COVID-19 day 120 : 📈 1,528,566 cases; 91,921 deaths : 19 May 2020
One big thing: buckle up, whack-a-mole is about to begin. Trump tweets demands to WHO; Brazil sets daily record; Florida GIS manager fired; why thermometers are MIA; are swimming pools open?
It’s day 120 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. On Wednesday, all 50 states will have begun the process of easing stay-at-home orders; the last holdout is Connecticut.
Some of us are more likely to abandon our homes than others. That Axios chart suggests that most of us are still a wee bit cautious, however.
Why do I call this next phase whack-a-mole? Because the virus hasn’t gone away, and it is still very active in a lot of states despite physical distancing. Without robust testing, contract tracing, and quarantine, we will see spikes and hot spots.
An early example of a hot spot: in early March, a rural Arkansas county of about 25,000 people had 35 of 92 church attendees test positive for COVID-19; three died. Another 26 cases in the community, including one death, were linked to the church outbreak.
That’s a death rate of 16 per 100,000. The current death rate for COVID-19 in the US is 28 per 100,000.
In mid-April, the Trump administration outlined a plan to relax physical distancing. One feature of that plan was states should exhibit a 14-day downward trend in infections.
States with cases steadily increasing (seven-day average, per capita, last 10 days):
Arkansas (100%), Michigan (20%), North Carolina (25%), North Dakota (35%), Texas (22%), Virginia (16%)
States with recent spikes:
Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, Wyoming
States with cases flat or slightly increasing/decreasing:
Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin
States with cases decreasing:
Colorado, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island
States where a single new case can be a spike:
Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Vermont
Although the federal government has announced another $10.25 billion to help states implement testing, money is insufficient when the physical media are unavailable to buy.
🦠Tuesday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,528,566 (1,508,957) cases and 91,921 (90,369) deaths in the US, an increase of 1.30% and 1.72%, respectively, since Monday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 1.64% and 2.11%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 22,657 (23,006) cases and 1,350 (1,362) deaths
Percent of cases leading to death: 6.01% (5.99%).
Today’s case rate is 461.80 per 100,000; the death rate, 27.77 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 413.88 per 100,000; the death rate, 24.89 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
[D]ata on excess deaths in the United States over the past several months suggest that COVID-19 deaths are probably being undercounted rather than overcounted.
How COVID-19 Deaths Are Counted. Assigning a cause of death is never straightforward, but data on excess deaths suggest coronavirus death tolls are likely an underestimate. Scientific American, 19 May 2020.
The leaders of Italy, France, Germany and Norway, together with the European commission and council, called earlier this month for any innovative tools, therapeutics or vaccines to be shared equally and fairly…
“The US, UK, Swiss and some others pushed against the WHO taking the lead in pushing for open licensing of patents and know-how for drugs and vaccines…
Oxfam’s health policy manager, Anna Marriott, said: “This week’s letter calling for a people’s vaccine, which was signed by more than 140 world leaders and experts, sets the bar for the scale of ambition we need to meet the challenge before us.
US and UK 'lead push against global patent pool for Covid-19 drugs'. The Guardian, 17 May 2020.
🔬 Research and medical news
If you have wondered why it’s hard to buy a thermometer, the Charlotte Observer has an answer.
🎦 Recommended viewing
The BBC has produced a six-minute video analyzing the lost six weeks, when COVID-19 circulated unchecked in the United States.
💃🏼 Life hack
What is the risk of visiting a swimming pool? The CDC has guidance on the use of public pools, hot tubs and water playgrounds (no date).
Arkansas will allow pools to open for Memorial Day weekend at 50% capacity (08 May). What’s open in Arkansas?
Boise ID will not open city pools this summer (06 May).
North Carolina may allow pools to open for Memorial Day weekend (07 May).
Riverside CA lifted its ban on community pools in April, but with only one swimmer at a time. New guidance (06 May) allows multiple swimmers who exercise physical distancing.
