COVID-19 day 110 : 📈 1,309,541 cases; 78,794 deaths : 09 May 2020
Two more White House officials, Anthony Fauci and CDC director, self-quarantine after contact with Pence staffer; SD governor demands Sioux lift COVID-19 checkpoints on tribal land
It’s day 110 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Globally, we have now passed 4 million confirmed cases (Johns Hopkins).
20 January: 280
25 January: 1,000
01 February: 10,000
06 March: 100,000
02 April: 1 million
15 April: 2 million
27 April: 3 million
09 May: 4 million
FDA Commissioner Hahn is being joined by CDC director Robert Redfield. Anthony Fauci has begun a "modified quarantine."
The most troubling story Friday centers on the District of Columbia, where the White House is on the verge of becoming a hot spot. Testing positive Wednesday: one of Trump’s valets. Testing positive Friday: Katie Miller, the vice president’s press secretary and the wife of Trump’s senior advisor for policy, Stephen Miller. According to severalnews reports, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn will self-quarantine for 14 days because of recent contact with Miller.
‼️ Broken record here: beware of headlines focused on a one-day jump in cases or deaths. I saw those headlines about Texas on Friday and Saturday. So I pulled data from the Covid Tracking Project; computed daily numbers from cumulative data (well, Excel did); then computed seven-day running averages (Excel, again). Popped over to Flourish.
What do you see?
I see irregularly reported data and a suggestion of a weekend pattern. A case curve that seems to be slightly trending up. There is no suggestion that the virus has been contained. Nor is there a suggestion that there is a dramatic jump. We’ll see what next weekend brings.
CovidActNow data do not make the case for opening.
Assuming current trends and interventions continue, Texas hospitals are unlikely to become overloaded in the next 3 months. However, any reopening should happen in a slow and phased fashion. If all restrictions were completely lifted today, hospitals would overload on June 4, 2020.
🦠Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,309,541 (1,283,929) cases and 78,794 (77,180) deaths in the US, an increase of 1.99% and 2.10%, respectively, since Friday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 2.65% and 2.02%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 25,612 (26,957) cases and 1,773 (1,730) deaths
That case rate is 395.63 per 100,000; the death rate, 23.80 per 100,000.
Percent of cases leading to death: 6.02%
One week ago, the case rate was 342.31 per 100,000; the death rate, 20.06 per 100,000.
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, particularly over a weekend.
🤓 Recommended reading
The White House and most Republicans seem to think that this crisis will be solved by loudly announcing the reopening of the economy. But this is a dangerous misunderstanding of what’s actually driving the recession: It’s the pandemic, stupid. The shutdowns themselves had “little or no impact on economic activity” according to an analysis by a team of economists at Harvard. Several papers now show that the decline in spending and employment in most cases occurred before states officially shut down their economy. Governments didn’t close state economies on their own, and they can’t open the economies on their own, either.
It’s the Pandemic, Stupid. The shutdowns aren’t what’s driving the worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression. The Atlantic, 08 May 2020.
🔬 Research and medical news
The role played by the federal government in developing remdesivir to combat coronaviruses has, in fact, involved various grants to universities, as well as contributions from government personnel at such agencies as the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, according to Knowledge Ecology International, an advocacy group that first disclosed these connections.
But while it remains unclear the extent to which federal funds contributed to the R&D, the patent is of particular interest because it is tangible evidence that government work yielded something of potential financial value to the company. Yet government employees are not listed as inventors, which one expert suggested should be corrected, especially in an era when federally financed research might be leveraged to collect royalties or, arguably, lower the price of medicines.
The U.S. government contributed research to a Gilead remdesivir patent — but didn’t get credit. STAT News, 08 May 2020.
🎦 Recommended viewing
There has not been enough written about the success story that is Vietnam: no deaths, the result of early action. Having SARS in 2003 and Swine flu in 2009 possibly helped encourage government investment in public health. It certainly colored their response to a threat.
