Counting, as Nature does, from 31 December 2019, when “Chinese authorities notify WHO of an outbreak of ‘pneumonia of unknown causes’ in Wuhan City, Hubei”:
Dr. Anne Schuchat of the CDC: The U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country. She says the pandemic is on par w/ the devastating 1918 global pandemic, which was a transformational global experience https://t.co/Mqwr6NPn5Q
— delthia ricks ?? (@DelthiaRicks) June 30, 2020
The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control, Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said Monday.
The U.S. has set records for daily new infections in recent days as outbreaks surge mostly across the South and West. The recent spike in new cases has outpaced daily infections in April when the virus rocked Washington state and the northeast, and when public officials thought the outbreak was hitting its peak in the U.S.
“We’re not in the situation of New Zealand or Singapore or Korea where a new case is rapidly identified and all the contacts are traced and people are isolated who are sick and people who are exposed are quarantined and they can keep things under control,” she said in an interview with The Journal of the American Medical Association’s Dr. Howard Bauchner. “We have way too much virus across the country for that right now, so it’s very discouraging.”…
“This is really the beginning,” Schuchat said of the U.S.’s recent surge in new cases. “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking around the country that, hey it’s summer. Everything’s going to be fine. We’re over this and we are not even beginning to be over this. There are a lot of worrisome factors about the last week or so.”
The coronavirus has proven to be the kind of virus that Schuchat and her colleagues always feared would emerge, she said. She added that it spreads easily, no one appears to have immunity to it and it’s in fact “stealthier than we were expecting.”
“While you plan for it, you think about it, you have that human denial that it’s really going to happen on your watch, but it’s happening,” she said. “As much as we’ve studied [the 1918 flu pandemic], I think what we’re experiencing as a global community is really bad and it’s similar to that 1918 transformational experience.”…
The current outbreak in the U.S. looks like nothing in any other rich country: https://t.co/R849s69HzX pic.twitter.com/CEy8GTZsAX
— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) June 29, 2020
… Most other high-income countries are dealing with modest numbers of new cases — often an inevitable consequence of reopening — and the countries are responding aggressively. Many are following the advice of public health experts, ordering social distancing, mask-wearing and partial lockdowns and doing their best to track people who came in contact with new patients.
The United States is not. President Trump and many governors continue to flout scientific advice and send mixed messages about the seriousness of the virus.
The federal government, as The Washington Post explained in a helpful reconstruction, has failed to offer “the kind of clear and consistent messaging experts say is necessary to mount a successful public health response.”…
Timeline: How the global coronavirus pandemic unfolded https://t.co/1HuepUFdVL pic.twitter.com/E7bKDp7Zys
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 29, 2020
COVID-19 Research in Brief: December, 2019 to June, 2020 https://t.co/pygjU8JIYW
— Soumya Swaminathan (@doctorsoumya) June 29, 2020
Short thread on the near future.
Roughly speaking, we hit nadir in case growth on June 10, positive rate on June 14, and hospitalizations on June 21. With seemingly no major measures to slow this down we will achieve a new peak in hospitalization on or around July 22. 1/5 pic.twitter.com/aaA4Pr1gAN
— (((Howard Forman))) (@thehowie) June 26, 2020
That ship has sailed: The infections that will lead to those hospitalizations & deaths have already happened or are imminent. Since there have been no major policy shifts over the last few weeks, we will only see things worsen through much of July. 3/5
— (((Howard Forman))) (@thehowie) June 26, 2020
POTUS has no capacity for leadership: we need every Governor to take the public's health seriously: to find & use as much testing capacity as can be found; & to show the public that mask wearing and social distancing are matters of grave importance. 5/5
— (((Howard Forman))) (@thehowie) June 26, 2020
the 3K deaths on 9/11 influenced American foreign policy until (checks notes) oh yeah, 19 YEARS LATER; freakout over a single-digit ebola death count in the US affected an entire midterm season; etc., etc.
This "covid's just a rounding error!" crapola is not gonna work, guys https://t.co/7mLHOXyV8i
— dn (@dnnation) June 26, 2020
Baud
At least we’re not suffering from Clinton Fatigue!
Elizabelle
Send your kids back to school. Vote Biden!
Send our kids back to school.
Fair Economist
Schuchat is either spouting nonsense or (more likely) quoted out of context. Countries with worse epidemics than we have now, like Italy and Spain, managed to bring it under control. A widespread epidemic just means you have to use stringent hygiene measures like lockdown first.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: When you are dead there is no fatigue.
The Thin Black Duke
What’s depressing is knowing that nothing rational is going to happen until Joe Biden is sworn is as president in January. How bad is it going to be by then?
NotMax
New U.S. cases, past 24 hours: 59,236. Roughly the population of Utica, NY or Pontiac, MI.
