785,779 confirmed infections
37,816 dead
165,607 recovered
In the US:
164,253 confirmed infections
3,166 dead
5,506 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
Reports are coming out of Wuhan that the death toll was not 2,500 like the authorities said, but more like 40,000 or possibly even higher. I don’t doubt it at all.
At this point it’s a bit “so what” re China. We didn’t trust their stats in the first place, and we have the rest of the world for statistics about infections, deaths and so forth. The only interesting bit is: did China actually contain Covid, or are there ongoing large breakouts? That would be something quite hard to cover up, and quite useful information.
A member of the New Jersey National Guard has died. A civilian contractor and a military dependent have also died.
The San Francisco Bay Area counties were among the first in the nation, on March 16, to declare that shelter-in-place order. Now, two weeks later, there are beginning to be signs that it’s working. The exploding case counts apparently aren’t exploding quite as fast as otherwise predicted. In another two weeks, we’ll have a better idea how it’s working.
Coronavirus slowing in Bay Area? Experts track data to see whether shelter in place is working, San Francisco Chronicle, March 28, 2020.
The Bay Area shutdown, originally scheduled to end on April 7, has been extended to May 1.
Berkeley, Bay Area to extend shelter-in-place order until May 1
You should. Many European governments have declared a state of emergency but none of them have decided that the best way of dealing with it is to grant someone dictatorial powers indefinitely.
Even before the current crisis, Hungary has been increasingly viewed by other members of the EU as a pariah state. Prime minister Viktor Orbán, once the West’s darling of post-Soviet Hungary, has used his supermajority to push through a number of very questionable and controversial laws and constitutional amendments. These include restricting election campaigning to state-controlled media outlets, reforming the electoral process in a way that gives a clear advantage to Orbán’s own party (think gerrymandering, but procedural rather than geographical), putting the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (of which I am a public-body member) under direct political control and dissolving its research institutions, effectively shutting the door to all asylum seekers, revoking the accreditation of degree programs (such as gender studies) that are deemed too “liberal”, shutting down entire universities for the same reason, retroactively lowering the mandatory retirement age of judges in order to pack the courts with new and loyal appointees, and even removing the word “Republic” from the name of the country. All this has earned Hungary a formal censure by the European Parliament for “a breach of the values on which the Union is founded”, suspension of Orbán’s party from its membership in the EU-wide European People’s Party, and hundreds of complaints to and dozens of unfavourable judgments by the European Court of Human Rights.
There is therefore a well-founded fear among Hungarian opposition parties and the rest of the EU that Orbán is not going to play nice with his new powers.
ETA: I see Hungary is already throwing mud at the detractors of its new dictatorship. The foreign minister has just posted on Facebook that the “international liberal media” is attacking Hungary “because the democratically elected Hungarian Parliament has given us the powers to protect our country from the worldwide pandemic”.
Maybe, just maybe, we’re starting to turn the corner on this thing. Apparently yesterday’s initial death totals for Sunday were low due to weekend reporting issues, and Worldometer has revised the totals (numbers below).
But the big news is that the Sunday + Monday death total (936) is essentially the same as the Friday + Saturday death total (925). (The individual daily numbers are 400, 525, 363, 573.) I expected the total for Monday alone to hit 1000, and I can tell you I’m quite happy to be wrong.
The people who are dying now were probably infected 2-3 weeks (or more) ago, so this would be the result of actions taken during the second and maybe the third week of March. And we were really just starting to respond widely at that point.
I really have to applaud Germany. Most of my income for the year comes over the summer working as a kid’s overnight camp director, so I was facing financial catastrophe. They quickly approved and implemented a financial aid package just a few days ago granting 5000 bucks for freelancers and the self-employed, which today appeared in my bank account. Definitely a weight off my shoulders.
Not Rodgers and Hammerstein, but here’s Randy Rainbow parodying Adelaide’s Lament from Guys and Dolls.
Folks, can we have a separate thread for this kind of stuff? Please?
As someone who does research at a history museum, * absolutely *. The internet is already life changing for being able to access so much more information and many more resources without having to travel to other places. And blogs, message boards and social media are basically the modern equivalent to diaries and correspondence.
Man, I completely disagree that it’s “so what”. We need every bit of * accurate * information about this virus as possible in order to try to fight it. The death count being that much higher would mean Italy (and Spain) isn’t necessarily an extreme outlier and that would change a lot of calculations and projections.
