Coronavirus dashboard for June 29: renewed exponential growth in infections, decline in deaths has stalled
Coronavirus dashboard for June 29: renewed exponential growth in infections, decline in deaths has stalled
Total US infections: 2,549,069, 42,161 in last day
Total US deaths: 125,803, 273 in last day
Here is the regional breakdown of the 7 day average of new cases per capita:
There is renewed exponential growth in the South and West. The Midwest also is beginning to look bad.
Also, here is some more evidence that, when you recklessly reopen, and the pandemic roars back, customers pull back, thus defeating the entire purpose of “reopening the economy:”
The scientific phrase for this phenomenon is, “Well, duh!”
The “top 10” States for new infections per capita are now dominated by the Confederacy, plus Arizona and Utah:
However, while Arizona now heads the “top 10” jurisdictions for deaths per capita, and Louisiana, Arkansas, and Florida have joined the list, the majority is still from the Northeast megalopolis where the death rate, while steeply declining, remains high:
I expect the Northeastern States and DC to drop out of this list over the next 7 to 10 days.
Aside from the situation in the recklessly reopened States, the big issue has been the disconnect between new cases and deaths. The main driver is almost certainly the demographic change from older to younger victims. An important sub-part of that change may be that nursing homes, the “dry tinder” that were first struck by the pandemic, are no longer the epicenter.
One complication in making sense of the data is that NJ had a big data dump of reassigned death rulings earlier last week:
So, the below two graphs take the NYC metro area, including NJ, out of the data, and compare the remaining 47 States plus DC.
Here is the 7 day growth in new cases:
This looks very much like the exponential growth we were seeing back in March.
Now, here is the 7 day change in deaths:
There has been a very slight decline over the past 10 days of the 7 day average.
The change in trajectory of deaths happened roughly one week after the new exponential growth in infections started. Because the young are not totally invulnerable from dying of the disease, I expect the death rate to slowly start rising, pretty much imminently.
One final note. How much did the Black Lives Matter protests affect new cases? Obviously social distancing went out the window, but the protests were outdoors and by all accounts almost all of the protesters wore masks. Since the protests started in Minnesota on May 25, 35 days ago, the effects ought to be apparent in cases by now.
So here is what Minnesota looks like:
New infections continued to decline for 25 days, but have risen slightly in the past 10 days. This suggests, thankfully, that the protests will have little effect on the trajectory of new cases.
Other places are doing the US versus the EU that shows how terrible the US compares.
Here is the link to the National Geographic chart of this.
The Coronavirus Pandemic
“Customers pull back defeating the whole purpose of reopening the economy” really says it all. An article last week suggested that on several metrics Sweden—which never closed—did no better economically than its Scandinavian neighbors who did shutdown and suffered much lower death rates as a result. Similarly, when Wisconsin reopened by court order there was only a slight blip in cases which likely was due to a lot of people acting responsibly in the face of some well publicized people doing the opposite. The real irony is that the moron in chief pushed reopening for the sole purpose of hoping that an improving economy would bolster his reelection chances and then refused to do the things—push testing and mask wearing—which might have let him pull it off. I have given up on this country getting a handle on the virus until January 20, 2021 and I do not think I am alone. All of those voters who were willing to overlook Trump’s many faults or thought even less of Hillary should have considered the most fundamental question—is he reasonably competent? Unfortunately, they now know the answer that a majority of voters knew in November 2016. Train wrecks are a lot less exciting when you are on the train.
Concerned Fauci warns of 100,000 coronavirus cases a day if guidance isn’t followed
via @BostonGlobe – June 30
Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday warned that the United States was “going in the wrong direction” in fighting the coronavirus outbreak, as he estimated that new cases could reach 100,000 a day if Americans do not begin following public health recommendations.
Fauci, the infectious disease chief at the National Institutes of Health, testified alongside other public health officials during a hearing before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee.
“I’m very concerned about what’s going on right now,” Fauci told Senator Elizabeth Warren in response to a question about where the US stands in fighting the outbreak. “Clearly, we are not in total control right now.”
