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You are here: Home / Healthcare / COVID-19 Coronavirus / COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Tuesday / Wednesday, April 28-29

COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Tuesday / Wednesday, April 28-29

by Anne Laurie|  April 29, 20204:15 am| 19 Comments

This post is in: COVID-19 Coronavirus, Foreign Affairs, Show Us on the Doll Where the Invisible Hand Touched You

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More than three million cases of coronavirus have been confirmed around the world

Of those, more than 840,000 have recovered so far, while 210,000+ have diedhttps://t.co/XZbxHrNZTx pic.twitter.com/o6lT1T9F7h

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 28, 2020

US tops 1 million #coronavirus cases, according to Johns Hopkins U. Pandemic has claimed 57000+ US lives & leads the world in confirmed infections at 1,002,498, according to the institution's latest count. Image: Hopkins' case distribution https://t.co/K4v64I9SHc pic.twitter.com/Ox3j6SmE6h

— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) April 29, 2020

We're all getting a good sense of the many ways states differ in responding to #COVID19

It turns out there's also a fair amount of variation in state rules pertaining to visitors, staff testing & PPE for nursing home & assisted living facilities.

NEW: https://t.co/GCx3H0Cdv5

— Tricia Neuman (@tricia_neuman) April 28, 2020

This graphic shows how the cumulative number of estimated U.S. covid deaths projected by the model have changed through the various updates. The latest 4/27 update to the model shows another increase in the projection for median cumulative deaths to 74,073. pic.twitter.com/pgDKhiCOif

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 28, 2020

As some states lift virus restrictions, a new poll finds a potential hurdle to keeping new cases down. A Gallup-West Health Healthcare Costs Survey found about 1 in 10 adults say cost would keep them from seeking care if they thought they were infected. https://t.co/5zRAgHVEDi

— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) April 28, 2020

Seriously good, short read:

Great interview with ⁦@CT_Bergstrom⁩. ‘There is no absolute truth': an infectious disease expert on Covid-19, misinformation and 'bullshit' https://t.co/HjbmrEJh0g

— Marc Lipsitch (@mlipsitch) April 29, 2020

… We’re all used to verbal bullshit. We’re all used to campaign promises and weasel words, and we’re pretty good at seeing through that because we’ve had a lot of practice. But as the world has become increasingly quantified and the currency of arguments has become statistics, facts and figures and models and such, we’re increasingly confronted, even in the popular press, with numerical and statistical arguments. And this area’s really ripe for bullshit, because people don’t feel qualified to question information that’s given to them in quantitative form.

Are there bullshit narratives about the coronavirus that you are concerned about right now?

What’s happened with this pandemic that we’re not accustomed to in the epidemiology community is that it’s been really heavily politicized. Even when scientists are very well-intentioned and not trying to support any side of the narrative, when they do work and release a paper it gets picked up by actors with political agendas.

Whether it’s talking about seroprevalence or estimating the chance that this is even going to come to the United States at all each study gets picked up and placed into this little political box and sort of used as a cudgel to beat the other side with.

So even when the material isn’t being produced as bullshit, it’s being picked up and used in the service of that by overstating its claims, by cherry-picking the information that’s out there and so on. And I think that’s kind of the biggest problem that we’re facing…

% who agree the economy should reopen even if covid-19 is not fully contained.
Lower than you’d expect.

Russia 60%
China 58%
Italy 53%
India 51%
Germany 50%
US 35%
Australia 32%
UK 23%

-Ipsos

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) April 28, 2020

It helps if your nation is effectively cut off from the world by elimination of air travel. South Korea, Australia, NZ — none have land borders (unless you count the Korean DMZ as "crossable"). This makes #COVID19 control a 100% domestic problem. https://t.co/Wr7aM0rJ3P

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) April 28, 2020

1/2 This is something we've been discussing for some time: Evidence from China shows while manufacturing has restarted, consumer activity hasn't rebounded. Partly it's reduced consumer confidence, but people are also afraid of viral spread and staying home https://t.co/nJXkovUE6g

— Scott Gottlieb, MD (@ScottGottliebMD) April 28, 2020

After months of successfully controlling its coronavirus outbreak, Singapore has seen thousands of new cases — including more than 1,400 new cases in a single day.

