COVID-19 day 73 : 📈 245,559 cases; 6,057 deaths : 02 April 2020
Global numbers pass 1 million; China declares a national day of mourning; medical military ships as pandemic theatre; 1-in-3 tests may throw a false negative
It’s day 73 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Identified cases of COVID-19 in the United States approach 250,000, and our rolling daily case average is the steepest and highest of any nation so far (Financial Times chat).
Global cases slipped past 1 million. Italy has plateaued (its curve has flattened), and Spain appears on track to flatten, too. That leaves the UK and the US on a straight trajectory. A reminder that the United States is the third most populous country (331,003,000) in the world. And that both countries tacitly embraced hands-off policy initially.
Thursday, Johns Hopkins reported 245,559 (216,721) cases and 6,057 (5,138) deaths in the US, an increase of 13.3 percent and 17.9 percent, respectively, since Wednesday.
Our case rate is 74 per 100,000; the death rate is 18.3 per million.
As China prepares to lift quarantine on Wuhan and its environs, Wang Zhonglin, the city’s Communist Party, said a high risk of a resurgence means life is not ready to return to normal.
Wuhan, for example, reported 35 new asymptomatic cases on Wednesday and has a total of 678 people infected with the coronavirus but not exhibiting symptoms under medical observation.
Beijing has not lifted its ban on foreigners entering the country.
China will hold a national day of mourning on Saturday to honor those who have died from coronavirus disease.
Saturday is also Tomb-Sweeping Day in China, but the centuries-long ritual of honoring ancestors has been disrupted by coronavirus and rescued, at least in part, by digital communication.
… few will be tending to graves this year, despite many recent coronavirus fatalities. Thousands of families, especially those in the outbreak’s epicenter of Wuhan, have been unable to bury their dead [emphasis added].
🤓Recommended reading
How epidemiologists rushed to model the coronavirus pandemic. Nature, 02 April 2020
Right answers are not what epidemiological models are for. The Atlantic, 02 April 2020.
Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model. FiveThirtyEight, 31 March 2020How sewage could reveal true scale of coronavirus outbreak. Nature, 03 April 2020.
Photos: The Volunteers. The Atlantic, 02 April 2020.
💃🏼Life hack
Need computer help from a not-so-nearby friend? Windows 10 devices are equipped with Quick Assist, which lets your friend help with the problem, no matter where you are located. An older tool, Windows Remote Assistance, is available for Windows 7, 8, and 10.
Mac users can provide remote help using the Messages app, which requires that both people be logged in with their Apple IDs. Or you can use the built-in screen share function.
Around the country
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have identified COVID-19 cases. The only state with no reported deaths is Wyoming.
A record 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, dwarfing the prior week’s filings.
Why Louisiana, and other deep south states, are at risk:
Tricia Neuman, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation, says this analysis points to the underlying issues that might complicate or worsen the pandemic in the South. “Due to high rates of conditions like lung disease and heart disease and obesity, the people living in these states are at risk if they get the virus,” Neuman told me. These aren’t “people who are sick, but these are people who have underlying comorbidities that put them at higher risk of serious illness if they get infected.”
The head of the New Orleans Health Department put the 115 deaths in Orleans Parish in context: it’s about the same as all homicides in 2019, but over a couple of weeks instead of 12 months.
Grim news out of New York City:
Across the city, hospitals are overrun. Patients have died in hallways before they could even be hooked up to one of the few available ventilators in New York. Doctors and nurses, who have had to use the same protective gear again and again, are getting sick. So many people are dying that the city is running low on body bags.
In San Jose, a company that makes fuel cells has now repaired 500 ventilators.
It’s a transformation akin to World War II, when manufacturing behemoths used their assembly line expertise to make airplanes and tanks. Now, some companies are tapping their storehouses of brainpower to do the same thing with medical equipment.
Shelter in place
The largest state without a “stay home” order is Texas, the second largest state in the country (29 million people). FEMA transferred $1.6 billion in taxpayer dollars to individual and households in Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey. Much of the damage to property came about because the state has lax-to-zero land use regulations. The longer Texas waits, the more the rest of us will bear the burden of their delay with this crisis, too.
