COVID-19 day 106 : 📈 1,204,475 cases; 71,078 deaths : 05 May 2020
What do an Italian grandma, a 70 year old Seattle area man, and a Boston area school teacher have in common? Welcome to the "gratitude" edition.
It’s day 106 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. And today is the “grateful” edition. But before these vignettes, a word about skepticism.
The image on the left was widely circulated on digital networks. Probably accurate, it is not truthful: it implies that most of Georgia has a confirmed coronavirus case rate of close to 1,000/100,000. It does so in two ways: choice of color but, more importantly, choice of scale. The image is so flawed that Forbes took down the post and fired the contributor. You can see how distorted it is by looking at the official map. More on WiredPen.
When something seems too good or too bad to be true: stop! Don’t share without engaging the “Spock” side of your brain! Because it’s probably not true. Even with COVID19.
Now for the smiles:
Today, rather than visit this Italian grandmother’s AirBnB to learn how to make pasta, you can join her cooking classes online. With Nonna Live, she brings you virtually into her kitchen in Palombara Sabina, a village outside of Rome.
During the two-hour cooking class, Nonna Nerina gives step-by-step instructions and even claps for you as you work. A week before your class, you'll receive a shopping list of ingredients to buy. Nonna sends translated notes to help you prepare for the session.
🎉Michael Flor, 70, is the “longest-hospitalized coronavirus patient” at Swedish Hospital in Issaquah. He was admitted on 04 March because his wife insisted on taking him to ER when he “came home early from work … with a bad cough.”
He’s like a Rip Van Winkle for the coronavirus era. When he finally started getting his senses back, last week, he was astonished at the new world around him. That a quarter-million have died worldwide. That all the schools are closed. That there are no traffic jams in Seattle.
On 04 March, Microsoft told employees who could to work from home, “through March 25th.” Amazon played catch-up that evening. There were 10 deaths and 39 confirmed cases in King and Snohomish Counties; the first death in the country had been announced only five days earlier, 29 February. Only 13 states had reported cases.
🦠Tuesday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,204,475 (1,180,634) cases and 71,078 (68,934) deaths in the US, an increase of 2.02% and 3.11%, respectively, since Monday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 2.44% and 3.75%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 23,841 (22,593) cases and 1,818 (1,813) deaths
That case rate is 363.89 per 100,000; the death rate, 21.47 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 305.91 per 100,000; the death rate, 17.63 per 100,000.
🤓Recommended reading
If you haven’t viewed the selfie gallery or read some of the stories at the New York Times ongoing profile, In Harm’s Way, please take a moment and do so now.
Despite their stoic selfies, they feel scared, grief-stricken, guilty they can’t do more. In submissions and interviews, they reflect on what they have witnessed, the decisions they have made and how the pandemic has changed them.
🔬Research and medical news
Immunity research from Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine is in pre-print. The donors were from New York City.
🎦Recommended viewing
From The Lincoln Project. Ironically, George Conway (Kellyanne) is a founder.
💃🏼Life hack
Lovely background images from the San Francisco area for your desktop or Zoom backdrop.
⓵ Around the country
✅Stephens Inc., a privately-held financial services firm from Arkansas, analyzed online menus for Wendy’s restaurants and reported that 18% had listed “beef items” as unavailable. Wendy’s uses fresh hamburger meat, not frozen, which would could make it more susceptible to supply disruption. But the finance guys aren’t worried: “A short outage is not material in our view.”
❌In Louisiana, “nearly every woman” in a prison dorm has tested positive for COVID-19. Most do not have symptoms.
❌In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott thought he was talking to a group of friendly politicians on the phone. One of them was a statesman, and recorded the governor admitting the truth about physical distancing:
“Pretty much every scientific and medical report shows that whenever you have a reopening... it actually will lead to an increase and spread. It’s almost ipso facto.”
❌None of these men are wearing masks. At a manufacturing facility that makes masks. They must have internalized the idea that masks make a man look weak.
Editorial comment: people, crop your photos before uploading! Zeke is an AP White House Reporter. 🤦♀️
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.
Please take a moment and answer this short reader survey! ✅
⓶ Around the world
In Africa, COVID-19 cases increased by 41% for the week ending 03 May.
In Israel, officials are readying a nationwide serological test of 100,000 citizens. Insert caveat here about false negatives, accuracy.
