On Tuesday, the China Daily reported that Dr. Liu Zhiming had died from COVID-19. The chief of the largest hospital in Wuhan, Dr. Liu was 51, had no complicating factors, and had not expected to die from the novel coronavirus. But he did. According to China’s National Health Commission, Dr. Liu was one of 1,716 medical workers who have developed COVID-19 in just the last week—which shows again the tremendous stress that working with this disease is placing on China’s medical system and the difficulty of protecting thousands of doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers who are dealing with tens of thousands of patients carrying a highly contagious illness.
But back in America, COVID-19 is generating a different kind of stress, and this one is completely avoidable. According to the Associated Press, Asian American businesses are finding themselves subject to threats, rumors, and a sharp downturn in trade—all of which is beyond silly and downright xenophobic. Not only are all active cases of COVID-19 in the United States under quarantine, but every one of those patients caught the disease while abroad. Not one person has been infected at any business in the United States. If there are Asian American businesses in your city, this would be a great time to visit them, make a purchase, and push back against the hate.
The total number of deaths from COVID-19 has passed 2,000 just one week after hitting 1,000, but as bad as that may seem, the number of deaths has actually been flat across most of that time, even as the total number of active cases increased. The outcome mortality—deaths/(deaths + recovered)—has continued to drop as it swings toward a case fatality rate (deaths/total cases) that is still between 2% and 3%.
In China, the number of new cases fell to 1,766, but recoveries tipped down a bit as well, to 1,275. So we still haven’t hit that day when the total load of active cases in China declined—which would be a great relief for those literally sick and tired healthcare workers. The number of deaths moved up from yesterday to 137. That’s about where it’s been for the last week, but with the still-increasing case count, that means fatality statistics are still declining.
Outside of China, there were another 79 cases on the cruise ship Diamond Princess. However, it seems that in addition to the American passengers who left on Monday, another 500 passengers who tested negative are being taken off the ship on Wednesday. Hopefully, this little experiment in Plague Ship 2020 is finally winding down. About 3,100 of the 3,700 on board have been tested and have received the test results.
There was a burst of cases in South Korea overnight—20 cases in a single day. As with the largest cluster of cases in Singapore, many of these seem to be associated with members of families who attended a single church. Any kind of large gathering represents a threat at this stage.
Japan got another 10 cases, including two members of the national Health Ministry, who appear to have become infected while working around the Diamond Princess.
Finally, there was a new country on the list for the first time in several days, as two cases showed up in Iran.
For today, here’s a somewhat different approach to charts, looking first at overall cases:
The number at the bottom of the pillar there represents active cases … which is inconsistent with the next chart. I will fix this, but I’m out of time at the moment.
The top chart show the flattening of the total number of active cases as recoveries begin to constitute a larger share of the total picture. I’d like to break this down to show the mild, serious, and critical values that are reported on the daily charts out of each Chinese province, but now one seems to have tallied them by day, so I’ve a fearful amount of Google Translate ahead. The second chart shows locations outside of China ranked by the number of active cases. Japan jumped to the No. 2 slot today due to a combination of 10 new cases around Tokyo and an increase in reported recoveries from Singapore. The big move from South Korea is disturbing, but hopefully it’s not the start of a trend.
As things start to break up, I’m likely to remove the Diamond Princess from the chart and report the cases by where they are being treated (sorry, Japan), which would be in line with cases now moved to United States.
An interesting chunk of data that got a mention in comments yesterday is this China CDC Weekly report, which gives an age breakdown of those 2,000 deaths. I’ll have a more detailed look in the near future.