COVID-19 day 140 : 📈 1,961,185 cases; 111,007 deaths : 08 June 2020
Globally, cases pass 7 million and deaths, 400,000; nursing homes seek immunity from lawsuits although more than 30,000 have died; dogs may be able to screen people for COVID-19
It’s day 140 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States.
Globally, we passed another psychological barrier today: more than 7 million cases and more than 400,000 deaths. It took nine days for cases to move from 6 million to 7 million, just as it did to move from 5 million to 6 million. Ten countries account for 67% of the cases.
The US still accounts for 28% of the cases and 27% of the deaths. However, the rate of spread has slowed here, whereas it is spreading rapidly through Brazil, the fourth largest nation. India, the second most populous nation, now ranks fifth in cases, behind the US, Brazil, Russia, and the UK. China is a distant 18th.
The next five: Spain, Italy, Peru, France and Germany.
The U.S. will probably pass 2 million cases on Wednesday.
Two research studies published in Nature on Monday detailed the lives saved due to the unprecedented global response to COVID-19.
An additional 200,000 to 300,000 people in the U.S. would have died from COVID-19 had states failed to implement mitigation strategies, according to a Berkeley study. The second paper, from Imperial College London, estimates that shutdowns in 11 European nations saved more than 3 million lives. Researchers used different methods to reach similar conclusions.
The Berkeley team analyzed data from China, France, Italy, Iran, South Korea, and the U.S. Their estimate: interventions in these six countries prevented about 530 million infections.
“Without these policies employed, we would have lived through a very different April and May,” said Solomon Hsiang, director of the Global Policy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley… His team estimated that, in the initial days after the virus was seeded in each country, and before the shutdowns, the number of infections was doubling every two days…
"Societies around the world are weighing whether the health benefits of anti-contagion policies are worth their social and economic costs," the Berkeley team wrote. The economic costs of shutdowns are highly visible - closed stores, huge job losses, empty streets, food lines. The health benefits of the shutdowns, however, are invisible, because they involve "infections that never occurred and deaths that did not happen," Hsiang said.
Estimating the effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions on COVID-19 in Europe. Nature. 08 June 2020.
The effect of large-scale anti-contagion policies on the COVID-19 pandemic. Nature. 08 June 2020.
Lead quote: Washington Post
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🦠Monday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,961,185 (1,942,363) cases and 111,007 (110,514) deaths, an increase of 0.95% (1.16%) and 0.43% (0.65%), respectively, since Sunday (Saturday). A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 1.18% and 1.33%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 21,338 (21,525) cases and 1,126 (1,264) deaths
Percent of cases leading to death: 5.66% (5.69%).
Today’s case rate is 592.41 per 100,000; the death rate, 33.53 per 100,000.
One week ago, the case rate was 547.23 per 100,000; the death rate, 31.77 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
One long, important read:
Americans may wish the virus to be gone, but it is not. While the outbreak has eased in the Northeast, driving down the overall national numbers, cases have only plateaued in the rest of the country…
But as the pandemic persists, more and more states are pulling back on the measures they’d instituted to slow the virus. The Trump administration’s Coronavirus Task Force is winding down its activities. Its testing czar is returning to his day job at the Department of Health and Human Services. As the long, hot summer of 2020 begins, the facts suggest that the U.S. is not going to beat the coronavirus. Collectively, we slowly seem to be giving up. It is a bitter and unmistakably American cruelty that the people who might suffer most are also fighting for justice in a way that almost certainly increases their risk of being infected…
Americans have not fully grasped that we are not doing what countries that have returned to normal have done…
There is no justice in who can breathe easy and who can’t breathe at all.
America Is Giving Up on the Pandemic. The Atlantic, 07 June 2020.
🔬 Research and medical news
✅ NY Times reporters asked 511 epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists when they expected to resume 20 activities of daily life.
[U]nless there’s an effective vaccine or treatment first, it will be more than a year before many say they will be willing to go to concerts, sporting events or religious services. And some may never greet people with hugs or handshakes again…
They mostly agreed that outdoor activities and small groups were safer than being indoors or in a crowd, and that masks would be necessary for a long time.
When 511 Epidemiologists Expect to Fly, Hug and Do 18 Other Everyday Activities Again. NY Times, 08 March 2020.
