COVID-19 day 138 : 📈 1,920,061 cases; 109,802 deaths : 06 June 2020
UPDATED: FL, NC and TX reveal three patterns but one conclusion: cases are increasing; the Friday jobs/unemployment report was wrong (overly sunny); blood type may be a factor in disease severity
It’s day 138 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Looking at this chart, is it any wonder that NC Governor Roy Cooper (D) is unwilling to let the Republican National Committee run a pretend-all-is-normal convention?
North Carolina is still in the early stages of the outbreak. There has been no peak-and-dip.
The week of 03 - 09 May: daily average, 407; total cases, 2,851
The week of 31 May - 06 June: daily average 993; total cases, 6,952
⛱ Many eyes are on Florida, which is experiencing a (predictable) rebound. The average daily number of cases is high and growing. As mentioned yesterday, the third largest number of cases was announced Thursday, two months after numbers one and two.
The week of 03 - 09 May: daily average, 648; total cases, 4,538
The week of 31 May - 06 June: daily average 1,048; total cases, 7,334
🥩 Turn to Texas, where Governor Greg Abbott continued to open the state on Wednesday and shared disinformation about hospitalizations. Accurate, not truthful (emphasis added).
“Today Texas had the fewest #COVID19 hospitalizations in the past 6 weeks,” he said in a tweet that has since been shared more than 5,000 times and liked by 26,000 user accounts.
The reference ignored the fact that statewide hospitalizations have been rising over the past week, and on Friday reached the second-highest total since the pandemic began.
Why might hospitalizations be rising? Just look at the chart. Note that the week with a dip was the week of Memorial Day, with reduced testing due to the holiday.
Three different patterns: one inescapable conclusion: the virus is spreading.
🦠Saturday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,920,061 (1,897,838) cases and 109,802 (109,143) deaths, an increase of 1.21% (1.32%) and 0.61% (0.85%), respectively, since Friday (Thursday). A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 1.38% and 0.94%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 21,755 (21,953 ) cases and 1,296 (1,361) deaths
Percent of cases leading to death: 5.72% (5.75%).
Today’s case rate is 580.07 per 100,000; the death rate, 33.17 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 534.79 per 100,000; the death rate, 31.35 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 journalist on COVID-19, make it Ed Yong.
When I spoke with LeClerc on day 66, she was still experiencing waves of symptoms. “Before this, I was a fit, healthy 32-year-old,” she said. “Now I’ve been reduced to not being able to stand up in the shower without feeling fatigued. I’ve tried going to the supermarket and I’m in bed for days afterwards. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.” Despite her best efforts, LeClerc has not been able to get a test, but “every doctor I’ve spoken to says there’s no shadow of a doubt that this has been COVID,” she said. Today is day 80.
COVID-19 Can Last for Several Months. The Atlantic, 04 June 2020.
Ed provided additional resources for those interested in the issues in this essay.
🔬 Research and medical news
New research suggests that having Type A blood is a risk factor for the seriousness of a COVID-19 infection; prior research from China had also implicated Type A blood. European researchers compared blood samples from 1,610 patients who needed an oxygen supply or had to go on a ventilator with 2,205 blood donors who showed no evidence of Covid-19.
Having Type A blood was linked to a 50 percent increase in the likelihood that a patient would need to get oxygen or to go on a ventilator…
[Andre Franke, a molecular geneticist at the University of Kiel in Germany], also noted that the locus where the blood-type gene is situated also contains a stretch of DNA that acts as an on-off switch for a gene producing a protein that triggers strong immune responses.
Genes May Leave Some People More Vulnerable to Severe Covid-19. New York Times, 03 June 2020.
The ABO blood group locus and a chromosome 3 gene cluster associate with SARS-CoV-2 respiratory failure in an Italian-Spanish genome-wide association analysis. medRxiv, 02 June 2020. Pre-print.
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 the pandemic continues, the first tropical storm of the season heads for New Orleans.
⓶ Around the world
Wondering how track-contact-quarantine works?
Leonhard’s job is to call people who have tested positive — and all those they have recently come into contact with — to tell them to self-isolate for a fortnight. It’s not much fun. A lot of people are scared and confused when he breaks the news…
Combined with its six-week shutdown, Germany’s “track and trace” system has been instrumental in stalling the spread of Covid-19 and preventing it from overwhelming the health system.
How Germany got coronavirus right | Free to read. Financial Times. 03 June 2020
🆘 South America remains troubled, as does Sweden.
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
Important thread (and story) on tear gas from environment reporter Lisa Song at ProPublica. Reminder: tear gas is banned in international warfare. But cops use it across the country with what seems like little provocation.
❌ You may have read the glowing stenographic reports on unemployment data this week. Both the people touting the gain and the people who are supposed to read fine print lied to you, one intentionally, the other through oversight.
Here are two Washington Post reporters, who, like everyone else, didn’t read the endnote before writing:
The federal unemployment rate dropped in May for the first time since the coronavirus sent the economy into a tailspin, the strongest sign yet that the economic damage is bottoming out — although 21 million people remain out of work.
This is at the very bottom of the news release
As was the case in March and April, household survey interviewers were instructed to classify employed persons absent from work due to coronavirus-related business closures as unemployed on temporary layoff. However, it is apparent that not all such workers were so classified...
If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to "other reasons" (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical May) had been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally adjusted basis).What the employment situation looks like, recognizing that the “recovery” in May is exaggerated:
⓸ Case count
There is a lag between being contagious and showing symptoms, between having a test and getting its results. There is also a lag in reports of cases and deaths making their way into daily results; this lag is visible in predictable declines for both in weekend reports.
🌎 06 June
Globally: 6 663 304 cases (127 950) 392 802 deaths (5 647)
The Americas: 3 155 370 cases (70 853) 176 167 deaths (3 891)
US: 1 857 872 cases (20 069 new) with 107 911 deaths (1 035 new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 6,897,225 (6,740,361)
Total deaths: 399,789 (394,984)
Recovered: 3,087,381 (2,748,553)
🇺🇸 06 June
CDC: 1,891,690 (29,034 new) cases and 109,192 (1,128 new) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,920,061 (1,897,838) cases and 109,802 (109,143) deaths
State data*: 1,916,525 (1,892,832) identified cases and 103,954 (103,201) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 19,778,873 (19,231,444)
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
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.
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