COVID-19 day 128 : 📈 1,699,176 cases; 100,418 deaths : 27 May 2020
Depending on which data source you use, total US COVID-19 deaths may not have yet crossed the psychological barrier that is reported deaths greater than 100,000
It’s day 128 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. A numbers edition.
According to the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard managed by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering, reported deaths exceed 100,000.
However no official government source has yet met this threshold. Inexplicably, the data upon which all sources should rest - reports from state departments of health - presents the smallest number.
To give you an idea of the degree of variability that can be attributed to the data pipeline, here are the reported daily deaths for the sources I track daily:
Both the Johns Hopkins dashboard and the COVID Tracking Project database grew out of a need that was not being met by the CDC or any other federal agency. Daily CDC reports are only accessible day-of and by copying from a PDF.
🦠Wednesday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,699,176 (1,680,913) cases and 100,418 (98,913) deaths in the US, an increase of 1.10% and 1.52%, respectively, since Tuesday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 1.52% and 1.65%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 21,046 (21,764) cases and 997 (999) deaths
Percent of cases leading to death: 5.91% (5.88%).
Today’s case rate is 513.34 per 100,000; the death rate, 30.34 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 468.83 per 100,000; the death rate, 28.23 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
What if WA1, the first case identified in Washington on 21 January (and the first in the US) was not the source of COVID-19 community spread in Washington? Yesterday I shared Trevor Bedford’s rejection of his initial hypothesis about WA1. Today I’m encouraging you to read this research summary at STAT News.
Worobey and his co-authors estimated that the infection that started the Seattle area outbreak arrived in the country around Feb. 13, shortly after President Trump’s ban on travel from China went into effect on Feb. 2.
So when Bedford identified a high school student in late February, that case was assumed to be the first community spread. This research suggests that community spread may have begun six weeks sooner.
Think of the economic mayhem and lives that could have been saved had the federal government treated this like the risk that it was.
🔬 Research and medical news
After 42 US states and Washington, DC, issued stay-at-home orders in response to the rising death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, the overall community infection rate declined by about 58%, according to a new study in the American Journal of Infection Control.
The doubling rate dropped from every 5 or 6 days to every 14 days. That collective effort kept the entire health care system from falling to its knees, although that did happen in hot spots, both rural and. urban.
You can follow along as the researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore update their results daily at hpmcovidpolicy.org.
🆘 Most of us are realistic: we think a vaccine will be available no sooner than 2021. But a mortifyingly large percentage of us (even with the margin of error in the survey) do not understand how a vaccine works or the benefits to community (not just the individual). It’s an AP survey with a small sample (1,056) and large margin of error (+/- 4.2%). Read it for trends not to make pie charts in your head.
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
⓶ Around the world
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
Americans, as a public, generally agree about the civic virtue of wearing masks: When surveyed, pluralities have called the practice respectful to others and important for public health. The viral videos, however, suggest otherwise. They imply division. They suggest that America’s culture war will be fought even in the presence of consensus—that the war’s soldiers, indignant and defiant, will take even the most straightforward of medical advice and make a great show of refusing to comply with it. Masks serve to protect not their wearers but the people their wearers come in contact with; to put them on is to engage in a basic but highly visible act of altruism. That fact alone has led to accusations that mask-wearing is a form of virtue-signaling: a smug display of moral values. The refusal to wear masks, though, recorded and turned into shareable media, is evidence of the opposite: vice signaling (emphasis added).
I still want to believe this “vice signaling” or random acts of selfishness reflect the minority. A loud minority, perhaps, but a minority.
And yet when I talk with friends around the country, I hear tales of being one of a handful of people in a grocery store wearing a mask. Of children running through retail establishments, maskless. I recall my own outrage at a woman in Fred Meyer with five kids in tow, all maskless, in late April. Or early May. Time is squishy.
Masks are tools of public health. The nation is nearing a grim and gutting milestone: Almost 100,000 Americans have now been killed by a virus that is transmitted, in part, through human breath. But not only does the president still refuse to model the very simple behavior that could help curb transmission of the illness; he also mocks those who do as arbiters of political correctness. He implies that mask-wearing is best understood as an act of personal brand management—a show like any other. One more virtue signal. One more act of smug condescension. The logic of political correctness, as he sees it, leaves no room for good faith, no space for altruism. It’s PR, all the way down. Asked why he refused to wear a mask during a visit to a Ford plant earlier this month, the president explained: “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.”
Trump’s actions are loud, and the model he sets, selfish and antithetical to the public good. The outlook for November in the light of COVID-19, grim.
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.
🌎 27 May
Globally: 5 488 825 cases (84 314 new) with 349 095 deaths (5 581 new)
The Americas: 2 495 924 cases (41 472 new) with 145 810 deaths (2 071 new)
USA - 1 634 010 cases (15 253 new) with 97 529 deaths (620 new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 5,695,155 (5,593,148)
Total deaths: 355,688 (350,509)
Recovered: 2,351,177 (2,288,034)
🇺🇸 27 May
CDC: 1,678,843 (16,429 new) cases and 99,031 (770 new) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,699,176 (1,680,913) cases and 100,418 (98,913) deaths
State data*: (1,671,488) identified cases and xxx (93,098) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 15,192,481 (14,907,041)
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