COVID-19 day 126 : 📈 1,662,302 cases; 98,220 deaths : 25 May 2020
For the second day, reports of COVID-19 deaths are significantly below the seven-day average and daily reports for the past two weeks; Trump threatens to pull RNC from North Carolina
It’s day 126 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Although official data do not yet report 100,000 deaths - and politics plays into how deaths are counted - we can be reasonably certain that we passed that psychological threshold this weekend, probably on Memorial Day.
It’s the reporting that lags.
A few states did not update data today (shown with their per 100,000 population case rate).
Hawaii (45.4)
Kentucky (191.8)
Nebraska (627.3)
Washington (260.4)
Wyoming (144.8, no date so last update is unclear)
However, even the states that reported data posted numbers far below the rolling average:
For the second day in a row, reported deaths were significantly below the seven-day average: 500 versus 1,122
For the second day in a row, reported cases were also down (13% today) compared to the seven-day average: 19,056 versus 21,906
Once you remove the northeastern states that skew data (CT, MA, NJ, NY, RI), these are the top 10 states in terms of per capita cases:
District of Columbia (1,165.4)
Delaware (920.7)
Illinois (884.0)
Louisiana (813.3)
Maryland (779.9)
Nebraska (627.3)
Iowa (557.1)
Michigan (549.5)
Pennsylvania (532.6)
South Dakota (518.4 )
These are all greater than the US average of 502.2 cases per capita.
🦠Monday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,662,302 (1,643,246) cases and 98,220 (97,720) deaths in the US, an increase of 1.16% and 0.51%, respectively, since Sunday. A week ago, the reported numbers increased by 1.36% and 1.45%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 21,906 (23,341) new cases and 1,122 (1,165) new deaths
Percent of cases leading to death: 5.91% (5.95%).
Today’s case rate is 502.2 per 100,000; the death rate, 29.67 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 455.87 per 100,000; the death rate, 27.30 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
If you read only one essay this week, let it be this one.
That number—100,000 dead from the coronavirus—is hard to grasp. For those who have lost someone, the pandemic’s scope is not just a statistic; within the abstraction lies an intimately life-changing event. For the rest of us, it is a fact we must try to wrestle into perspective. One hundred thousand people is nearly the population of the city I now live in; it is a neighborhood’s worth of people in Brooklyn, my longtime home; it is perhaps 10 times the total number of people most of us will cross paths with in our entire lives. It is graveyard upon graveyard upon graveyard. It is mass burials at Hart Island, bodies stacked in refrigerated trucks outside hospitals and nursing homes. It is PTSD for the nurses and doctors in the hardest-hit areas. Mostly, it is the shocking echo that follows the loss of even one person: zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. A lament: O, O, O, O, O.
Grappling With a Terrible Milestone: One Hundred Thousand Dead. The Atlantic, 23 May 2020. Meghan O’Rourke is the author of The Long Goodbye.
Cooped up in large towns and cities, many people heading into their third month of quarantine have been trying to decide whether they should visit their favorite summer destinations this year. My answer is an unsatisfying maybe…
Provincetown has 3,000 year-round residents and a summer population often estimated at 10 times as much. The local health-care infrastructure is built more for the former than the latter. In the past few months, the debate about how to prepare for summer has been fierce.
I’m a Chef in a Seaside Town. I’m Not an Epidemiologist. Business owners like me face a summer of uncertainty, and I’m terrified. The Atlantic, 25 May 2020.
🔬 Research and medical news
On 9 March, a patient who had recently traveled to Europe and had symptoms of COVID-19 visited the emergency department of St Augustine’s, a private hospital in Durban, South Africa. Eight weeks later, 39 patients and 80 staff linked to the hospital had been infected, and 15 patients had died—fully half the death toll in KwaZulu-Natal province at that time.
Study tells ‘remarkable story’ about COVID-19’s deadly rampage through a South African hospital. Science, 25 May 2020.
💃🏼 Life hack
From Camping To Dining Out: Here's How Experts Rate The Risks Of 14 Summer Activities. NPR, 23 May 2020.
😎 Brighten your day
A 101-year-old World War II veteran and his 73-year-old daughter — who live at the same Maryland nursing home — were able to celebrate Memorial Day Weekend together after both beating the coronavirus.
101-year-old WWII vet, daughter beat coronavirus together at Maryland nursing home. New York Post, 24 May 2020.
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
As you can see from these charts, very few states have a downward trend in daily case numbers (per capita, logarithmic). States should have 14 days of downward trending case numbers before allowing more freedom for people to gather.
I will update these charts weekly. Given the photos from the weekend, many states should show an upward movement in cases in two weeks. If they do not, that will be a good sign, assuming testing is taking place.
Northeast
South
Midwest
West
⓶ Around the world
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
❌ It is not clear that President Trump has the authority (there are contracts) to pull the Republican National Convention out of North Carolina. He has threatened to do so unless the Governor (a Democrat) agrees to “a full-capacity gathering in August despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.” See North Carolina’s daily per capita cases in the chart above.
❌ The politics of how we (randomly, it seems) count COVID-19 deaths are laid out clearly in this op-ed in the NYTimes.
Though my mother almost certainly died of Covid (she met the clinical case definition), her death was, as far as I can tell, not counted — and certainly will not be counted if the White House gets its way. Unfortunately, counting Covid deaths and cases has been turned into a battle of semantics, chance, bureaucracy, politics and immediate circumstance, rather than science.
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.
🌎 25 May
Globally: 5 304 772 cases (100 264 new) with 342 029 deaths (4 342 new)
The Americas: 2 395 295 cases (57 171 new) with 141 472 deaths (3 356 new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 5,495,061 (5,410,439 )
Total deaths: 346,269 (345,104)
Recovered: 2,231,738 (2,169,00 )
🇺🇸 25 May
CDC: 1,637,456 (15,342 new) cases and 97,669 (620 new) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,662,302 (1,643,246) cases and 98,220 (97,720) deaths
State data*: 1,654,829 (1,636,233) identified cases and 92,464 (91,964) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 14,604,942 (14,163,915)
Take with a grain of salt. The CDC and at least 11 other states have begun combining the number of tests for active infections with the number of antibody tests, which boosts the total number of tests and thus drops the percentage who test positive.
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