Here’s how the coronavirus came surging back in Singapore. https://t.co/8ExU8SPILd

— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 29, 2020


Coronavirus cases in India climb towards 30,000; Pakistan mosques a growing worry https://t.co/DCTT6EERGn pic.twitter.com/3G2MBPZocx

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 28, 2020

Russia reports record daily rises in new coronavirus cases and deaths https://t.co/rhCz0gayXI pic.twitter.com/UWhEO0Wuaz

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 28, 2020

Putin admits PPE shortage as lockdown extended https://t.co/7X2bdgettB

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 28, 2020

Public health's eternal battle: A crisis averted is by definition not suffered through, leading some to conclude the measures that averted the crisis were overreactions. Germany's easing of #Covid19 restrictions will be interesting to watch. By @kakape ??https://t.co/Xr6WZqZtG0

— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) April 28, 2020

UK on track to become one of Europe's worst hit in COVID-19 pandemic https://t.co/0nndgCD3UJ pic.twitter.com/5sX1ds95pS

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 28, 2020

French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe says the country's lockdown measures have saved 62,000 lives over a monthhttps://t.co/WLv3Go1dMw pic.twitter.com/UyKWMsWuTz

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 28, 2020

France has become the first major European soccer league to cancel its season https://t.co/nB34uoIZw1 pic.twitter.com/lfc9pp19Wv

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 28, 2020

Coronavirus: Spain plans return to 'new normal' by end of June https://t.co/TKJediBmiB

— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) April 28, 2020

Special session for AFTCOR taskforce. This session is in collaboration between @AfricaCDC and @JackMa @foundation_ma, @AlibabaGroup, Alibaba Health.
The Chinese experience in dealing with COVID-19 will be shared.#AfricaResponds #FactsNotFear pic.twitter.com/4qnW8dg4DN

— Africa CDC (@AfricaCDC) April 28, 2020

NEW: Everything you ever wanted to know about antibody studies and what they can tell us about the #coronavirus.

All the answers to your burning questions: Are we close to herd immunity? Does this mean it's actually like the flu?
Spoilers: No and no.https://t.co/UOIpN4aCkW

— Caroline Chen (@CarolineYLChen) April 28, 2020

Doctors in Texas successfully treat a severe case of #COVID19 in a 3-week-old infant in what's considered one of the 1st cases of its kind. Experts attribute their success to early recognition. Case reported in the New England Journal of Medicine https://t.co/zUQkQy1ocd pic.twitter.com/CNTFwPZYEp

— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) April 28, 2020

Coming up with an estimate (& it will be an estimate) of how many people have died in the #Covid19 pandemic will show a number that exceeds what we know right now. By how much? Still unclear. But excess mortality data already suggests it may be sizeable. https://t.co/tBS7JAcCRE

— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) April 28, 2020

COVID-19 testing for anyone draws a crowd in hard-hit Detroit https://t.co/fflrdcXFtU pic.twitter.com/JlHBb5Fktq

— Reuters (@Reuters) April 29, 2020

American Geriatric Society develops roadmap for govt action to aid assisted living facilities. Nursing homes & other congregate care centers have been hit hard by #COVID19. 800k+ people live in 28k assisted living facilities, which employ 450k+ people https://t.co/WsHmQtxg8Z pic.twitter.com/KHqIgc0Dxn

— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) April 28, 2020

We need a clearer understanding of where people are getting infected and how that has changed over time. What fraction of new cases are in households? Special settings like long term care or correctional facilities? We shld know this ideally for each county or at least state. 1/

— Caitlin Rivers, PhD (@cmyeaton) April 28, 2020

If special settings like nursing homes and correctional facilities are the source of most new cases, we may assess general community risk as lower. We know those places are v. high risk, but it would be good to know what % of new cases now are associated with those facilities 3/

— Caitlin Rivers, PhD (@cmyeaton) April 28, 2020

If general community transmission is still widespread, with cases diagnosed in all sorts of places and conditions, that suggests staying home to slow the spread has not been effective, and if that is the case, we need to figure out why and what more can be done. 5/

— Caitlin Rivers, PhD (@cmyeaton) April 28, 2020

“You’re going to have economies with greatly reduced activity levels for years. We’re definitely in the tens [of trillions], which blows the mind. If you’d asked me six months ago, I wouldn’t have thought that was possible.” Bill Gates. https://t.co/ukLJaAEPjc

— Anthony Costello (@globalhlthtwit) April 28, 2020

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Reader Interactions

19Comments

  1. 1.

    Mary G

    April 29, 2020 at 4:45 am

    Carl Bergstrom rocks. I started following him on Twitter last July when he posted about his friends who are crows. He has a book coming out in August titled “Calling Bullshit” I hope to read.

