30,697,080 total cases
956,438 dead
22,339,514 recovered
In the US:
6,925,941 total cases
203,171 dead
4,191,894 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
By now I’d expect nursing homes or other places with similarly vulnerable populations to have figured out some ways to get around this.
No doubt in my mind that collecting together large cohorts of young adults facilitates behaviors that are not socially distanced, especially in a state that has many who don’t wear masks and such. That increases rates among young adults of course. Also little doubt that by end of summer many young adults were already engaging in such behaviors, just living within households and communities with much greater and closer contact with older higher risk adults.
Neither is absolute.
There is some level of increased exposure to staff etc. in college communities, not so often “close” but contact. And there is some level of decreased contact to higher risk older adults throughout the rest of the state that results from these young adults to greater degrees NOT living in close contact with higher risk people when they are pre-symptomatic and at peak risk to spread it, per infected individual dramatically reducing both the numbers of contacts and the risk of each one.
More of these young adults will return to their parent’s households and home communities over the extended family contact times of Thanksgiving through New Years, likely when influenza picks up, as “resolveds” less likely to be contagious to higher risk family members then.
The net impact is really hard to know.
No new deaths reported in Hawaii today, but yesterday we had a record 13. The previous record was only five. To date, total cases in Hawaii number 11,326 with 120 deaths. Next Thursday is supposed to be the end of the current four-week lockdown. We’ll see.
30,984,437 total cases
961,400 dead
22,583,470 recovered
In the US:
6,967,403 total cases
203,824 dead
4,223,693 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
31,240,317 total cases
965,068 dead
22,835,563 recovered
In the US:
7,004,768 total cases
204,118 dead
4,250,140 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
I was just looking at the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus site this morning. There have been sudden and sharp rises in several states –
Wisconsin hit a new high of 2469 cases just two days ago, about three times its previous high
Utah of 1038 on the same day, considerably above its previous high of 813 cases
Puerto Rico hit a high of 990, well above its previous high of 719 for a single day.
All of these, as I say, are very sudden, and all appear to still be going up very rapidly.
The states aren’t anywhere near each other. Does anyone know a possible cause? This seems weird.
There continue to be North and South Dakota and surrounding states, but for the most part these aren’t sudden rises, and I think they’re the continuing aftermath of Sturgis. But the ones in Wisconsin, Utah, and Puerto Rico can’t be explained by a single such incident (as far as I know). Yet you’ve got that simultaneous, sudden striking increase.
Here in Canada, lots of news articles have been saying we’re experiencing the second wave, since Ontario’s and Quebec’s daily case counts have been near or exceeded 400 for a few days in a row (numbers not seen since May).
Ottawa: Ottawa officially in COVID-19 pandemic's 2nd wave, says city's medical officer of health | CBC News
Ontario general: Premier limits gathering sizes provincewide as Ontario reports 407 new cases of COVID-19 | CBC News
Montreal: Montreal, Quebec City under new restrictions as Quebec tries to fend off 2nd wave of COVID-19 | CBC News (Canada’s epicenter)
Some cities in Quebec changed their guidelines yesterday, because of spikes (as per that last link above):
News sites around here are reporting a second wave in Europe as well: https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/how-it-all-went-wrong-in-europe-as-second-wave-grips-continent-1.5111846
@psychonaut, how are things going in Austria?
I’ve checked in on Quebec from time to time just because of how similar its numbers have been, in many ways, to Sweden’s. Not sure what all differences in approaches there have been, though, from the beginning.
How is Sweden doing now, do you happen to know? Are cases rising there too?
IME, most people in my neighborhood in Montreal weren’t wearing masks (indoors or out) until they were made mandatory indoors, I think in July. Until then, I would often be the only person I saw wearing a mask as I went out to run errands, but after that date I started to see more masks outdoors as well. More, but still 50% of people or fewer (100% indoors, people in my neighborhood have been fine wearing them indoors).
Apparently Quebec reported 586 new cases today, sigh.
I just read this this morning.
…When most of Europe locked down their populations early in the pandemic by closing schools, restaurants, gyms and even borders, Swedes kept enjoying many freedoms.