Asked to forecast the outcome of recent surges in some states, Fauci said he couldn’t make an accurate prediction, but believes it will be “very disturbing.”
“We are now having 40-plus-thousand new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around, and so I am very concerned,” Fauci said. …
World War C
NY Times – Paul Krugman – June 30
(A compendium of Trump quotes about coronavirus,
concluding with a quote from Dr Fauci – as per above.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/06/30/could-americas-pandemic-response-be-any-more-medieval/Opinion by
Dana Milbank
Columnist
June 30, 2020 at 3:09 p.m. PDT
Add to list
Sen. Rand Paul doesn’t much care what Anthony Fauci has to say. The Kentucky Republican gets his public health advice from Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek, the Austrian-born economist and libertarian hero, died in 1992. But Paul, an ophthalmologist before he took up politics, still takes medical guidance from the 20th-century philosopher.
“Hayek had it right!” Paul proclaimed at Tuesday’s Senate health committee hearing on the coronavirus pandemic. “Only decentralized power and decision-making based on millions of individualized situations can arrive at what risks and behaviors each individual should choose.”
Paul focused his wrath on Fauci, the U.S. government’s top infectious-disease official. “Virtually every day we seem to hear from you things we can’t do,” Paul complained. “All I hear is, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, we can’t play baseball.”
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
Fauci assured Paul that “I never said we can’t play a certain sport.”
Unsatisfied, Paul demanded: “We just need more optimism.”
So that’s what we need. The United States is hitting new records for infection, largely because President Trump and allied governors across the South and Southwest ignored public health guidance. While other countries beat back the virus, we’re on course to have 100,000 new cases a day, Fauci said, and doing little about it. But we just need to be more upbeat!
Not for
the first time, it feels as though 21st-century America is 14th-century
Europe, reacting with all manner of useless countermeasures to the
plague: balancing ill “humors” and dispelling evil “vapors” caused by
planetary misalignment, religious marches and public self-flagellation, cures involving live chickens and unicorns, and the wearing of amulets and reciting of “abracadabra.”
Now, we have science to tell us how to beat the coronavirus — with face masks and social distancing. Yet our response is resolutely medieval.
The president ridicules mask wearing as politically correct and unmanly. His campaign staff tears down social distancing signs at his mass rally. Governors of hard-hit states tamper with data, sideline public health experts and blame the spread on Latino farmworkers, civil rights demonstrations and increased testing — anything but their reckless and premature relaxing of restrictions.
And
then there’s Vice President Pence, head of the White House coronavirus
task force. “I’d just encourage every American to continue to pray,” he said at Friday’s task force briefing.
I’m all for prayer. But prayer without face masks won’t defeat the virus.
“The
attitude of pushing back from authority and pushing back on scientific
data is very concerning,” Fauci told senators Tuesday, bemoaning a “lack
of trust” in government. “We’re in the middle of a catastrophic
outbreak and we really do need to be guided by scientific principles.”
A lack of urgency about the virus caused the testing debacle. A lack of regard for science caused the hydroxychloroquine debacle.
A contempt for public health advice caused the reopening debacle. A
president’s vanity caused the anti-face-mask debacle. An immunology
debacle likely comes next: If Trump rushes out a vaccine before the
election, would anybody believe it’s safe?
Belatedly, more than a dozen states
have paused or scaled back their rash plans to reopen without heeding
public health guidance. But we still have the White House proclaiming
“remarkable progress” against the pandemic because the latest victims
are younger — as though they won’t infect the old and the sick. Trump
insists he wasn’t joking when he said he told health officials to “slow
the testing down” to suppress the number of reported cases. He’s
proceeding with plans for an in-person, mask-optional convention in
Florida, now a virus hot spot.
Florida
Gov. Ron DeSantis blames street protests (even though New York,
Washington and Minneapolis experienced no such surge in cases) and “overwhelmingly Hispanic”
workers, and as cases spiked last week, he claimed that “nothing has
changed.” Like other GOP governors and the Trump administration, he also
blames an increase in testing — which doesn’t explain the higher rate
of positive tests.
