day moving averages, to try to smooth out the variance.
Each group uses different data sources, although you’d think that the state departments of health would be the primary source.
The important thing about data: pick a data source and then ignore the others. You’re looking for trends. “The largest X” is important when it illustrates a jump in a trend line; this did not. It’s important when pointing out that the trend is still growing, not declining, but contextually. Not as though daily death totals were a baseball score.
I was so annoyed that I calculated the CDC daily data (I can do that because I capture their data each day).
Second, the protests:
Two weeks ago, The Guardian detailed the right-wing groups behind these astroturf, made for cable-TV, spectacles. Some, as New York magazine detailed, have been linked to established conservative political groups and politicians.
From Columbia Journalism Review:
Several mainstream outlets have compared the anti-lockdown protests to the Tea Party movement—which, of course, has faced allegations of Astroturfism itself. In 2011, Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol, and John Coggin, of Harvard, wrote that Fox and other right-wing media entities didn’t just encourage the Tea Party, but acted, in a sense, as its “membership and communications infrastructure,” since, on the ground, the Tea Partiers were only “loosely interconnected.”
In an action akin to his support for Charlottesville protesters where a woman was killed, Trump tweeted support for the armed men in Michigan:
Sentiment runs counter to the public objections.
Pew Research reports are the gold standard on methodology (which includes substantive sample sizes). Here’s what they found:
About twice as many Americans say their greater concern is that state governments will lift restrictions on public activity too quickly (66%) as say it will not happen quickly enough (32%)…
Nearly three-quarters of Americans in counties with the highest number of deaths say the response wasn’t quick enough. A nearly identical share of adults in areas that have been hit moderately hard by coronavirus deaths also say this (73%)…
When it comes to the problems the country is facing from the coronavirus outbreak, 73% of U.S. adults say the worst is still to come, compared with 26% who say the worst is behind us. Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say the worst is still to come. However, Democrats are much more likely to say this than Republicans.
🦠Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,133,069 (1,103,781) cases and 66,385 (65,068) in the US, an increase of 2.65% and 2.02%, respectively, since Friday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 3.7% and 3.8%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 28,183 (26,771) cases and 2,026 (1,898) deaths
That case rate is 342.31 per 100,000; the death rate, 20.06 per 100,000 [corrected]
One week ago, the case rate was 273.51 per 100,000; the death rate, 16.29 per 100,000.
🤓Recommended reading
Two essays that help debunk the “but flu is just as deadly” arguemnts.
I decided to call colleagues around the country who work in other emergency departments and in intensive care units to ask a simple question: how many patients could they remember dying from the flu? Most of the physicians I surveyed couldn’t remember a single one over their careers. Some said they recalled a few. All of them seemed to be having the same light bulb moment I had already experienced: For too long, we have blindly accepted a statistic that does not match our clinical experience.
Comparing COVID-19 Deaths to Flu Deaths Is like Comparing Apples to Oranges The former are actual numbers; the latter are inflated statistical estimates. Scientific American, 28 April 2020.
There’s a more accurate way to compare coronavirus deaths to the flu. If we measure flu mortality the same way we count covid-19 deaths, the picture becomes very stark. Washington Post, 02 May 2020.
🔬Research and medical news
With very limited research, on Friday, President Trump announced that the FDA had authorized remdesivir for emergency use in coronavirus patients. I can hear President Reagan in my head: “here we go again!”
In an interview with Quartz, Holly Fernandez Lynch, a medical ethics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, noted that “the researchers changed the primary outcome that the study claimed to evaluate.”
Originally, the study was designed to rate participants’ health on day 15 and day 29 of treatment. Now, it’s focused on how many days it takes to recovery. There can be good reasons for changing this variable—NIAID provided an explanation on Friday, after the drug was authorized—but, without the full dataset, outside scientists can’t make sense of the change…
“The end point that we really care about for Covid is mortality,” says Lynch. “This product [remdesivir] has not demonstrated an impact on mortality.”
⓵ Around the country
I continue hammer home the importance of examining per capita data. This chart is from the NYTimes; I added the numbers. Look! Which major city is missing*?
It’s true that case-to-severe illness-to-death ratio is not fixed. In Michigan, the death-to-case rate is 9.3%; in South Dakota, 1%. Our median is 5.5%.
But in these smaller communities, how well do you think their health care system can handle a spike?
*Missing: NYC. It was 23rd.
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
The number of affected countries/territories jumped from 29 at the end of February to 187 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
Think most people are clamoring to go out in public and be social? That’s not been the case, according to news reports.
Bad Axe CEO Mario Zelaya expected business to be bad, maybe 10% of the hundreds of customers he would expect to see throw axes and drink beer on a typical weekend.
“That was the worst-case scenario, especially with all the marketing we did,” Zelaya said. “The reopening weekend was a disaster. We had two customers all weekend."
I had to read that twice: there’s a place where you throw axes and drink beer? At the same time? And it was able to open last weekend in Atlanta?
Here’s why only two people showed up (bars have to be lower yet):
With only 500 respondents, there’s not a lot of validity in ranking these choices. But it’s clear that most people aren’t ready to pretend life hasn’t been irrevocably changed.
Perhaps these business owners talked with their customers:
More than 120 restaurants in Atlanta are refusing to open their dining rooms to patrons until they believe it’s safe, despite Georgia’s decision to allow restaurants and other businesses to start reopening this week amid the coronavirus outbreak.
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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.
🌎 02 May
Globally: 3 267 184 cases (91 977 - new) with 229 971 deaths (5,799 - new)
The Americas: 1 340 591 cases (48 674 - new) with 72 196 deaths (3,109 - new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 3,428,422 (3,344,435 - yesterday)
Total deaths: 243,831 (238,788 - yesterday)
Recovered: 1,093,189 (1,055,536 - yesterday)
🇺🇸 03 May
CDC: 1,092,815 (1,062,446) cases and 64,283 (62,406) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,133,069 (1,103,781) cases and 66,385 (65,068) deaths
State data*: 1,125,719 ( 1,061,101) identified cases and 60,710 (57,266)
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 6,816,347 (6,551,810)
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.
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🦠 COVID-19 @ WiredPen.com
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