✅ French scientists from the National Veterinary School took dogs that “were previously able to detect the odor of malaria with an accuracy level ‘above the World Health Organization standards for a diagnostic’” and trained them to detect COVID-19 using armpit odor samples. The success rate was between 83% and 100%. In addition to malaria, the dogs can recognize the scent of cancer and Parkinson's disease.
[Watch] Dogs Can Tell If You Have Coronavirus by Smelling Your Armpit: Here's the Breed That Does It Best. Science Times, 08 June 2020.
🎦 Recommended viewing
Wide-ranging discussion of the impact of COVID-19 on health care, the economy, race, politics, ethics and history, led by Bob Wachter, chair, University of California San Francisco Department of Medicine.
Changes that people have been trying to get done for 20 years happened in, you know, 30 days, under duress… I think four years from now, every doctor will be a hybrid doctor… To the extent that we get paid when people show up and don’t get paid when we talk with them on the phone will construct a system in which people show up. ~Mark Smith, MD, MBA
This YouTube embed should start at ~5 minutes after all the introductions, which you can read on ThreadReader.
This link starts at 0:00.
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
❌ More than 30,000 nursing home residents have died of COVID-19, which is at least 27% of all reported US deaths.
A Post analysis in April found that 40 percent of nursing homes with reported coronavirus cases had been cited more than once in recent years for violating federal standards meant to prevent the spread of infections. A report by the Government Accountability Office last month, which cites The Post’s analysis, found that 82 percent of homes had been cited over a five-year period for lapses in infection control and prevention.
About 20 states have given nursing homes broad immunity from lawsuits via emergency orders. This is wrong.
❌ According to research from The Guardian and Kaiser Health News, almost 600 front-line health care workers appear to have died of COVID-19.
The tally includes doctors, nurses and paramedics, as well as crucial health care support staff such as hospital janitors, administrators and nursing home workers, who have put their own lives at risk during the pandemic to help care for others.
⓶ Around the world
✅ New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the country has eradicated COVID-19 and will lift all social restrictions. The country is open for business, so to speak, but individuals who arrive from abroad will continue to be isolated and quarantined.
The latest announcement, which brings the country of 5 million to its lowest alert level, means that large public gatherings, such as concerts and sports events, will be allowed for the first time since March 23, when Ardern announced a nationwide lockdown amid a rising number of daily cases. Restaurants and public transport will also be allowed to resume normal operations.
✅ Sweden may have turned a corner. Last week, the country showed no excess mortality compared to a five-year average, the first time since the outbreak began.
⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
❌ In April, Congress told the CDC to report demographics related to COVID tests; it has not done so.
Speaking before the House Appropriations Committee, CDC Director Robert Redfield said, “I want to apologize for the inadequacy of our response.”
Finally, HHS is requiring laboratories to “include detailed demographic data when they report the results of coronavirus tests to the federal government, including the age, sex, race and ethnicity of the person tested.”
Ummm… the labs report to the states and to the feds? What?
❌ Most states continue to ignore CDC guidance on reporting COVID-19 cases and deaths, meaning that both case numbers and deaths are underreported.
Fewer than half the states are following federal recommendations to report probable novel coronavirus cases and deaths, marking what experts say is an unusual break with public health practices that leads to inconsistent data collection and undercounts of the disease’s impact.
A Washington Post review found that the states not disclosing probable cases and deaths include some of the largest: California, Florida, North Carolina and New York.
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 reports containing weekend data.
🌎 08 June
Globally: 6 931 000 cases (131 296 new) with 400 857 deaths (3 469 new)
The Americas: 3 311 387 cases (76 512 new) with 181 804 deaths (2 410 new)
US: 1 915 712 cases (28 918 new) with 109 746 deaths (708 new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 7,119,736 (7,007,948)
Total deaths: 406,542 (402,709)
Recovered: 3,293,975 (3,140,721)
🇺🇸 08 June
CDC: 1,938,823 (17,919 new) cases and 110,375 (474 new) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,961,185 (1,942,363) cases and 111,007 (110,514) deaths
State data*: 1,953,413 (1,936,185) identified cases and 105,046 (104,403) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 20,615,303 (20,235,678)
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
📊 Visualizations: US, World
🌐 Global news (at WiredPen)
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