COVID-19 day 91 : 📈 787,901 cases; 42,364 deaths : 20 April 2020

"We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat."

Apr 21, 2020

It’s day 91 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. A team based at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has developed this global forecast, which shows very little “peak” in the Americas. Not enough yellow on this map; the dark blue is the storm..

An anonymous poem has taken the social web by storm as COVID-19 makes bright existing cracks in our social order.

I heard it said that we are all in the same boat, but it's not like that. We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat. Your ship could be shipwrecked and mine might not be. Or vice versa…

Read it in toto on Facebook or Twitter, on the Times of India or the Lake Powell Life. May we come through on the other side a more empathic and egalitarian society, not one that is further stratified.

My boat is a bit swamped tonight.

Pollen count must be through the roof because It Is Everywhere. I have a low temp (99.3), swollen lymph glands and unhappy sinuses. Calling it an early night. Newsletter light. 😉

Please take a moment and answer this short reader survey! ✅

Some of the best COVID-19 reporting is coming from STAT News, a niche publication focused on “health, medicine, life sciences and the fast-moving business of making medicines.”

Monday, reporter Helen Branswell took a deep dive in to “magical thinking” (aka denial) that hobbled official responses to coronavirus in the west. View how the crisis evolved through her notes and interviews.

“Everybody was in denial of this coming, including the U.S. And everybody got hit — just as simple as that,” Gary Kobinger, director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec, told STAT.
Kobinger himself thought the WHO’s immediate move to a war footing on the virus — the day after China made its first official report on it on Dec. 31 — was probably an overreaction. The rapid rise in cases in the city of Wuhan brought him around.

Monday, Johns Hopkins reported 787,901 (759,696) cases and 42,364 (40,683) deaths in the US, an increase of 3.7% and 4.3%, respectively, since Sunday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 4.5% and 6.8%, respectively.

That case rate is 238.03 per 100,000; the death rate is 127.99 per million.
One week ago, the case rate was 175.97 per 100,000; and the death rate, 71.36 million.

🔬Research and medical news

COVID-19 studies: Obesity boosts risk; diagnosing health workers. CIDRAP, 20 April 2020.
FDA takes another step to ease shortages of drugs for Covid-19 patients on ventilators. STAT News, 20 April 2020.

🎦Recommended viewing

SCMP News @SCMPNews

"Trust us, the worst is yet ahead of us," warned the WHO on Monday as global coronavirus cases neared 2.5 million.

💃🏼Life hack

The Philadelphia Inquirer has put together its recommendations for puzzles and games.

What’s your favorite? (You can comment on this newsletter on the website link - just like a blog post!)

⓵ Around the country

The Johns Hopkins dashboard now allows you to drill down to the county-level with an amazing degree of detail. Here’s my home county in Georgia, the epicenter of the state’s outbreak.

Pick a state, then a county
Click on the county map, and ARC GIS will pop open a window
Click on the thumbnail to see the view a new window

Georgia

… caseloads are still climbing daily and over 700 people have died from the coronavirus, [but] Governor Brian Kemp announced that businesses including gyms, barbers, and hair stylists will be able to open on Friday. Theaters and restaurants will be allowed to open on Monday, if owners enforce proper social distancing, though bars and clubs will remain closed. As part of Kemp’s “small step forward,” religious services will also be allowed to hold in-person services.

New York
On Monday, New York Governor Cuomo reported 478 deaths, the first daily tally of COVID-19 deaths under 500 since 02 April.

Minnesota
JBS, the US subsidiary of the world’s largest processor of fresh beef and pork, has closed its pork production plant in Worthington, MN. “As we all learn more about coronavirus, it is clear that the disease is far more widespread across the U.S. and in our county than official estimates indicate based on limited testing,” Bob Krebs, President of JBS USA Pork, said in a news release.

This is the third JBS facility to close its doors. The Souderton, PA., beef production facility reopened today. The Greeley, MN, beef production facility remains closed.

Pennsylvania
Gov. Tom Wolf has extended Pennsylvania’s stay-at-home order until 08 May, and protesters rallied outside the state capitol in Harrisburg.

South Carolina and Tennessee
Both governors followed Georgia’s lead.

Washington
Reporter Gregory Scruggs went to Olympia on Sunday to cover the protests on behalf of Reuters; state patrol estimated the crowd at 2,500. After his interviews with protesters were cut from that story, he published this essay at The Stranger. A key observation:

The annual March for Our Rights gun rally scheduled for late April was postponed, so a large contingent of heavily armed Second Amendment activists who had planned to rally anyway at this time of the month showed up.

This observation matches this NBC report: “A family-run network of pro-gun groups is behind five of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to protesting shelter-in-place restrictions.”

Did the Olympia Protest Against Social Distancing Violate Facebook's Policies?

"Yes," said Inslee spokesperson Mike Faulk in an e-mail to The Stranger. "Sunday’s protest was in violation of the 'Stay Home, Stay Healthy' proclamation."

All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have identified COVID-19 cases and all have at least one death.

⓶ Around the world

The Ada Lovelace Institute has evaluated contact tracing and immunity certificates to determine if UK government use of technology will “be safe, fair and equitable.”

It concludes that there is no evidence to support the immediate deployment of digital contact tracing or immunity certification and calls for the establishment of a new Group of Advisors on Technology in Emergencies (GATE) to oversee the development and testing of any proposed digital tracing application.

Japan’s government has secured over 210,000 hotel rooms '“to accommodate those with mild coronavirus symptoms as well as asymptomatic patients as the country tries to contain the spread of the virus.”

A model from New Zealand: New Zealand’s Prime Minister May Be the Most Effective Leader on the Planet. The Atlantic, 19 April 2020.

Someone(s) will write a dissertation dissecting the different leadership styles of women and men at the local, state and national level as it relates to responses to this public health crisis.

A warning from Singapore about the risks of insufficient physical distancing:

Vincent Rajkumar @VincentRK

Singapore should be a warning to us. They had COVID under excellent control. Now it’s out of control: 728 new cases yesterday. When we relax social distancing measures prematurely we risk a second wave. Places where groups of people work/live close to each other are at high risk.

The number of affected countries/territories/areas jumped from 29 at the end of February to 208 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.

⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19

The malfeasance of this administration reaches new lows each day.

On Feb. 26 — when total deaths had reached 2,770, nearly all in China — the Commerce Department published a flier titled “CS China COVID Procurement Service,” guiding American firms on how to sell “critical medical products” to China and Hong Kong through Beijing’s fast-tracked sales process… Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Robert Kadlec testified in February that the U.S. would need 3.5 billion N95s in a serious pandemic.

Our government facilitated sending masks to China “in large numbers through February.” Reporting from the Washington Post.

According to New York Magazine:
… it has started to appear as though, in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade — like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy during the Civil War — to prevent delivery of critical medical equipment to states desperately in need.
Two weeks after promising a plan, Trump administration still has nothing in place to cover coronavirus treatment for the uninsured.

Some things don’t age well.

Others do.