The UK has now passed Spain and Italy to take the dubious position of having the most COVID-19 deaths in Europe according to both Johns Hopkins data and its own tracker. It also has fewer total cases. However, it is still third in per capita deaths and cases.
UK, 29,501 deaths (43.46/100K) and 196,243 cases (289.08/100K)
Italy, 29,315 deaths (48.47/100K) and 213,013 cases (352.17/100K)
Spain, 25,613 deaths (54.78/100K) and 219,329 cases (469.10/100K)
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
✅Whistleblower, take 1.
The Washington Post and the New York Times provide a devastating review of Jared Kushner’s coronavirus response team, staffed by volunteers. Their work was “overseen by a former assistant to Mr. Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump.”
In April, one of those volunteers filed a complaint with the House Oversight Committee.
“Americans are facing a crisis of tragic proportions and there is an urgent need for an effective, efficient and bold response,” reads the complaint, which was sent to the committee on April 8. “From my few weeks as a volunteer, I believe we are falling short. I am writing to alert my representatives of these challenges and to ask that they do everything possible to help front-line health-care workers and other Americans in need.”
From South Carolina, Dr. Jeffrey Hendricks, who had manufacturing contacts in China, offered to help.
As the federal government’s warehouses were running bare and medical workers improvised their own safety gear, Dr. Hendricks found his offer stalled. Many of the volunteers were told to prioritize tips from political allies and associates of President Trump, tracked on a spreadsheet called “V.I.P. Update,” according to documents and emails obtained by The New York Times.
It was this volunteer group that passed on the bogus offer by a Silicon Valley huckster that led New York to “[assume] Mr. Oren-Pines had been vetted and awarded him an eye-popping $69 million contract” for ventilators. No deliveries.
Remember the promise of drive-through testing?
Even as the volunteer group struggled to procure PPE, about 30 percent of “key supplies,” including masks, in the national stockpile of emergency medical equipment went toward standing up a separate Kushner-led effort to establish drive-through testing sites nationwide, according to a March internal planning document obtained by The Post and confirmed by one current and one former administration official. Kushner had originally promised thousands of testing sites, but only 78 materialized; the stockpile was used to supply 44 of those over five to 10 days, the document said [emphasis added].
If that’s the case, the stockpile was practically empty. I reported on those testing facilities. The numbers reported were … insignificant.
✅Whistleblower, take 2.
Dr. Rick Bright, former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), filed an 89-page complaint with the US Office of Special Counsel on Tuesday. According to his lawyers, he will testify before Congress next week.
He was pressured to invest in drugs and vaccines that lacked scientific merit, because the people selling them had friends in the Trump administration, up to and including the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. He was forced to transfer funds to acquire drugs for the Strategic National Stockpile, America’s most important reserve of lifesaving medications, based not on health needs but on “political connections and cronyism” …
And when the COVID-19 crisis erupted, he was pressured to approve a plan that would “flood” cities with unproven and untested doses of chloroquine drugs, from uninspected manufacturing plants in Asia. When his efforts to work through the system failed, he decided he had a “moral obligation to the American public” to ring the alarm about the plan, “which he believed constituted a substantial and specific danger to public health and safety.”
✅Common sense rules.
In California, federal court judge John Mendez has upheld the state order closing churches.
Mendez said state and local stay-at-home orders were a valid exercise of emergency police powers and didn’t violate the church’s constitutional rights. Mendez noted that the Supreme Court over 100 years ago upheld the government’s right to exercise police powers to promote public safety during a public health crisis.
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.
🌎 05 May
Globally: 3 517 345 cases (81 454 - new) with 243 401 deaths (3797 - new)
The Americas: 1 477 447 cases (43 691 - new) 79 590 deaths (1763 - new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 3,664,011 (3,584,118 - yesterday)
Total deaths: 257,288 (251,562 - yesterday)
Recovered: 1,199,389 (1,167,883 - yesterday)
🇺🇸 05 May
CDC: 1,171,510 (1,152,372) cases and 68,279 (67,546) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,204,475 (1,180,634) cases and 71,078 (68,934) deaths
State data*: 1,195,605 (1,173,257 ) identified cases and 65,307 (62,806) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 7,544,328 (7,285,17)
View infographic and data online: total cases and cases and deaths/100,000.
* 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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