Thanks for fleshing out the details of this development. I was not especially aware of Orban and did not realize Hungary was in such a state. I can see how such a move could Potentially lead to strict “get tough” measures to control the outbreak, but in the context of your description it doesn’t sound like that’s where it will end (or maybe even start).
It is weird to see the “war on liberals” taken to such an extreme since I don’t really accept “liberals” as a valid category at all- I think the concept is mostly a demonized, fictional foil. Nobody really meets the description of “liberal” as told by liberal-haters. But it is simple and focuses the mind on partisan us-vs-them ideas which can be useful to politicians.
Doesn’t sound like they are to the point of burning books, but the stifling of research and corruption of the electoral process is… creepy.
Yes. If it turns out that China’s death toll is ten times higher, and that people are still dropping, then perhaps we should not look to China as a model for fighting the virus.
I think Tagesspiegel’s interactive map is significantly better.
Look, either you believe the information China is putting out, or you don’t. If you don’t, there’s nothing that can fix that. If China came out this week and said, “hey, we were under reporting, here’s the real figures!” would you suddenly believe those figures? Of course not. So we already have useful information or we don’t, and if it’s the latter there’s nothing that can fix that. That’s, “so what?”
In the UK, Dominic Cummings (Brexit architect, advisor to Boris Johnson) has caught Covid-19.
Today in Austria:
[ul]
[li] Yesterday I reported that supermarkets will be distributing free face masks beginning on Wednesday, and it will be required to wear these in the stores. The chancellor subsequently explained in an interview last night that it is his intention for people to eventually start wearing these masks in all public places, not just in supermarkets. Supermarkets were chosen as the first place to start distributing and wearing the masks, because almost everyone goes shopping at one point, and because the supermarkets have an established supply and distribution chain. The idea behind wearing masks is not to protect the wearer against infection, but rather to help prevent people who are (perhaps unwittingly) infectious from spreading the virus when speaking, coughing, or sneezing.[/li]
The chancellor says that wearing masks is going to be the “new normal” and that supermarkets will be the place where we must all learn and practise doing this. He said that before the crisis, he was often quizzical, and even irritated, at all the Asian tourists in Vienna who wore face masks, but after speaking directly with Asian politicians and health experts, he has come to understand and embrace their use.
[li] Besides masks, the government has introduced further health restrictions regarding shopping: First, when going shopping, you must go alone. No more family trips to the supermarket. Second, surfaces touched by customers, such as shopping cart handles, must be disinfected after use. (I’ve already witnessed some cashiers wiping down debit/credit card readers after customers make a PIN transaction.) Third, all cashiers must be protected with plexiglass screens, though most shops I’ve visited in the past week have already installed these. Fourth, stores must take measures to enforce social distancing, such as only allowing in a certain number of customers per square metre of floor space, and marking spacing lines in front of the tills.[/li]
[li] The country’s classrooms remain closed and the education minister says they will remain so indefinitely. A survey of parents indicate that 90% are in favour of this measure. Schools are providing children with distance learning material, and 80% of parents report satisfaction with it. The education ministry is also providing funds to families who need to buy distance learning infrastructure (laptops, etc.) for their children. However, concerns are being raised about the social development of students in isolation. The government is therefore recruiting 900 psychologists to contact and work directly with students.[/li]
[li] As Austria’s intensive care beds are not yet at full capacity, the government has agreed to take on some patients from other countries. Three critical patients from France have been transferred to Salzburg for treatment, and five from Italy have been accepted by Tyrol.[/li]
[li] The government is performing antibody tests on doctors, and in the future will expand this to other health care workers. These tests are intended to determine which people have already been exposed to and recovered from the virus and are presumably immune to further infections.[/li]
[li] For some time now, certain districts in the country have been placed under a strict quarantine, with nobody allowed to enter or leave the district. In the past few days, some of these quarantines have been lifted, but as of today this stricter quarantine has been extended to some new districts (Altenmarkt, Zell am See and Saalbach).[/li]
[li] Current statistics: 10,180 confirmed infections, 128 dead, 1095 recovered. 179,000 people have registered as unemployed since 15 March. Dozens of major companies are taking advantage of the government’s aid package to lay off most of their workforce while still paying 80% of their salaries.[/li]
[/ul]
OK, but what would we do differently if we found out the Chinese cases and deaths were, say, 5x as high as they’ve reported?