Pence, too, rejects the
obvious conclusion that “the reopening has to do with what we’re
seeing” in the viral spread. (It’s the evil vapors!) He said Sunday that
it’s a “good idea” to wear face masks — just after attending a church event at which half the 2,200 people, including the choir, eschewed masks.
At
Tuesday’s committee hearing, Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who is
retiring, urged Trump to “occasionally wear a mask” so his admirers
“would follow his lead and help end this political debate.”
But
neither Alexander’s pleadings, nor those of the various health
officials testifying, are likely to break down America’s medieval
resistance to science. Paul, citing the successful reopening of schools
in Europe, demanded U.S. schools reopen (ignoring that Europe has
contained the virus). Invoking the superiority of Hayek’s theories to
the findings of public health officials, Paul said “we shouldn’t presume
that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best.”
Hayek must be right. After all, he never got covid-19.
Actual number of COVID-19 cases is 12 times higher than reported, with 50 percent more deaths, says MIT study
via @BostonGlobe – June 30
The true number of COVID-19 cases around the world is roughly 12 times the official count, and the number of deaths is 50 percent greater, according to a study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers, who contend that a swifter response could have prevented one-third of fatalities.
The paper, which relied on test results and other data from 84 hard-hit countries with a total population of 4.75 billion, concluded that cases are vastly undercounted in large part because, the researchers say, about half of infected people have few or no symptoms.
The authors estimate there have been 88.5 million coronavirus cases in the 84 countries and 600,000 deaths through June 18, far more than what the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. Cases have surged in parts of the world since then, including in the South and West of the United States.
“The magnitude of [the] epidemic is widely under-reported with much variation globally,” says the 57-page paper, which is marbled with mathematical calculations, by researchers from the MIT Sloan School of Management. Several Latin American countries have had particularly high infection rates.
Like a number of research studies publicized during the pandemic, the paper has yet to be submitted to a journal for publication or subjected to peer reviews that could identify shortcomings or flaws.
Although the authors concluded that the true number of deaths is 50 percent higher than reported, they said the actual number of infections is so much greater than official tallies that the fatality rate may be lower than some had feared.
In the United States, for example, the researchers estimate that 1 percent of cases have been fatal. That may not seem large, but one of the co-authors noted it is roughly 10 times the fatality rate of the seasonal flu.
“That’s a very high risk,” said John Sterman, director of the MIT System Dynamics Group, in an interview, and the risk is higher for the elderly. “Are you willing to subject yourself or your family to a 1 percent risk of death? Most people would say no.”
Without a vaccine or a breakthrough in treatments, and with only modest improvements in public health policies to control the epidemic, the researchers estimate that there could be a total of 249 million cases of COVID-19 and 1.75 million deaths by next spring in the 84 countries.
The study corroborates other recent reports that the official number of infections and deaths have been undercounted.
Last Friday the CDC said the number of coronavirus infections in many parts of the United States is more than 10 times the reported rate. …
Estimating the global spread of COVID-19
When Dr Fauci expressed concern about not achieving
‘herd immunity’, perhaps he was thinking about this:
The world needs Covid-19 vaccines. It may also be overestimating their power
via @statnews – May 22
With a little luck and a lot of science, the world might in the not-too-distant future get vaccines against Covid-19. But those vaccines won’t necessarily prevent all or even most infections.
In the public imagination, vaccines are often seen effectively as cure-alls, like inoculations against measles.
Rather than those vaccines, however, the Covid-19 vaccines in development may be more like those that protect against influenza — reducing the risk of contracting the disease, and of experiencing severe symptoms should infection occur, a number of experts told STAT.
“We all recognize that flu vaccine, in a year when it’s efficacious, you have what, 50% protection? And in a year when it’s poor you have 30% or less than that — and still we use that,” said Marie-Paule Kieny, who is chairing a committee advising the French government on vaccines to prevent Covid-19.
