COVID-19 day 118 : 📈 1,486,757 cases; 89,562 deaths : 17 May 2020

Japan enters recession; WHO meets Monday, US is expected to demand it investigate China's role in the virus; US death rate continues very slow decline; the flood of disinformation

May 18, 2020

It’s day 118 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is the master of understatement. And also handwaving:

“Assuming there’s not a second wave of the coronavirus, I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year,” the U.S. central bank chief said in an excerpt of an interview conducted Wednesday and aired on Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation” show.

Is there any epidemiologist or virologist suggesting that we will not have a “second wave” of this virus? No. And it’s not a precise term.

In an email to DW, WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier said the "second wave" is not a fixed technical term. "The term [only] refers to renewed outbreaks after an initial reduction in cases. Hence, the same applies for a 'third' wave."

The Atlantic points out that “resurgence” isn’t the only “second wave” concern.

‼️It was a frustrating weekend as far as news media and COVID-19 are concerned. I use Memeorandum to stay on top of the political news that’s getting chatter. Which is how I found this:

⚡️Kathy E Gill | Staying at home @kegill

With this headline and framing, the NYPost equates coronavirus virus with “the flu.” Again. The virus H3N2 is not in the same family as SARS-CoV-2, @ericspitznagel Flu != coronavirus which seems to have as many neurological issues as breathing ones

To say that the NY Post article is a mess is an understatement. Can I count the ways?

H3N2 - third flu pandemic in 20th century; vaccine
Woodstock was not in the middle of the pandemic except in a technical, calendar-year basis (accurate but not truthful)
The framing came from an essay at the American Institute of Economic Research, a right-leaning advocacy group. The reporter “interviews” that author but doesn’t note the similarities (including an attention-grabbing Woodstock-and-mud photo).
⚡️Kathy E Gill | Staying at home @kegill
NYP: “H3N2 has so far proved deadlier than COVID-19.” BULLSHIT In US, the H3N2 pandemic resulted in an estimated 100,000 deaths. Over TWO YEARS. We’re at ~90k deaths in three months with active interventions.
12:07 AM ∙ May 17, 2020

Sunday, wild information about the virus and its origin flooded my Twitter feed. So I went into detective mode. Again.

⚡️Kathy E Gill | Staying at home @kegill

LEDE is built on a sentence based on an April OP ED in the Washington Post. GDI. Did you even look for the source of the cherry-picked inflammatory statement, @JasonLemon. Where was the copy editor, @Newsweek? EVEN THE AUTHORS of the paper point to caution:

This two-week old pre-print went viral after a story ran in the Daily Mail followed by this one in Newsweek. The timing is suspect, given a major WHO meeting on Monday (see below).

🦠Sunday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,486,757 (1,467,884) cases and 89,562 (88,754) deaths in the US, an increase of 1.29% and 0.91%, respectively, since Saturday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 1.55% and 0.93%, respectively.

The seven-day average: 22,423 (22,620) cases and 1,433 (1,423) deaths
Percent of cases leading to death: 6.02% (6.07%).
Today’s case rate is 449.17 per 100,000; the death rate, 27.06 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 401.75 per 100,000; the death rate, 24.03 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

New York Magazine examined the differences in COVID-19 response in Seattle and New York City earlier this month. Now Politico compares New York and California.

ProPublica @propublica

California’s governor and San Francisco’s mayor worked together to act early in confronting the COVID threat. For Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, it was a different story, and 27,000 New Yorkers have died so far.

propub.liTwo Coasts. One Virus. How New York Suffered Nearly 10 Times the Number of Deaths as California.California’s governor and San Francisco’s mayor worked together to act early in confronting the COVID threat. For Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, it was a different story, and 27,000 New Yorkers have died so far.

📣 Disinformation and misinformation aren’t new. But they can be deadly. One of these three researchers is in my backyard: Kate Starbird. I like to think if I were her age, I’d be doing similar work. But I would not have played professional basketball first!

Brandy Zadrozny @BrandyZadrozny

Someone once told me that eventually there would be full accounting of this moment and all the most important disinformation research done to understand it. On that day, we’ll be standing in a room of full of women. I talked to three of the best.

nbcnews.comThey’re on the misinformation front line. Here’s what they predict about the virus.Joan Donovan, Claire Wardle and Kate Starbird have been preparing for this moment for a decade.

🔬 Research and medical news

That rare childhood disease associated with COVID-19 now has a name: multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C).

Chilling case study of a 12-year-old girl in Louisiana who was healthy, until she wasn’t. Her heart stopped twice, her organs were shutting down.

Then on April 15, almost as suddenly as she had been admitted nine days before, doctors told Juliet she was well enough to go home.

😎 Brighten your day

Time for smiles again from Adrian Grimes (and band).

Rock and Roll in Lockdown (Led Zeppelin coronavirus parody)

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

⓵ Around the country

❌ Remember the controversial Stanford study (Santa Clara County) that argued that COVID-19 wasn’t really any more risky than the flu because so many more people had antibodies than we realized? After it went live on a “pre-print” server…

Within hours, the paper had been leveraged by conservative commentators and activists on social media, forged into ammunition to support the protests against lockdowns and other social mitigation efforts meant to contain the coronavirus and minimize deaths. The right-wing, prospecting for proof that the severity of the pandemic was overblown, had found their science, plain as day…
There were at least 480 comments posted on the first version of the study that went online. The very first one raised doubts about the researchers’ methodology. It was posted by one of the study’s participants.

The paper was ripped apart during public peer-review.

The tests are known to generate false positives up to 1.7 percent of the time. Given that the Stanford study originally identified 1.5 percent of its participants as having the antibody, critics pointed out that in theory, every single one might have been a false positive. The tests are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and a subcommittee in the House of Representatives opened an investigation into four vendors of antibody tests, including Premier Biotech, the maker of the tests used in the Stanford study.

Now there’s more information which should relegate all whose names are on the paper into permanent infamy. A whistleblower complaint:

A highly influential coronavirus antibody study was funded in part by David Neeleman, the JetBlue Airways founder and a vocal proponent of the idea that the pandemic isn’t deadly enough to justify continued lockdowns.

✅ The trend in deaths is down from its peak seven-day average on 21 April (2,070). What to make of the increasing huge swings in any seven-day period (higher highs, lower lows)? Is that simply an artifact of reporting? [The chart is interactive on Flourish.]

✅ If you’re interested in what’s happening in the middle-Atlantic region (Delaware, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia) the Philadelphia Inquirer has the visualization for you.

⓶ Around the world

Reported cases are increasing rapidly in Brazil, India, Peru and Russia.

⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19

❌ Japan is the first country to officially enter a recession this year; it is the third largest world economy (following the US and China). Japan’s economy shrank at an annualized rate of 3.4% in the first quarter.

Japan now meets the technical definition of a recession of at least two consecutive quarters of negative GDP -- following a 7.3 percent slump during October-December -- for the first time since the fourth quarter in 2015…
Yasutoshi Nishimura, minister in charge of economic and fiscal policy, told a press conference that GDP in the April-June period will “get more serious” than the January-March figure, and the economy will “slow down to a considerable extent for the time being.”

❌ Whether it is a calculated distraction or an exercise in pettiness, when the WHO meets Monday with all 194 member, “a key question will be whether the United States and other countries will call” for an investigation into any possible role China might have had in the coronavirus outbreak.

Certainly makes one wonder about the timing of the weekend’s incendiary pieces in Newsweek and the Daily Mail.

Also, Trump is leaning towards giving WHO none of its Congressionally allocated funding.