When Georgia governor Brian Kemp said he would issue an order Thursday calling for state-wide sheltering in place to begin Friday, he said he was only now “finding out that this virus is now transmitting before people see signs.” If that’s true, he’s been living in a Faraday cage. Or he thinks there’s an Olympic medal for willful ignorance.
🌸Honoring Ellis Marsalis, patriarch of the Marsalis family (1935-2020)
Around the world
The number of affected countries/territories/areas jumped from 29 at the end of February to 201 yesterday (no additions today). Although early reports tied the outbreak to a seafood (“wet”) market in Wuhan, China, analyses of genomic data suggest that the virus may have developed elsewhere.
Globally, 10 nations have recorded more than 1,000 deaths attributable to COVID-19, but the death tolls in Italy (13,915) and China (3,326) are probably underreported due to the chaotic state of medical care at the height of the crisis.
It’s shortsighted to focus on absolute numbers, however. My home town in southwest Georgia has only 35 reported deaths today, but its per capita death rate is the same as Italy’s (205 per million), and its per capita case rate (442 per 100,000) is double Spain’s (205 per 100,000).
Politics, economics and COVID-19
Over the weekend, President Trump broke quarantine for a photo opp: seeing USNS Comfort set off on its mission to help the overloaded medical system in New York. Its goal: to treat anyone except COVID-19 patients. Hope is exceeding that promise of its name.
On Thursday, though, the huge white vessel, which officials had promised would bring succor to a city on the brink, sat mostly empty, infuriating executives at local hospitals. The ship’s 1,000 beds are largely unused, its 1,200-member crew mostly idle…
The ship has struggled to fulfill civilian missions in the past. After Hurricane Maria pummeled Puerto Rico in 2017, the Comfort was sent to relieve overextended hospitals, but ended up treating only a handful of patients each day.
A military physician who had previously served on the Navy’s hospital ships said in an interview that conditions on board were suitable for soldiers, but, with its narrow bunked cots instead of modern hospital beds, it was not ideal for treating civilians.
If you’ve seen any numbers run on the cost of this mission, please share.
Testing. Widely accepted as the nation’s Achilles heel as we attempt to navigate the pandemic. The US has struggled to distribute tests. Patients who are “assumed” positive have no test record (CDC recommendation), thus understating the extent of the outbreak. Labs lag in returning results.
Yet experts repeatedly explain that widespread testing is critical to determining how many people have been infected, how the virus is spreading and how it might be contained.
Thus it is disconcerting to learn that “nearly one in three coronavirus tests may be giving false negative results.” Another report, by Andy Slavitt, former head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimates the false negative rate at about one-in-four. Neither stat feels comforting.
The San Jose Mercury News explored challenges presented by false negatives in mid-March. Perhaps test reliability is why Chinese and Japanese officials require two or three negative tests in a succession before a patient can be released from quarantine.
These numbers are abysmal.
The FDA, in acknowledging a shortage of blood donations due to coronavirus, has relaxed its ban on blood donations from gay men and well as other restrictions on donors such as tattoos, piercings, travel and sexual practices.
In 1983, the FDA implemented a lifetime ban on blood donations from gay and bisexual men amid fears in the early days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. During the Obama administration in 2015, that policy was eased to a ban on donations from men who’ve had sex with men in the past year — but restrictions nonetheless remained in place.
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.
🌎 02 April
Globally: 896 450 confirmed (72 839) 45 525 deaths (4923)
The Americas: 216 912 confirmed (28161) 4565 deaths (1165)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 1,016,401
Total deaths: 53,160
Total recovered: 211,775
🇺🇸 02 April
CDC: 213,144 (186,101) cases and 4,513 (3,603) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 245,559 (216,721) cases and 6,057 (5,138) deaths
State data*: 241,734 (212,695) identified cases and 5,862 (4,774) deaths
View infographic and data online: total cases, cases/100,000 and deaths/million.
* Johns Hopkins data, 11 pm Pacific.
State data include DC, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands
See US (state/territory) total cases, cases/100,000 and deaths/million as infographics.
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 Daily Memo :: Daily Memo archives
🦠 COVID-19 @ WiredPen.com