Ideally, vaccines would prevent infection entirely, inducing what’s known as “sterilizing immunity.” But early work on some of the vaccine candidates suggests they may not stop infection in the upper respiratory tract — and they may not stop an infected person from spreading virus by coughing or speaking. …
(It’s got to be most disturbing to medical authorities when refusal to
receive vaccination against such a ferocious disease, coupled
with an effectivity rate of 50% or less, means achieving
herd immunity may be important but is unlikely..)
Actual number of COVID-19 cases is 12 times higher than reported, with 50 percent more deaths, says MIT study
via @BostonGlobe – June 30
… Although the authors concluded that the true number of deaths is 50 percent higher than reported, they said the actual number of infections is so much greater than official tallies that the fatality rate may be lower than some had feared….
Perhaps we should do way more testing, to get the
fatality rate down where it belongs.
However, if 90% of the hugely enlarged number wh oare supposedly
infected people are asymptomatic, and presumably walking
around, maskless, infecting others, then all the more
reason to wear a mask & maintain social distances.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.06.24.20139451v1
June 26, 2020
Estimating the global spread of COVID-19
By Hazhir Rahmandad, Tse Yang Lim and John Sterman
Abstract
Limited and inconsistent testing and differences in age distribution, health care resources, social distancing, and policies have caused large variations in the extent and dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic across nations, complicating the estimation of prevalence, the infection fatality rate (IFR), and other factors important to care providers and policymakers. Using data for all 84 countries with reliable testing data (spanning 4.75 billion people) we develop a dynamic epidemiological model integrating data on cases, deaths, excess mortality and other factors to estimate how asymptomatic transmission, disease acuity, hospitalization, and behavioral and policy responses to risk condition prevalence and IFR across nations and over time. For these nations we estimate IFR averages 0.68% (0.64%-0.7%). Cases and deaths through June 18, 2020 are estimated to be 11.8 and 1.48 times official reports, respectively, at 88.5 (85-95.3) million and 600 (586-622) thousand. Prevalence and IFR vary substantially, e.g., Ecuador (18%; 0.61%), Chile (15.5%; 0.57%), Mexico (8.8%; 0.69%), Iran (7.9%; 0.44%), USA (5.3%; 0.99%), UK (5.2%; 1.59%), Iceland (1.65%, 0.56%), New Zealand (0.1%, 0.64%), but all nations remain well below the level needed for herd immunity. By alerting the public earlier and reducing contacts, extensive testing when the pandemic was declared could have averted 35.3 (32.7-42.7) million cases and 197 (171-232) thousand deaths. However, future outcomes are less dependent on testing and more contingent on the willingness of communities and governments to reduce transmission. Absent breakthroughs in treatment or vaccination and with mildly improved responses we project 249 (186-586) million cases and 1.75 (1.40-3.67) million deaths in the 84 countries by Spring 2021.
About mass coronavirus testing, China has in several instance tested mass populations to catch and determine the spread of infections. Since June 11, 8.3 million residents of Beijing have been tested to stop a community outbreak in the city. Earlier, every resident of Wuhan was tested. All incoming air travelers are tested. Infections are found and there are immediate quarantines and contact tracing, but the extent of infections found is evidently less than MIT scientists have estimated for other countries.
This does not mean the spread of the coronavirus is less worrisome, since the Chinese worry about every infection detected and are taking dramatic precautions, but that the estimates need to be carefully examined.
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2020/06/why-does-this-government-get-away-with.html
June 30, 2020
Why does this government get away with murder?
In the government’s final press conference Chris Whitty, the Government’s chief medical officer, said “I would be surprised and delighted if we weren’t in this current situation through the winter and into next spring.” The significance of that statement cannot be overstated. Deaths in the UK from the virus are currently running 100 every day. (The true total may be higher.) The chief medical officer is saying don’t expect to see deaths running at an order of magnitude lower before the Spring of next year.
I fear we have become desensitized over coronavirus deaths. We keep being told by the government that they are at a much lower level than they used to be, every graph shows deaths are much lower than they were at the peak, resulting in a danger that we regard daily deaths around a hundred as somehow inevitable. But they are not inevitable. They are an order of magnitude higher than deaths in other European countries. Here is a chart of a three day moving average of deaths per day in the UK and some of our nearest neighbours over the past month.
