In other nations, governments are moving to the forefront in taking actions to secure the population and slow the spread of 2019 novel coronavirus. That’s meant shutting down Carnival in Venice, closing primary and secondary schools across 13 nations, and even closing down public transportation in major cities. But the only guidance that Americans are getting is to get back to work and stop worrying about it.
But just because Trump is turning a life-threatening illness into a ratings game, that doesn’t mean good decisions can’t be made outside the White House. This week, the City of Austin decided to cancel the SXSW conference, despite knowing that the annual event represents a $300 million boost to their community and not having any confirmed cases of coronavirus in the immediate area. The organization behind Seattle’s Emerald City Comicon, after some delays, made the painful decision of delaying that event, even though it means a big fiscal hit for them and for vendors. And now major universities—including both the University of Washington and Stanford—are closing classrooms to move to online education for the duration of the crisis.
Trump hasn’t stepped up. That doesn’t mean America has to sit back and take it.
Good planning in confronting a burgeoning pandemic doesn’t mean everyone climbs into their bunker and closes the door. It also doesn’t mean that 400,000 people from around the world congratulates together in lecture halls and entertainment venues while skimping on sleep and sharing overcrowded facilities with strangers, so … good decision on the part of Austin.
When Trump, Kellyanne Conway, and Larry Kudlow insist that this virus is “contained,” don’t believe them, and don’t follow their advice. Because while it seems inevitable that a sizable percentage of the United States population (and the population around the world) is going to be introduced to the novel coronavirus over the coming months, it doesn’t have to be all at once.
This is already a personal disaster for the families of those who have died, those isolated from their loved ones, and those left with lasting lung damage from the aftereffects of the illness. But those personal disasters do not have to become a global catastrophe. They can. They might. They don’t have to—not if enough people make enough good decisions, even without the guidance we deserve from an effective government.
That doesn’t mean crawling in a hole. But it does mean doing what you can slow the spread of the coronavirus and the disease, COVID-19, that it causes.
A big reason for that is that simply calculating the number of deaths likely to be caused by the spread of novel coronavirus is only a part of the problem. Right now, around the world, 14% of all those who have coronavirus are listed in either serious or critical condition. If that number can be taken as a proxy for the need for hospitalization, then for every 10% of the population that becomes infected, the United States needs another 4,500,000 hospital beds. About 900,000 of those beds will require respirators. But there are only 900,000 hospital beds in the whole country … and 75% of them are already full. There are only 100,000 respirators in the country … and many of them are not only already in service, they are in pediatric wards, cancer centers, and burn wards where they are both desperately needed and not easily switched over to additional service.
A rational government would already be engaged right now in securing additional beds, additional equipment, and additional personnel. Because that isn’t happening, the response has to be to hold down the number of cases. Don’t be in the first wave of this thing. Even if you do eventually become infected, it will be much better for that to happen when facilities are not swamped, when doctors have had more time to work out the optimum treatment protocols, and when healthcare workers are themselves not down with infections.
Worldwide cases are at 105,000, with active cases moving up again after recoveries have absorbed most of the initial peak in China. At this point, China itself represents something of a success story. Even though 80,000 cases and 3,000 deaths sounds terrible, it represents less than a tenth of one percent of their overall population. That’s an amazing job of constraining a virus where there is no existing immunity and no vaccine available. At this point, there are still 22,000 active cases in China, which represents a huge threat for further expansion. But it’s also one half of the active cases they had three weeks ago.
I’m reviving the 3D chart for a single day, just to show that things there have changed.
The last time this chart appeared, both Singapore and Hong Kong were in the top ten countries in terms of cases outside of China. Both are off the chart now, because they’ve continued to constrain their total number of cases. Instead, they’re been replaced by European nations such as Switzerland and the U.K., which have seen a sharp uptick in the last week.
Still, those big secondary epicenters — South Korea, Italy, and Iran — make the scale of this graph so overwhelming that it’s difficult to see what’s going on elsewhere. So here’s a close-up on the nations where they’re in the “not quite exploded” position.
For want of a better term, these are the “tertiary locations,” the rising centers who have started climbing quickly in the last week after seeing new cases, many of which came not from China but the secondary locations. The United States falls solidly into this group. The U.S. added 98 cases on Friday, and has picked up another 46 so far on Saturday.
And, despite the claims from Trump as of Friday, only 1,895 people have been tested in the United States. Meaning that as the test kits actually arrive … if they arrive … a jump in the numbers should be expected. Despite complaints about both China and Iran fudging the numbers, the Trump White House may yet prove the world champs at obfuscation. Which seems right, but only in the worst possible way.
The biggest change in the map may not be the spread of cases, but the sharp rise in New York state, where there were eight new cases in Westchester County, three in Nassau, and eleven more cases that can be traced by to that original case from a traveler who lives in New Rochelle.
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