“Countries that took early, aggressive action, using proven methods, have severely limited the virus. If you reduce it fast enough, you never reach the point of exponential growth.”
Vietnam and the Indian state of Kerala curbed covid-19 on the cheap. Their secret is quick and efficient public-health systems. The Economist, 09 May 2020.
💃🏼 Life hack
Check out CovidActNow for county-level assessments. Here’s Fulton County GA (Atlanta) compared to Dougherty County GA (state hotspot).
😎 Brighten your day
“Trends may come and trends may go … the beauty is still on duty. He’s here, from way down south … Little Richard, baby”. Whoopi Goldberg, introducing Little Richard at the 1994 President's Gala. #RIP
Sections (no jump links, sorry!)
1, Around the country; 2, Around the world; 3, Politics, economics and COVID-19;
4, Case count; 5, What you can do and resources
Please take a moment and answer this short reader survey! ✅
⓵ Around the country
❌ In South Dakota, the governor is facing off with the Sioux nation by demanding that the tribe remove COVID-19 checkpoints on tribal land. Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Chairman Harold Frazier responded to the governor with a statement:
“The English definition of consultation is ‘a meeting with an expert or professional, such as a medical doctor, in order to seek advice.’ In the Lakota language, wóglakA means ‘to speak about something.’ In meeting with county commissioners, municipal, South Dakota Department of Transportation, Public schools and Federal agencies we have met the definition of consultation in both of our languages.
“We have not stopped any state or commercial functions as you claim in your request.”
⓶ Around the world
❌ The US has no monopoly on the occasional scientist siding with the “opening is the least risky” argument in the face of the pandemic. In the UK, Dr. John Lee penned Ten reasons to end the lockdown, now, for The Spectator (established in 1828).
I’m hoping that Carl Bergstrom, evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington and author of Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, can carve out more time for a rebuttal. This was his quick response when I pinged him about the essay:
Carl was asked if he believed the other nine points. One word answer: no.
The essay reminded me of the controversial essay in STAT News that John P.A. Ioannidis wrote in March. That critique was handwringing along the lines of “we don’t have enough information to make a decision” and hinted at “I don’t believe the data that I’m seeing.”
In May, Ioannidis was a co-author on subsequently discredited analysis of antibodies in Santa Clara County.
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
“What I want to know is, where are the women?” asked Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) before walking out on an all-male opening panel in a 2012 congressional hearing on contraception coverage in Obamacare. "I look at this panel and I don't see one single individual representing the tens of millions of women across the country. . ."
Fast forward to 2020, and Maloney’s question still resonates. President Trump announced his “Opening Our Country Council” last week -- with 220 men and a paltry 20 women. Of the 16 Business and Industry categories ranging from Agriculture to Transportation (along with a single Thought Leader group tacked on), 41% have zero females. The largest roster (Health Care) has 27 men and 2 lone women.
Where are the women? Trump's "Opening the Country Council. Women’s Voices Media, 04 May 2020.
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 and the weight of evidence is it was not released intentionally. Although early reports tied the outbreak to a seafood (“wet”) market in Wuhan, China, analyses of genomic data in January suggested that the virus might have developed elsewhere.
🌎 09 May
Globally: 3 855 788 cases (95 845 - new ) with 265 862 deaths (6388 - new )
The Americas: 1 636 841 cases (50712 - new) with 91 893 deaths (3963 - new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.30 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 4,025,175 ( 3,939,281 - yesterday)
Total deaths: 279,329 ( 274,932 - yesterday)
Recovered: 1,376,025 ( 1,323,960 - yesterday)
🇺🇸 09 May
CDC: 1,274,036 (1,248,040) cases and 77,034 (75,477) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,309,541 (1,283,929) cases and 78,794 (77,180) deaths
State data*: 1,301,095 (1,275,916) identified cases and 73,291 (71,762) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 8,709,630 (8,408,788)
View infographic and data online: total cases and cases and deaths/100,000.
* Johns Hopkins data, ~11.30 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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