[Graph]
With the possible exception of Sweden, which chose not to lockdown, daily deaths in the UK are an order of magnitude higher compared to our neighbours. If you think this has anything to do with the UK’s population size, there is the same chart per capita.
[Graph]
The only change is that Sweden now leapfrogs over us. From all those who write for The Telegraph and other right wing outlets saying we shouldn’t have locked down I look forward to their profuse apologies.
This comparison shows there is nothing inevitable about a hundred or more people dying from coronavirus every day. Other countries have got numbers much lower, so why can’t we? The answer is that our government has chosen not to cut numbers further. Our numbers are higher because our lockdown was less severe than in other countries, and we started reducing an already weaker lockdown while deaths were still high. The government didn’t protect care homes, and it didn’t protect medical staff. And the government decided to farm out test, trace and isolate (TTI) to their private sector friends rather than expand experienced local authorities. In other words there are a host of government failures that have led to deaths going down more slowly than our neighbours.
What is equally scandalous, but largely unnoticed by the media, is the government intends to do little to rectify the situation. That was the gist of Chris Whitty’s remarks. Let’s put 100 deaths a day in context. On average 5 people die a day from road traffic accidents. Far fewer die on average from deaths as a result of terrorism. But just think of the media publicity each terrorist incident gets in the UK. Coronavirus deaths can be just as accidental, perhaps being in the wrong place at the wrong time and being infected by a complete stranger.
One reason the government gets away with it is by playing off the majority against a minority. People are desperate to get back to normal. Businesses fear for their existence if lockdown continues. It seems churlish to spoil the day by saying we need to wait for numbers to come down further. Another reason is that the media seems obsessed about a ‘second wave’, and fails to notice the first wave is still killing more than a hundred a day. But there is no getting away from the fact that the government by its actions appear rather indifferent to people dying.
Their excuse is that they are saving the economy. This is nonsense. If daily infection numbers remain high, people will be reluctant to resume social consumption. This in turn will threaten the viability of some businesses, and lead to a lot of unemployment as other firms slim down. The government, by ending lockdown too early, is creating an economic crisis that will hit the UK in the second half of this year.
The root causes of this failure are two basic flaws in the government’s thinking. The first is penny-pinching by the Chancellor and the Treasury. I hate the word, but the fiscal space is there to save around 500 lives a week by giving support to individuals and businesses. It was the Chancellor who initiated the first relaxation of lockdown by insisting those who couldn’t work from home went back to work. The second is the Prime Minister’s dislike of lockdown which allowed the UK to flirt with herd immunity at the beginning of the pandemic and is now ending the lockdown with too many people dying.
Yet the government remains ahead in the polls. They have allowed tens of thousands of excess deaths, and continue to allow people to die who needn’t have done so, yet more people would still vote for them than the only alternative, an alternative government that does not suffer from the same flaws as this one. Incredibly 44% approve of the government’s handling of the pandemic. Trump famously boasted that if he shot someone in Times Square his popularity would be undented. This government through their incompetence and ideological blinkers have killed tens of thousands and still voters would put them back into government. If tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths cannot do it, just what will it take to diminish the popularity of this government?
— Simon Wren-Lewis
This essay by Simon Wren-Lewis is especially important and I would hope will be given considerable attention and thought. Just what sort of values does the British government reflect in its policies on the coronavirus?
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
July 1, 2020
Coronavirus
UK
Cases ( 313,483)
Deaths ( 43,906)
The British deaths to confirmed coronavirus cases ratio is 14%.