  2. 2.

    Amir Khalid

    April 29, 2020 at 4:58 am

    Malaysia’s daily numbers: 94 new cases, total 5,945. Only 22 new cases are from local community infection; the other 72 are imported cases i.e. Malaysians returning from abroad. 55 patients recovered and discharged, total 4,087 or 68.7% of all reported cases. No deaths, total still 100. Case fatality rate: 2.39%. Worldometer link to come when updated.

  3. 3.

    slightly_peeved

    April 29, 2020 at 5:00 am

    That tweet about NZ and Australia’s response really nails it. Clearly the issue for the US was all the infected people who drove over the US’s land border with the EU.

  4. 4.

    Mary G

    April 29, 2020 at 5:10 am

    @Amir Khalid: Very impressive stats. Is there a very strict lockdown or universal mask use when people do go out? I am still enraged about our VP prancing around the Mayo Clinic bare faced.

  5. 5.

    Amir Khalid

    April 29, 2020 at 5:22 am

    @Mary G:

    Lockdown here is quite strictly observed and enforced. From what I’ve seen, most of us here are compliant with lockdown and mask-wearing. And our national leaders are definitely not doing photo-op visits to hospitals.

    Re the Mayo Clinic visit: Did Pence invite himself, or did the Clinic invite him? With so much work to do, I can’t imagine them having much time for VIP visitors.

  6. 6.

    Mary G

    April 29, 2020 at 5:29 am

    @Amir Khalid: They are in a very red area of a blue state so I would guess that Jared cooked it up with a big donor there to distract from Twitler’s stupid off the cuff “remedies,” but Pence’s arrogance was all anybody could talk about, so it failed.

  7. 7.

    Amir Khalid

    April 29, 2020 at 5:33 am

    @Mary G:

    I haven’t been to Rochester in decades, but I do remember it’s quite rural.

  8. 8.

    terben

    April 29, 2020 at 6:19 am

    Australian Dept of Health bulletin:

    ‘As at 3:00pm on 29 April 2020, there have been 6,746 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Australia. There have been 15 new cases since 3:00pm yesterday.

    Of the 6,746 confirmed cases in Australia, 89 have died and 5,667 have been reported as recovered from COVID-19. More than 544,000 tests have been conducted across Australia.’

    There are now less than 1000 active cases in the country, less than 100 of those are hospitalised. States which have imposed restrictions beyond the national guidelines have either eased or indicated that they will ease them this week.  There is a note of cautious optimism in the air.

  9. 9.

    Amir Khalid

    April 29, 2020 at 6:29 am

    @Amir Khalid:

    Worldometer link.

  10. 10.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    April 29, 2020 at 6:30 am

    One example [of intentional bullshit] might be this insistence for a while on graphing the number of cases on a per-capita basis, so that people could say the US response is so much better than the rest of the world because we have a slower rate of growth per capita. That was basically graphical malfeasance or bullshit. When a wildfire starts spreading, you’re interested in how it’s spreading now, not whether it’s spreading in a 100-acre wood or millions of square miles of national forest.

    Fun fact, if the US was handling the Virus like England, we would have 120,000 dead right now, like Belgium, the worst hit country in the world, 180,000 dead.  And this is the US with the Trump admins non-existent virus response.  Maybe it’s me, but an informed, actively involved public may just help more than well informed leaders and a docile public.  So do on on about weasel words…

  11. 11.

    Ixnay

    April 29, 2020 at 6:35 am

    The good Dr. Ixnay and I have been discussing the alarming undercount of fatalities caused by Covid 19. There is clearly a need for a concise and easily understood term for this gap. Borrowing from the sabermetricians, who use WAR, Wins Above Replacement to make a players value to the team clear, she has coined DAR, Deaths Above Replacement. When you want to lay waste to a good portion of the population, you don’t want some minor league reaper who can turn the double play some of the time, you want an MVP Grim Reaper who can do the job. Feel free to steal. DAR.

  12. 12.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    April 29, 2020 at 6:35 am

    @Amir Khalid: Re the Mayo Clinic visit: Did Pence invite himself, or did the Clinic invite him? With so much work to do, I can’t imagine them having much time for VIP visitors.

    Are you being sarcastic? This is the Trump administration.

  13. 13.

