COVID-19 day 99: 📈 1,012,583 cases; 58,355 deaths : 28 April 2020
We've crossed a psychological threshold; deaths in veterans home in MA make it imperative we track assistive living cases; how cruise ship companies are culpable; more on Bakersfield misinformation
It’s day 99 since the first case of coronavirus disease was announced in the United States. We’ve crossed a psychological threshold: 1 million domestic cases (identified by state departments of health). Here’s the timeline from the calendar, in multiples of 10:
21 January 2020: first case, travel to China, Washington
12 February 2020: 10 cases
26 February 2020: first case, community spread, California
29 February 2020: first death, Washington 🦠
03 March 2020: 100 cases
04 March 2020: 10 deaths 🦠
11 March 2020: 1,000 cases
17 March 2020: 100 deaths 🦠
19 March 2020: 10,000 cases
25 March 2020: 1,000 deaths 🦠
27 March 2020: 100,000 cases
06 April 2020: 10,000 deaths 🦠
23 April 2020: 50,000 deaths 🦠
28 April 2020: 1,000,000 cases
What’s clear from this illustration is that political leaders in Washington and California listened to advice from epidemiologists and then took incredibly brave actions in the absence of an obvious threat. What’s also clear is how much the White House dawdled, wasted time and cost lives.
On 04 March, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced that the county had asked businesses to start allowing employees to work from home. Look at where 04 March falls on that calendar of cases and deaths.
Yes, I still want you to read the New Yorker discussion of how differently this played out in Washington and New York.
Tuesday, Johns Hopkins reported 1,012,583 (988,451) cases and 58,355 (56,245) deaths in the US, an increase of 2.44% and 3.75%, respectively, since Monday. A week ago, the daily numbers increased by 4.7% and 6.4%, respectively.
The seven-day average: 26,771 cases and 1,898 deaths
The case rate is 305.91 per 100,000; the death rate, 176.30 per million.
One week ago, the case rate was 249.30 per 100,000; the death rate, 136.16 per million.
🤓Recommended reading
'There is no absolute truth': an infectious disease expert on Covid-19, misinformation and 'bullshit'. The Guardian, 28 April 2020.
The idea with bullshit is that it’s trying to appear authoritative and definitive in a way that’s not about communicating accurately and informing a reader, but rather by overwhelming them, persuading them, impressing them. If that’s done without any allegiance to truth, or accuracy, that becomes bullshit…
What’s happened with this pandemic that we’re not accustomed to in the epidemiology community is that it’s been really heavily politicized. Even when scientists are very well-intentioned and not trying to support any side of the narrative, when they do work and release a paper it gets picked up by actors with political agendas.
The Pandemic at Sea. Washington Post, 25 April 2020.
Let them all go bankrupt. Due to the cavalier attitude of management, COVID-19 infected passengers and crew on at least 55 ships, which is one-fifth of the global fleet.
The industry’s decision to keep sailing for weeks after the coronavirus was first detected in early February on a cruise ship off the coast of Japan, despite the efforts by top U.S. health officials to curtail voyages, was among a number of decisions that health experts and passengers say contributed to the mounting toll.
🔬Research and medical news
A group of scholarly publishers and organizations “is launching an initiative to ensure a rapid, efficient, yet responsible review of COVID-19 content.” The group has admirable goals: make research accessible (aka “open”) and “maximize the efficiency of peer review.” I don’t know which gatekeepers they are trying to circumvent.
YouTube took down a news conference video released by Bakersfield, CA, doctors Daniel Erickson and Artin Massihi, whose controversial claims that COVID-19 is comparable to seasonal influenza were “emphatically condemn[ed]” by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine (AAEM).
These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19.
The video got 5 million views before YouTube pulled it, adding to the flood of misinformation (and disinformation) about the virus.
Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court…. They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said.
I alerted you to the claims on Sunday.
🎦Recommended viewing
Creatives do make the world go ’round and “at home” performances are a highlight of this surreal time. Of his two performances featured on the Late Show, Fogerty seems to feel this one the most. Or maybe it’s me. A protest song from my youth (when I didn’t understand the words).
💃🏼Life hack
King County Washington Department of Health has posters, virtual or printable, for a variety of situations and in multiple languages.
⓵ Around the country
Track which states are re-opening with this guide from CNN.
More than half of the states do not have sufficient testing for epidemiologists to recommend that they relax mitigation, according to STAT News and Harvard.
There is no official count of covid-19 deaths in the nation’s 15,000 nursing homes. AP estimated 11,000 deaths in a 23 April news report. The federal government has only recently required reporting confirmed and presumed infections and deaths. The data are not public.
Alaska has lifted restrictions on some non-essential business categories, though not as many as Georgia. And the state has the lowest population density in the country (1.0 per square mile compared to 71.2 for the rest of the nation). Gov. Mike Dunleavy is a Republican.
Arizona officials “are unlawfully withholding data, statistics, and information regarding COVID-19 outbreaks.”
In Iowa, despite a recommendation from researchers at the University of Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) moved ahead with plans to relax mitigation.
Massachusetts. The deadliest known outbreak at a long-term care facility in the US has taken the lives of at least 68 veterans at Soldiers' Home in Holyoke. The facility is managed by the state of Massachusetts.
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
Contact tracing is time-consuming, labor-intensive and effective at helping staunch a pandemic. A study published in TheLancet Infectious Diseases details how contract tracing helped control the spread of COVID-19 in Shenzhen, China.
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.
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⓷ Politics, economics and COVID-19
The United States experienced an unusually high mortality rate during March and intro April, above and beyond the deaths attributed to COVID-19. Analysis from Yale “suggests that the death toll from the pandemic is significantly higher than has been reported.”
The national tally also shapes the public’s perception of how serious the disease is, and therefore how necessary it is to continue social distancing despite economic disruption…
In the United States, public health experts say reporting lags, along with the fact that nearly every state initially counted only cases in which the coronavirus was confirmed through a test, contributed to an incomplete picture of deaths in those early weeks.
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.
🌎 28 April
Globally: 2 954 222 confirmed (76 026 - new) with 202 597 deaths (3932 - new)
The Americas: 1 179 607 confirmed (39 087 - new) with 60 211 deaths (1722 - new)
Johns Hopkins interactive dashboard (11.00 pm Pacific)
Global confirmed: 3,117,204 (3,041,777 - yesterday)
Total deaths: 217,193 (211,170 - yesterday)
Recovered: 928,970 (894,337 - yesterday)
🇺🇸 28 April
Data in parenthesis are from the prior day for comparison
CDC: 981,246 (957,875) cases and 55,258 (53,922) deaths
Johns Hopkins*: 1,012,583 (988,451) cases and 58,355 (56,245) deaths
State data*: 1,005,592 (981,134) identified cases and 52,525 (50,327) deaths
Total tested (US, Johns Hopkins): 5,795,728 (5,593,495)
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
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