We are on day 6 on this new trajectory. We are already 500K fewer infections than the prior trajectory was projecting. At this rate we will not see 1,000,000 cases until the 8th or 9th. We have not seen an inflection point yet, each day brings more cases than the previous day so we are still exponential but we are getting close to linear growth and our health care system can handle linear growth at least at this level.
Best case scenario 100,000-150,000 people die and that’s about as many people as we lose to cancer and heart disease (combined) every year.
If we don’t get a second wave in the fall we might have a vaccine out in time for next Spring.
It occurred to me the other day, that climatologists are suddenly getting a wealth of date re: global climate change.
We’ve all seen the articles about how pollution is down over most industrial areas, due to decreased car travel, plane travel, factories closing down. This strikes me as being a great data point, however small, that climatologists will be able to use to model the effects of greenhouse gas mitigation going forward. I’d think they’d even be able to break causes down further, by comparing (say) air travel miles between last year and this, and calculating the effects of that particular activity. Lots of data means better tools for understanding.
Went to my local Wegmans tonight. I had to wait outside in line for 40 minutes to get in but once I did pretty much everything was back to normal. They even had TP! I was amused because except for a few singles the TP was packaged in giant bales so if you were going to buy some you were buying a lot.
NY Times story on Chinese Americans tapping networks in the US and in the old country. We are all Americans, dude. Front line American doctor of Chinese heritage sent out a request for help on WeChat: Three days later, Dr. Lee’s desperate plea for protective gear had worked. Members of the Millburn Short Hills Chinese Association, based about 20 miles from Montville, saw his post and took action, raising more than $50,000 and obtaining 10,000 masks, gowns and other pieces of equipment from a Chinese company with a warehouse in Queens. The gear was distributed to Envision Physician Services, Dr. Lee’s employer, as well as to other organizations.
Throughout New York and New Jersey, small groups from the Chinese-American community are uniting to fight the pandemic in this country even as they face racist remarks and some physical attacks. Using mostly WeChat, they are creating vast networks and rallying their contacts here and in China to procure supplies for doctors and nurses in need.
Due to the lockdown in India, pollution in the Indian city of Jalandhar has reduced so drastically that people can now see the Himalayan mountains, 150 miles away, from their homes.
The governments social distancing measures were aimed at reducing the R-number to 1,4. The populations excessive enthusiasm over an excuse for not having to interact with other people dropped it below 0,7.
Allstate is going to refund a bunch of Insurance premium for April and May, since people aren’t driving around. Hopefully other auto insurers will follow suit.
Good news: The FDA has finally called out Alex Jones for his lying claims about his bullshit snake oil.
"Jones has claimed the products sold on InfoWars, which have no evidence behind them, can “boost your immune system.” He said in March said the wound gel and two toothpastes are “on record taking out viruses and bacteria.”
The FDA has [warned against colloidal silver](https://subscriber.politicopro.com/article/2020/03/fda-ftc-crack-down-on-companies-making-false-coronavirus-claims-3977492), especially fake claims about the coronavirus.
FDA and the Federal Trade Commission gave the InfoWars founder 48 hours to respond to their warning and threatened to seize products or take legal action if he did not."
If I’m reading today’s Worldometer stats correctly, Washington State appears to have succeeded in bending the curve downwards, at least for a day. Yesterday WA had 8,855 active cases, today 8,824. With only 24 new deaths today, there were 7 more recoveries than new cases.
May be just an outlier, but looking at the 91-DIVOC graphs, it’s the first time for any of the hard-hit states in the US.
The lead researcher on a covid vaccine at NIH says that if all goes well, they’re expecting a vaccine for emergency personnel by fall of 2020 and might be available by Spring 2021.
Without extensive trials, how will we know its efficacy and safety? How many “emergency personnel” will be guinea pigs in very risky tryouts? And am I cynical to think this was timed to jolly the administration and avoid budget cuts?
Good News: Some Chicago area police departments, fire departments and public works departments are holding scheduled parades through neighborhoods to cheer people up, and let them get out of the house a little bit. There are even “drive-by” happy birthday requests being taken.
Bravo, police, fire, and others who are doing this!
They have already determined this is a severe enough problem to skip the normal years of Animal trials, and are going straight to small scale human testing.
The media concentrate on case counts and deaths, but I’ve always felt that the number of people hospitalized is a better progress metric. Case counts are a function of testing, and deaths are a lagging indicator because . . . people take a while to die.
Until recently, though, it was hard to track hospitalization because a lot of states weren’t reporting it. Now though, almost all of the larger ones are. And the results for the last week are encouraging. Usage in all of the larger states has peaked and is declining, meaning that more people are being discharged (or alas, dying) than being admitted.
New York peaked at 18,825 people hospitalized on April 13 and is down to 16,213 today. ICU usage has declined from 5,225 to 5,016. California has declined from 5,236 beds to 4,936; Michigan from 3,986 to 3,634, and so on.
If this keeps up for another couple of weeks we should see a significant easing of hospital system overload.
That IS encouraging. I got my hopes up last week because my Washington county had no new cases for 4 days, but since then we’ve had an 11% jump in confirmed cases. I so, SO badly want to believe we’re on the downhill side of this, and you’ve given me hope that may be the case.