Back on February 11, the novel coronavirus outbreak passed a grim milestone when 1,000 deaths were logged. Italy hit that number, all on it’s own, exactly a month later when it reached 1,016 deaths on Wednesday. Meanwhile in Iran, the government isn’t just digging mass graves in the city of Qom, it’s digging mass graves that can be seen from space. That beyond-grim information only serves to back up what we’ve always known about the numbers from Iran—they can’t be trusted.
And neither can the numbers in America. Not so much because the number of positive results are being hidden, or deaths are being disguised by other causes. In America, we don’t know how bad the situation is because we simply have not tested adequately. It’s gone past the delays developing the CDC test rather than using the world-standard WHO test. The number of people being given tests isn’t pitiful, it’s criminal. The tiny amount of available data is leaving America shooting in the dark, with everything on the line.
And it is deliberate.
As reported on NPR’s Fresh Air, Donald Trump “did not push to do aggressive additional testing” because “more testing might have lead to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak.” This goes beyond Trump’s repeated refusal to include passengers from the Diamond Princess when discussing the number of Americans who had been infected with coronavirus. This is deliberate endangerment of the public.
Providing adequate tests early in the process are why South Korea has sharply reduced it’s cases per day. Reducing the number of tests because of political concerns about finding out the truth, is exactly why Italy is in a complete national lock down with cases and deaths still rapidly increasing. Completely looking the other way is why the steam shovels are out in Iran.
Right now, the United States looks a whole helluva lot more like Italy — or Iran — than it does South Korea. And it’s leading to absolutely horrifying moments like this one.
Public schools are closing next week in Ohio. And in Maryland. Despite the low numbers of confirmed results, health officials there are getting the picture — and it’s ugly. There’s no reason to trust that 1% number. It could be orders of magnitude off in either direction. There’s also no better number, because there simply is no data against which to operate. You cannot improve what you do not measure, and Donald Trump seems to be insistent that there will be no measurement that reveals to the republic the extent of his failure.
At least, until that failure can be measured in acres. From space.
Overall, the world is closing on 135,00 active cases this afternoon, and by the end of the day 2019 novel coronavirus will claim it’s 5,000th death. That we know of. The rapid pace of new confirmed cases around the world is now completely swamping the recoveries in China, and with some of the more critical cases taking 3-6 weeks to recover, don’t exact the number of active cases to fall any time soon.
Nations affected by Trump’s European travel ban
Here’s a brief chart to show the ludicrous nature of Trump’s “travel ban” that doesn’t ban Americans from travel. Not only is this a completely ineffective measure, the extent to which is cherry picks “good” nations can be seen in the case counts for the countries still open to travel, the U.K. and Ireland, vs. those placed under constraint. The graph is on a log scale to keep the tiny bars at the far right from disappearing entirely. Because a whole swath of countries with only a handful of cases are barred, while the U.K., with hundreds more, is open for business. Go Brexit!
The action on Thursday continues to be with the nations that were the “secondary epicenters” of the pandemic back when China was really driving the show. Now China is turning out only a few dozen cases a year, and this trio is telling a very diverse story.
COVID-19: Secondary epicenters
After a small surge of cases in Seoul, South Korea seems to have once again brought their outbreak under control and flattened the curve well below the point where their health care system is overwhelmed. The opposite is true in Italy, where another day continued a sharp increase in both cases and deaths, despite a series of increasingly harsh national lock downs. Every story out of Italy is the same at this point—ICUs are simply overrun, with nowhere to put new cases and old cases that are not recovering quickly. The situation is being made worse by a new wave of patients, many of them younger than 50, who were able to self-isolate at home for the first few days of illness, but whose condition has reached a point that it requires care. This is a nation in absolute crisis, one where the government acted much too slowly to inform and protect its citizens. And in Iran … as always, who knows? Things are bad, that much is clear. How bad they really are may not be known until the current government collapses.
COVID-19: Tertiary epicenters
Getting down to the next round of nations, none of the stories being told are particularly great. The U.K, is keeping the growth rate lower than the rest, but that rate is still accelerating and a number of high profile positive tests may indicate that under-testing is also a factor in that reporting. The United States continues to follow the unpleasant path being set by European nations, just a day or two behind. As usual, the most recent day has been chopped off the U.S. data because it’s very incomplete at this point, but at the time of writing, the U.S. is sitting at 1,570 cases and 40 deaths. That’s 270 new cases so far on Thursday.
COVID-19: United States
An update of the U.S. data through Wednesday evening shows that neither the numbers nor the messaging has improved. If you haven’t listened to Joe Biden’s address to the nation on this topic … do so. We’re going to need some genuine leadership, even if it’s not coming from the White House.
Resources on novel coronavirus:
World Health Organization 2019 Coronavirus information site.
World Health Organization 2019 Coronavirus Dashboard.
2019-nCoV Global Cases from Johns Hopkins.
BNO News 2019 Novel Coronavirus tracking site.
Worldometer / Wuhan Coronavirus Outbreak.
CDC Coronavirus-2019 (COVID-19) information site.
European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
Information on preparing yourself and your family:
Some tips on preparing from Daily Kos.
NPR’s guide to preparing your home.
Ready.gov
