Washington state started off as the hot spot for coronavirus in the United States. Not only was it one of the first places where person-to-person spread within the community was confirmed, but the unfortunate circumstance of having the virus swiftly spread in an extended care facility meant that Washington was quickly faced with the one-two punch of dealing with a spiraling number of cases and a terrifying number of deaths. Even two weeks later, articles tend to treat Washington as if it’s the center of COVID-19 cases in the United States.
With close to 1,200 cases, no one is going to mistake Washington for a COVID-free zone. However that big number is a little deceptive. Because Washington has been doing what everyone should be—a lot of testing. On Wednesday, those results were bolstered by a jump in cases found after conducting over 3,000 tests. But, like South Korea and Singapore, Washington has been dutifully pursuing connections to every one of those cases. And it seems to be paying dividends.
Washington’s Department of Health set a goal at the beginning of the week of reaching 5,000 tests a day. That’s a modest enough target, considering the rate of testing in some countries. But it’s a huge improvement over what has been happening in most of the United States.
Not only has the state been serious about testing, but health officials also never stopped following up on cases, tracking down sources, and providing the public with up-to-date detailed information. That information shows that of 17,000 tests conducted so far, 93% have been negative. But negative tests are not wasted test—far from it. The negative results are just as important as the positives in ferreting out the real extent of the outbreak and how it can be fought. It’s too early to be certain that Washington’s efforts will be successful in limiting the outbreak, and stopping the virus in just one state is likely to be even less effective than having gun regulations that limit sales in just one area. But Washington, which started off as the national hot spot, might also be the national bright spot when it comes to handling this crisis well.
Also worthy of some kudos on Thursday: the Nevada Department of Health and Human Services. Their new Statewide COVID-19 Dashboard is not just high-tech, it’s informative and shows the kind of high-level information that should be much more available from the federal government … whose site is perpetually behind, and consistently short on critical information.
And now … Italy. Italy, dammit, we are so sorry. What Italy is going through right now is the kind of crisis that in normal times would demand an international response. The U.S. would be lining up supplies, and doctors, and equipment and so would everyone else. Except everyone else is already facing the crisis on their own doorsteps, so poor Italy is going it alone.
That means that on Thursday, Italy logged over 5,300 cases. And it marked up another 427 deaths as the hugely overstretched health care system continues to bring the fatality rate up from the 1% that can be expected when everyone gets critical care, to a rate closer to the number that need that care in the first place. Right now in Italy, the case fatality rate stands at 8.3%. And that’s leading to scenes like this, which are just heartrending.
As the caption notes, Italy has exceeded China for the greatest number of deaths, as their health care system is far more stressed than China’s ever became. In fact, on Thursday China reported no new community spread cases of COVID-19. Though it reported 34 cases, they were all the result of travelers who had come to China with the coronavirus.
Rather than post Iran’s numbers on the secondary chart, I tossed it for the day and replaced it with the United States to show how we’re doing vs. the countries that were ahead of us in line for a serious outbreak. The answer is: not well. All those indications that the United States looks more like Italy than South Korea are easy to see when all three are side by side, especially so now that the U.S. has blown past the total case count in South Korea.
And honestly, that horror show in Italy … we’re still going up faster than they did at this point. When it comes to the national numbers, there is absolutely nothing good to say about this.
Even though it’s still just the afternoon, the United States has already added 4,000 cases today. Some of that is more testing—and that’s good. Because you can’t improve what you don’t measure, and we’re way, way behind in measuring. But until we reach the point where we’re testing widely enough to really see what we’re dealing with, it’s not only going to look bad, it’s going to be not all that predictive of where the next day is going.
For Friday, I’m going to go through the whole big stack of charts again—the world totals, epicenters, U.S. and even some that haven’t been pulled out in the last couple of weeks. Then it’s going to be time to put them all away as we look for better ways of providing information. The best presentation is one that allows you to act on that information, so … think about what that might be and what kind of numbers/charts/analysis would be most beneficial to you as we ride these rapids together.
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 / COVID-19 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