As high as the per capita level of deaths in Sweden is, the level in Britain is far higher:
June 30, 2020
Coronavirus (Deaths per million)
UK ( 647)
Sweden ( 528)
Germany ( 108)
Denmark ( 105)
Finland ( 59)
Norway ( 46)
July 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,758,044)
Deaths ( 130,435)
India
Cases ( 604,808)
Deaths ( 17,848)
UK
Cases ( 313,483)
Deaths ( 43,906)
Mexico
Cases ( 226,089)
Deaths ( 27,769)
Germany
Cases ( 195,998)
Deaths ( 9,053)
Canada
Cases ( 104,271)
Deaths ( 8,615)
China
Cases ( 83,534)
Deaths ( 4,634)
July 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,765,667)
Deaths ( 130,621)
Of possible interest, from the current NEJM:
Covid-19: Facing the Monster in Haiti
Race and Medicine
Coronavirus
The “exclude NY/NJ/CT” curves are tough to figure out. Deaths seem to lag an initial ramp up of cases which makes sense but then decline quite a lot when the per day case identification plateaus. Did treatment get a lot better in this period? Or maybe the testing criteria expanded to the extent that the “plateau” in cases really represents a true decline? Or possibly the viral amount to infect a person who eventually succumbs is far lower than for most of the population, so people at high risk of a bad result are also more likely to get that initial infection….the fragile die early and that early case ramp up was skewed heavily to the fragile?
July 1, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 2,778,130)
Deaths ( 130,785)
India
Cases ( 605,216)
Deaths ( 17,848)
UK
Cases ( 313,483)
Deaths ( 43,906)
Mexico
Cases ( 226,089)
Deaths ( 27,769)
Germany
Cases ( 196,324)
Deaths ( 9,061)
Canada
Cases ( 104,271)
Deaths ( 8,615)
Sweden
Cases ( 69,692)
Deaths ( 5,370)
China
Cases ( 83,534)
Deaths ( 4,634)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/01/health/coronavirus-recovery-survivors.html
July 1, 2020
Here’s What Recovery From Covid-19 Looks Like for Many Survivors
Continuing shortness of breath, muscle weakness, flashbacks, mental fogginess and other symptoms may plague patients for a long time.
By Pam Belluck
We had zero (0) deaths in Massachusetts yesterday!
For MA, that really is an accomplishment given the population density. They mush be using masks, social distancing, and not gathering in crowds.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/02/world/europe/uk-coronavirus-domestic-abuse.html
July 2, 2020
As Domestic Abuse Rises, U.K. Failings Leave Victims in Peril
At least 26 women and girls have been killed during the coronavirus lockdown, and others were trapped with abusers. But pleas for emergency support have largely gone unanswered.
By Amanda Taub and Jane Bradley
LONDON — The British government, after failing to heed early warnings that domestic abuse would soar during the coronavirus lockdown, is still struggling to adequately respond more than four months later. For victims trapped with their abusers, the consequences have been catastrophic.
During the first month after the lockdown began in late March, sixteen women and girls were killed in suspected domestic homicides — more than triple the number from the same period in 2019. At least 10 more have died in the two months since then. The oldest of them was 82 years old. The youngest, killed alongside her mother and 4-year-old sister, was 2.
Distress calls to abuse hotlines are soaring. Charities are overwhelmed, while some emergency housing providers cannot meet demand. An already overstretched court system is suffering lengthy delays and has allowed some abusers to return home, despite restraining orders.
By contrast, New Zealand included domestic abuse preparations in its broader lockdown planning from the start. Italy, Spain and other countries set up nationwide programs to house abuse victims in hotels if existing shelters were full. Germany made an open-ended pledge to fund shelters and other crucial services.
Britain did none of this. Interviews with more than 50 government and law enforcement officials, academic experts, front-line support workers and abuse survivors show that British leaders never prioritized domestic abuse in lockdown planning and are still failing to quickly provide help. Early in the lockdown, the government promised 37 million pounds, or about $46 million, in emergency funds for domestic abuse charities, but as yet only £1 million has reached front-line organizations.
The National Oversight Group on Domestic Abuse — a cross-party advisory group set up under former Prime Minister Theresa May — has not convened once during the pandemic. The government’s overall pandemic plan, published on March 3, includes no mention of domestic abuse…
The ways in which the British have handled the period of coronavirus spread are shocking to me, but there has been almost no criticism of government policy from Labour and scant criticism from supposedly independent analysts. Simon Wren-Lewis is an exception:
https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2020/06/why-does-this-government-get-away-with.html
June 30, 2020
Why does this government get away with murder?