COVID-19 day 98: 📈 988,451 cases; 56,245 deaths : 27 April 2020
Global cases exceed 3 million; at least six Tyson's employees die, chairman runs full-page newspaper ads on the need to stay open; children seem to be as likely to become infected as adults
It’s day 98 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. Today, the number of global cases topped 3 million according to Johns Hopkins; the number of cases in the US will top 1 million tomorrow. The United States has 4% of the world’s population.
Let’s compare the United States and Italy, which registered its lowest daily number of cases since 10 March, the day after the national quarantine was announced.
First case announced: US, 21 January; Italy, 31 January
First death announced: Italy, 21 February; US, 29 February
National quarantine: Italy, 09 March, 1,797 cases; US, none
First state quarantine: California, 19 March, 5,964 US cases
Peak cases: Italy, 21 March, 6,557; US, 24 April (to date), 36,188
Cases/100,000: Italy, 329.69; US, 298.62
Deaths/million: Italy, 446.00; US, 169.92
The United States population is slightly more than five times that of Italy; our number of cases, about the same ratio. But Italy’s trend is clearly on the downward slope; we might be or we might on a plateau or we might spike up again. The chart suggests we have flattened the spike in cases, at least right now.
From the day of the national quarantine in Italy to the peak: 12 days. The daily number of cases increased by a factor of 3.64.
From the day of the California quarantine, which triggered stay-at-home orders around the country, to the current peak: 36 days. The daily number of cases increased by a factor of 6.07.
Imagine if our top 10 states had implemented stay-at-home orders with California. We might have cut our death rate in half and relieved a lot of stress on health care workers. And shortened the time we all need to stay at home.
However, the death rate in Italy is more than twice that of the United States. Life expectancy there normally exceeds ours (a reminder that we aren’t number one on a lot of factors). 🙁
Monday, Johns Hopkins reported 988,451 (965,910) cases and 56,245 (54,876) deaths in the US, an increase of 2.3% and 2.49%, respectively, since Sunday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 3.7% and 4.3%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 28,650 cases and 1,983 deaths
That case rate is 298.62 per 100,000; the death rate, 169.92 per million.
One week ago, the case rate was 238.03 per 100,000; the death rate, 127.99 per million.
🤓Recommended reading
The old African-American aphorism “When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia” has a new, morbid twist: when white America catches the novel coronavirus, black Americans die.
The Black Plague. Public officials lament the way that the coronavirus is engulfing black communities. The question is, what are they prepared to do about it? New Yorker, 16 April 2020.
🔬Research and medical news
For those of you with children:
🎦Recommended viewing
💃🏼Life hack
All cloth masks are not created equal, and their efficacy remains contested. However, this combo looks like it has solid research data to support it. Would not want to wear it for an 8-hour day.
⓵ Around the country
In my perfect vision of what happens “after” … citizens demand that anti-competitive laws be marshaled by people who believe in them, not those who will continue to let the big get bigger. No more ‘too big to fail’ or ‘too big to pivot’ but not 'too big’ for government checks.
Tyson Foods operates poultry, beef and pork processing plants around the country. Just one of its plants in Iowa represents 3.9% of all national pork processing capacity. Tyson suspended operations last week at the plant because it sparked an outbreak.
The NY Times reported on conditions at Tyson plants on 09 April. Three Georgia employees had already died, but the company kept on keeping on.
Annie Grant, 55, had been feverish for two nights. Worried about the coronavirus outbreak, her adult children had begged her to stay home rather than return to the frigid poultry plant in Georgia where she had been on the packing line for nearly 15 years.
But on the third day she was ill, they got a text from their mother. “They told me I had to come back to work,” it said.
Ms. Grant ended up returning home, and died in a hospital on Thursday morning after fighting for her life on a ventilator for more than a week. Two other workers at the Tyson Foods poultry plant where she worked in Camilla, Ga., have also died in recent days.
Why is this not criminal behavior on the part of Tyson’s? Essential business does not mean that you get to force people to come to work when sick. That you get to force them to work in crowded conditions without PPE.
So far, at least six Tyson employees have died, four of them in Georgia.
The chairman ran ads in major newspapers this weekend claiming, “The food supply chain is breaking.” It could very well break because people like him chose short-term profits over long-term strategy.
The problem is not only Tyson; other food processors seem to have taken minimal steps to ensure worker safety. And like the airlines, the industry seems addicted to share buybacks rather than investment.
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.
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⓶ Around the world
Slovakia, a landlocked country of 5.5 million, closed its schools, shops and borders earlier than any other country after Italy. Meanwhile, politicians and TV anchors embraced face masks even before the government made them mandatory.
The measures bore fruit: Six weeks after the first reported infection, Slovakia has just 18 fatalities and is bottom of the European list of deaths per capita, according to data compiled by John Hopkins University as of April 26.
Germany: The number of new infections in dipped below 1,000 for the first time in more than five weeks for this country of 84 million. How risky is the movement to re-open?
Japan: What happens when you think your lockdown is successful, and so you return to normal too quickly? We can learn from Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido, population 5.3 million.
Singapore: Foreign workers living in dormitories continue to drive Singapore’s new cases; two additional deaths reported, bringing the total in this country of 19 million to 12 (0.73 deaths/million).
New Zealand: After four weeks at the most strict level of quarantine, New Zealand is starting to slowly loosen the quarantine. Six feet distancing is still in effect in this island nation of 5 million.
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
I really put my head in my hands when I read this:
The Food and Drug Administration is dealing with a flood of inaccurate coronavirus antibody tests after it allowed more than 120 manufacturers and labs to bring the tests to market without an agency review (emphasis added).
FDA Commissioner Dr. Stephen M. Hahn was sworn in … in December 2019. A radiation oncologist by profession, he was the chief medical executive of MD Anderson in Texas before joining the FDA. “The FDA is trying to balance concerns about quality with its desire to allow innovative tests to reach the market quickly during a pandemic, he said.” [That’s a scathing bio from STAT News, BTW.]
▪️▪️▪️
This is the song that you may not have heard before, but you already know the tune:
U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats.
For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences.
But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience for even the oral summary he takes two or three times per week, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
⓸ 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.
🌎 27 April
Globally: 2 878 196 confirmed (85 530 - new) with 198 668 deaths (4982 - new)
The Americas: 1 140 520 confirmed (45 674 - new) with 58 492 deaths (2453 - new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 3,041,777 (2,971,639)
Total deaths: 211,170 (206,553)
Recovered: 894,337 (2868,480)
🇺🇸 27 April
CDC: 957,875 (928,619) cases and 53,922 (52,459) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 988,451 (965,910) cases and 56,245 (54,876) deaths
State data*: 981,134 (959,056) identified cases and 50,327 (49,164) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 5,593,495 (5,441,079)
View infographic and data online: total cases, cases/100,000 and deaths/million.
* Johns Hopkins data, ~11.00 pm Pacific.
State data include DC, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands.
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.
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🦠 COVID-19 @ WiredPen.com
🌐 Global news
This summary is the best I've read tied to news surrounding the covid-19. I've read much of this here and yon, but the infection/mortality data summary sheds concentrated light on the topic. Well done, Kathy.