    VOR

    April 29, 2020 at 8:59 am

    @Enhanced Voting Techniques:  The State of Minnesota announced a partnership with Mayo Clinic, which is based in Minnesota, to increase testing capacity about 10x. The Governor is Democratic and was targeted by Trump earlier this month with one of his “Liberate” tweets urging on the stupid people protesters. Minnesota has historically been a blue state but the local (Rochester area) Congressman is an R. I don’t know if Pence was invited or not, but his comments make it sound like he invited himself. And who is going to turn down a visit from the VP, especially at a time when the state needs federal help?
    https://www.twincities.com/2020/04/28/pence-visits-mayo-clinic-learns-of-coronavirus-testing-partnership-with-minnesota/

  14. 14.

    Laura Too

    April 29, 2020 at 9:06 am

    A few things I notice-Putin’s PPE VS Pence PPE (?) okay, lack there of. Such a striking difference would make a remarkable side by side photo comparison.  I think the Mayo visit may have come about because of the flap on 45’s tweet to “liberate MN”. Reading between the lines, a CEO of a major world corp. based in MN called 45 to tell him to knock it off or he would be getting even less PPE than he was now or some other form of blackmail. It was very effective as his little war of words ceased. It is possible the visit came about because of that. Pence’s lack of mask sort of seems like a dogs humping your leg to show dominance, outward display of affection that is actually aggression.

  15. 15.

    Mary G

    April 29, 2020 at 11:31 am

    @Laura Too: That made me laugh. You really are your uncle’s niece.

  16. 16.

    Laura Too

    April 29, 2020 at 12:40 pm

    @Mary G: A high compliment, thanks! I do miss him daily, and during this especially. I would go crazy if not for this place. I hear his voice in so many people. And I love the story tellers. He was a great story teller. And it is good to know he is remembered.

  17. 17.

    Amir Khalid

    April 29, 2020 at 12:59 pm

    Reposted from wrong thread.

    I have The Guardian‘s coronavirus liveblog on another tab. It just put up this Agence France-Presse story:

    Treating coronavirus patients with the antiviral drug remdesivir showed no “significant clinical benefits” in the first randomised trial of its kind, according to research released on Wednesday, AFP reports.

    In a study among more than 200 COVID-19 patients in Wuhan, China, published in The Lancet, doctors found no positive effects of administering the drug compared with a control group of adults.

    The findings were released after US pharmaceutical giant Gilead, which makes remdesivir, said a separate large-scale trial with the drug had showed positive results.

    “Unfortunately, our trial found that while safe and adequately tolerated, remdesivir did not provide significant benefits over placebo,” said Bin Cao from China-Japan Friendship Hospital and Capital Medical University in China, who led the research.

    “This is not the outcome we hoped for.”

    As I recall, Trump was touting remdesivir. He’s an investor in Gilead, isn’t he?

  18. 18.

    UncleEbeneezer

    April 29, 2020 at 2:02 pm

    So, a month ago I had this problem with swelling of my toes.   I went to a podiatrist, got tested for gout and some other tests then ultimately determined it was probably chilblains.  I’ve always had issues with circulation in my extremities and the weather was very cold and wet so it made total sense. They’ve since cleared up (which is par for the course with chilblains). Now it looks like this could be (asymptomatic) Covid-19 related.  Otherwise I haven’t had anything beyond usual allergy symptoms for lungs/nose etc.  Doctor’s office is closed because of Covid concerns but left a message to see if I need/can get antibody test.

    Anyways, just wanted to share for anyone else who may have these symptoms and general knowledge etc.:

    In addition to attacking the respiratory system, coronavirus may be attacking toes. Cases of a new mysterious skin condition that causes purple, blue or red discoloration of the toes, and sometimes the fingers, are popping up across the country, prompting dermatologists to wonder if there is a connection to COVID-19.

  19. 19.

    Kay

    April 29, 2020 at 2:16 pm

    My client just got one of the PPA loan/grants. 27k – we applied for 36 but they reduced it. He has a body shop with 4 employees. I’m ridiculously pleased that someone finally got one :)

    It starts to get complicated because we had already put his employees into “shared work” which is a UI program where the employer pays half their wages (for half time) and UI contributes half of what they would have gotten in unemployment. THEN they started getting the extra 600 a week so now we have to take everyone off that and into this new program because it’s the paycheck protection act so is to be used to be used for payroll (in addition to some other things).

    My take on this so far is small businesses aren’t maybe putting enough thought into this- how to use the various programs that are available to get thru this in a flexible way- plug one in and then another. I would exempt restaurants from that observation- they have a really tough situation. I could see just curling up into a ball ‘o hopelessness with owner/operator restaurant.

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