The relatively low-key strategy captured the world’s attention, but at the same time it coincided with a per capita death rate that was much higher than in other Nordic countries.
Now, as infection numbers surge again in much of Europe, the country of 10 million people has some of the lowest numbers of new coronavirus cases – and only 14 virus patients in intensive care.
…“We must recognize that Sweden, at the moment, has avoided the increase that has been seen in some of the other countries in western Europe,” WHO Europe’s senior emergency officer, Catherine Smallwood, said Thursday. “I think there are lessons for that. We will be very keen on working and hearing more from the Swedish approach.”
According to the European Center for Disease Control, Sweden has reported 30.3 new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 inhabitants in the last 14 days, compared with 292.2 in Spain, 172.1 in France, 61.8 in the U.K. and 69.2 in Denmark, all of which imposed strict lockdowns early in the pandemic.
Overall, Sweden has 88,237 reported infections and 5,864 fatalities from the virus, or 57.5 deaths per 100,000 inhabitants since the beginning of the crisis.
…
It remains to be seen if there will be a second wave.
I read the following and almost cried, because this cannot happen in the USA.
…Most of the changes involved voluntary actions by citizens, rather than rules imposed by the government.
This trust given to the population to shoulder personal responsibility in the pandemic puts Sweden at odds with most other countries that used coercive measures such as fines to force compliance.
This is often attributed to a Swedish model of governance, where large public authorities comprised of experts develop and recommend measures that the smaller ministries are expected to follow. In other words, the people trust the experts and scientists to develop reasonable policies, and the government trusts the people to follow the guidelines.
…
My bold.
Sigh.
thanks @ThelmaLou! Hmm, that’s interesting.
I feel you. There are apparently thousands of people here who don’t trust the experts either: Thousands protest Quebec's mask regulations in downtown Montreal | CTV News (anti-mask rally fueled by conspiracy theories). Even this small minority of Canadians is pretty scary, to me, I can’t even imagine what people in the US are going through…I hope things change for the better.
For Wisconsin, about half of the new cases in recent days have been among people under 30; this is all coming a few weeks after schools reopened, and many of them reopened to face-to-face learning, including the UW system. I know that UW-Madison has seen a big spike, to the point where they had to stop in-person classes for two weeks, and required residents in several of the high-rise dormitories to quarantine.
So, at least one of the answers to “why the sudden spike,” in this case, is “schools opening up, and college students doing what college students do.”
I went to the state site and couldn’t find this out, but I wonder how many of those college kids were tested in the weeks and months leading up to the return to school. I can readily imagine a scenario where they had no reason or desire to be tested before they returned to school, where testing was then compulsory. You can’t see what you can’t test for – well, in the case of that age cohort, anyway.
Why are only those three states peaking, though? There are colleges and schools opening all over.
Bah - I had found a map earlier that showed a dot map of schools & their plans, but now I can’t find it. What I saw though was that Wisconsin was more in-person than most states, but Utah? Nothing different from most there, it was mostly online.
I think the reason for the uptick is that it has been two weeks since Labor Day weekend. Isn’t there usually an uptick in new cases two weeks after large gatherings?
No. Cases did start to rise over the summer around June 16, which people blamed on Memorial Day, but this seems pretty dubious, since there is no discernable uptick after Easter or Mother’s Day, and cases started dropping about the same amount of time after the Fourth of July. All of these seem much more likely to be occasions for large gatherings than Memorial Day, and yet, nothing happened. (I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of anybody having a Memorial Day party or going out for Memorial Day brunch or anything – it is, after all, a holiday about honoring the war dead!)
31,482,604 total cases
969,298 dead
23,110,086 recovered
In the US:
7,046,216 total cases
204,506 dead
4,299,525 recovered
Yesterday’s numbers for comparison:
No, but it’s a long weekend, and one on which a lot of people traditionally travel, or at least have cookouts, during it. Even if they aren’t specifically “observing” Memorial Day, they’re making use of the holiday weekend.
I suspect, though it’s just a guess, that the spike after Memorial Day was related to the long weekend, as well as stay-at-home orders being lifted, and generally better weather than in the spring. So, a lot of people went out and cut loose after being cooped up all spring.