Texas allowed swimming pools to open on 08 May at 25% capacity but local governments can choose to override that ruling. What’s open in Texas?
What’s the rule where you live? Comment on this post, drop me an email, or talk with me on Twitter @kegill.
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
❌ In Texas, officials are co-mingling viral tests (does someone have an active infection) and antibody tests (has someone had an infection). coronavirus tests have been marked by false negatives, but the antibody tests have been particularly susceptible to false negatives.
“If antibody tests are included in here, we really need to know what proportion of those positive test results are antibodies, because it changes how we understand the timeline of infections,” said Rebecca Fischer, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Texas A&M School of Public Health…
Adding just the antibody test numbers and not the results inflates the state’s testing numbers and artificially lowers the infection rate, while grouping “presumed positive” cases from antibody tests with active positive cases from viral test totals conflates the two.
❌ Follow up from yesterday’s story about Florida, from the Tampa Bay Times:
Rebekah Jones, geographic information systems manager for the State of Florida Department of Health, was reassigned after objecting to data being deleted from the public record. Jones, 30, built Florida’s COVID-10 dashboard “from scratch.” (I can attest that building anything on ARCGIS is a non-trivial exercise.)
“Jones said Tuesday that she was offered a settlement and the option to resign in lieu of being fired, effective May 26.”
⓶ Around the world
✅ The US has agreed to Canada’s desire to extend the border closure to 21 June.
The ban, which prohibits discretionary travel like vacations and cross-border shopping without restricting trade, commerce and essential employees, was set to expire Thursday until the U.S. agreed to Canada’s request to extend it to June 21.
❌ Cases in South America are rising. Brazil is the world’s fourth most populous country (the US is third).
Brazil recorded 17,408 cases and 1,179 deaths on Tuesday, both records.
The US recorded 19,609 cases and 1,552 deaths, both down from peak levels in mid-April.
And as if an pandemic were not enough:
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
✅ None of the WHO’s 194 member states objected to an EU-crafted resolution (on behalf of 100 countries) which supports WHO leadership “and said there needed to be an investigation into the global response to the coronavirus pandemic.”
Using Twitter as his medium, on Monday Trump told WHO it had 30 days to “commit to major substantive improvements” or the US would permanently freeze funding and reconsider its membership.
❌ The United States is the third most populous country in the world, so it would be not be a surprise for it to lead the world in number of identified cases of COVID-19. That is not, however, how President Trump views the world.
"By the way," he told reporters, "you know when you say that we lead in cases, that's because we have more testing than anybody else."
"So when we have a lot of cases," he continued, "I don't look at that as a bad thing, I look at that as, in a certain respect, as being a good thing because it means our testing is much better."
What’s “news” is that the number one and number two countries have fewer cases that the United States. China took aggressive action to contain the virus; the virus began circulating rapidly in India only recently.
❌ Don’t believe every doctor you hear on TV.
Republican political operatives are recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.
The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy. A leaked recording of the hourlong call was provided to The Associated Press by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group.
Please take a moment and answer this short reader survey! ✅
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.
🌎 19 May
Globally: 4 731 458 cases (112 637 new) with 316 169 deaths (4322 new)
The Americas: 2 082 945 cases (65 134 new) with 124 668 deaths (3059 new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 4,900,356 (4,805,544 - yesterday)
Total deaths: 323,345 (318,596 - yesterday)
Recovered: 1,689,377 (1,787,595 - yesterday)
🇺🇸 19 May
CDC: 1,504,830 (24,481 new) cases and 90,340 (933) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,528,566 (1,508,957) cases and 91,921 (90,369) deaths
State data*: 1,520,778 (1,322,807) identified cases and 86,070 (84,640) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 12,233,987 (11,834,508)
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.
📝 Subscribe to Kathy’s COVID-19 Memo :: COVID-19 Memo archives
🦠 COVID-19 @ WiredPen.com
🌐 Global news
📊 Visualizations: US, World