COVID-19 day 176: 📈 3,431,574 (68,518 new) cases and 136,466 (861 new) deaths: 14 July 2020

White House campaign against Dr. Anthony Fauci picks up; trade advisor Peter Navarro attacked Fauci in a USA Today op-ed published online late Tuesday; JAMA endorses universal masks

It’s day 176 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Subtitle today: the mask issue.

We need a new word for “unprecedented” because it seems as though it has been an appropriate adjective for something every day during the past six months. This time: the White House attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci suggest Wednesday’s news cycle will again be dominated by personal vendettas.

Sections (no jump links, sorry!)
1, One big thing; 2, Key metrics; 3, Recommendations; 4, Politics, economics & COVID; 5, Case counts and resources

⓵ One big thing: Fauci

Monday’s news cycle was dominated by the White House circulating what political insiders called “opposition research” critical of Fauci.

In response, the editor in chief of JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association, published an open letter supporting Fauci on Tuesday morning. In that open letter, he called for Americans to “wash your hands… wear your masks and …. show respect for Dr. Anthony Fauci and his many colleagues at the NIH, CDC… who are our best hope in these challenging times.”

At 6:45 pm Eastern, USA Today published an op-ed from White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, attacking Fauci. For a fact-check of Navarro’s op-ed, just read this annotated review of Monday’s White House memo; the claims are recycled.

In case you’ve forgotten, Navarro tangled with Fauci (and other public health experts) in April over hydroxychloroquine.

From the 05 April issue (day 76):

On 28 March, FDA issued an emergency order allowing physicians to prescribe chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, a “highly unusual guidance.”

[…]

Economic adviser Peter Navarro “is convinced based on his reading that the drug works against the coronavirus and speaks about it enthusiastically.” Yet “[m]ost members of the task force support a cautious approach to discussing the drug until it's proven.”

And in January, Navarro predicted mass deaths; from 06 April (day 77):

White House economic adviser Peter Navarro has sent two memos warning colleagues about the risk of COVID-19. In January, he estimated it could result in more than than half a million American lives and cost close to $6 trillion. By late February, in his second memo, he warned that 2 million might die.

Note that Navarro has an “anti-China agenda.”

In the midst of the attacks on Fauci, the White House has accelerated its attempt to control COVID-19 related date. In April, they hired TeleTracking on a no-bid contract to build a hospital reporting system parallel to that of the CDC.

Today, the White House ordered hospitals to bypass the CDC and instead send data only to their proprietary system.

From now on, H.H.S., and not the C.D.C., will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, how many beds and ventilators are available, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

These actions are unprecedented.

⓶ Key metrics

🦠 Tuesday, Johns Hopkins reported 3,431,574 (68,518 new) cases and 136,466 (861 new) deaths, an increase of 2.04% and 0.63%, respectively, since Monday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 2.04% and 0.90%, respectively.

• Today
  - seven-day average: 61,937 cases and 770 deaths 
  - 3.98% cases leading to death
  - case rate, 1036.72 per 100,000; death rate, 41.23 per 100,000

• One week ago
  - seven-day average: 50,693 cases and 778 deaths
  - 4.39% cases leading to death
  - case rate, 905.16 per 100,000; death rate, 39.72 per 100,000

Note: the seven-day average is important because dailies vary due to factors other than actual case numbers, particularly over a weekend.

⓷ Recommendations

🤓 Recommended reading

The United States could get the spread of the novel coronavirus “under control” within a matter of weeks if everyone wore face coverings, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield said Tuesday.

Coronavirus could be ‘under control’ in weeks if everyone wore masks, CDC director says. Washington Post, 14 July 2020.

“This anti-mask rhetoric is mind-blowing, dangerous, deadly and polarizing,” said Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine and an infectious diseases specialist at UC San Francisco. “There is no evidence that it is dangerous.”

Masks offer much more protection against coronavirus than many think. LA Times, 14 July 2020.

The agency has no experience with responding to this level of political attack, agreed former CDC Director Tom Frieden, now leader of an initiative to prevent epidemics and cardiovascular disease.

“I don’t know of any precedent for what’s happening,” he told STAT in an interview. “The key to having an effective public health agency is that it is close enough to the rest of the government for its advice to be trusted and listened to, but far enough [away] for the public to trust that it’s valid, and for 74 years the CDC has had that role. It’s an extraordinary time right now that it doesn’t.”

The CDC has always been an apolitical island. That’s left it defenseless against Trump. STAT News, 13 July 2020.

🔬 Research and medical news

In the absence of such data, it has been persuasively argued the precautionary principle be applied to promote community masking because there is little to lose and potentially much to be gained. In this regard, the report by Wang et al provides practical, timely, and compelling evidence that community-wide face covering is another means to help control the national COVID-19 crisis.

Universal Masking to Prevent SARS-CoV-2 Transmission—The Time Is Now. JAMA, 14 July 2020.

⓸ Politics, economics and COVID-19

‼️In Michigan, a 77 year-old man and a 43 year-old state employee argued about wearing masks. The younger man reportedly stabbed the older man and fled. When confronted by a member of the sheriff’s department, the suspect exited his car with what appeared to be two knives in one hand. He approached the deputy, who shot him. He died at the hospital.

⛱ Florida reported a record number of deaths Tuesday, 132. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) met with local leaders in the Miami area.

At a meeting where DeSantis touted the promise of high school football in the fall and minimized the COVID risk for children, mayors told him Miami-Dade families were scared about putting their kids back in the classroom.

“There is a significant amount of pressure, right now, for us to shut down at some level,” Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) said. 

🇬🇧In Britain, masks are now required in all shops; a shopper could be fined $125 for failure to wear a mask.

The majority of Brits haven’t been inclined to take up mask wearing of their own initiative. The resistance is perhaps surprisingly high for a country with the highest death toll in Europe.

CDC, Johns Hopkins, states, WHO

🇺🇸 14 July 

• CDC: 3,355,457 (58,858 new) cases and 135,235 (351 new) deaths

• Johns Hopkins*: 3,431,574 (68,518 new) cases and 136,466 (861 new) deaths

• State data*:  3,414,304 (62,398 new) cases and 128,750 (773 new) deaths
  KS reports only M-W-F; CT and RI report only M-F

• WHO Situation report, 176
  3 286 063 cases (60 113 new) with 134 704 deaths (312 new)

🌎 14 July 

Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)

• Global cases: 13,323,530 (220,240 new)

• Total deaths: 578,628 (5,586 new)

WHO Situation report, 176

• Global: 12 964 809 cases (196 775 new) with 570 288 deaths (3 634 new)

• The Americas: 6 780 428 cases (110 549 new) with 288 430 deaths (1 853 new)

* 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 market in Wuhan, China, analyses of genomic data in January suggested that the virus might have developed elsewhere.

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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