Treating it a a public relations crisis and not as a public health crisis was, has been and continues to be insanely wrong, dangerous and stupid.
JPL
@Baud: Earlier I saw that we should vote for sleepy Joe, so we can once again sleep at night. I think it Conway, the good one.
JPL
Even Fox news is promoting wearing a mask.
The Thin Black Duke
@NotMax: What’s worse, Trump and his tribe of parasites see the pandemic as a business opportunity and whatever fatalities happen is acceptable collateral damage.
David Evans
@Fair Economist: Google (Spanish Prime Minister wearing mask) and you will see at least one reason why the US is not likely to do as well as Spain.
trollhattan
@The Thin Black Duke:
How bad? Worse than our imaginations allow for.
Gin & Tonic
@NotMax: But, quite frankly, nobody gives a shit about Utica.
frosty
@The Thin Black Duke: Texas Arizona and Florida reinstituted shutdowns of bars. That’s at least a little bit rational. It’s possible more could happen by January but I don’t see anything coming that’s better than a plateau at a horrible rate of infection.
satby
And I think there should be more emphasis on the long-term effects of Covid-19 that are so far big unknowns. Even patients with mild cases show lung, musculoskeletal, digestive, and kidney affects and we don’t know how permanent that damage may be.
Martin
@Fair Economist: Italy and Spain never reached the kind of widespread outbreak that we have. When it was a few cities, you could keep the country running while shutting those cities down for a spell, and you can see NYCs numbers as proof. But when it’s tearing through all of your national agricultural areas, plus cities, plus much of your manufacturing belt, you’re pretty fucked unless you plan on asking everyone to sit in the dark for a month and just eat beans.
Whether something can be contained is not based on a theoretical – in theory you can contain anything. It’s based on an institutions capacity to contain it, and we as a nation lack that. We lack the institutional discipline, we lack the leadership, we lack the infrastructure.
SiubhanDuinne
Wasn’t really focussing, so this is a paraphrase, but I have MSNBC on in the background and a few minutes ago I heard an announcement that Biden said that his first call after being (elected? inaugurated?) would be to Dr. Fauci, asking him to stay on and giving him unfettered access to the Oval Office.
Baud
NotMax
@Gin & Tonic
Not since they stopped producing Maximus Super.
:)
Snippet of trivia from times past which has stuck with me stated that Utica has the most bowling alleys per capita in the country. Make of that what you will.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
So long as he keeps 6 feet away, I hope.
Felanius Kootea
@The Thin Black Duke: Until they start to die. Someone needs to point out repeatedly that Trump and those around him get tested two times a day, every day, while most of his supporters don’t have easy access to testing.
Mingobat (f/k/a Karen in GA)
A coworker of mine walked by* a little while ago, cheerfully announcing that she wasn’t going to wear a mask because “herd immunity!” She was just in the break room with two other women. No masks, no attempts at social distancing.
Another coworker was just talking about the beach house she’s going to be renting soon with friends. In Florida.
This is going to be with us for a while.
*Yeah, they reopened my office (located in a suburb northeast of Atlanta). We have to be here three days a week despite the fact that we’ve already shown that we can do everything from home. On one hand I’m happy to have a job right now, but on the other hand I work with morons that I have to avoid as much as possible because they’re going to end up good and sick any day now.
C Stars
Utterly depressing. Here in super-liberal metropolitan northern California, only about 30% of the people in a highly trafficked public shopping area were willing to wear masks or keep them on when walking on a crowded sidewalk. This was about a week ago–I haven’t ventured back out. I just can’t fathom the selfishness.
Also, isn’t there supposed to be a big Biden speech/policy rollout today? There’s not hide nor hair of it in any of the national news sites I just checked.
Baud
@C Stars: His twitter didn’t mention anything.
ETA: NYT is reporting this:
Martin
@NotMax: That just tells me people are leaving Utica.
NotMax
@Martin
However all the resultant extra methane will accelerate climate change.
;)
C Stars
@Baud: Thanks, I didn’t see that. Here’s hoping it can cure my overwhelming sense of existential nausea…
catclub
speaking of insanely wrong, dangerous and stupid, Jen Rubin is not playing. /trump-shows-us-what-unfit-means/
Brachiator
Not too long ago, an episode of the right wing Federalist podcast showed up as a possible download. The episode description, about the pandemic, referred to the views of “so-called experts.” I wasn’t curious enough to download the episode, but I wondered who they thought were better advisors than people trained in medicine and health disciplines.
I also wonder how the right wing explains the increase in hospitalizations. Do they believe that if we don’t treat these people, there would be no virus?
bemused senior
@Elizabelle: Mom of a preschool sped teacher here, who lives with me along with her twin 4 year olds. I have cancer and a non-existent immune system. She just spent 6 months teaching virtually, including finding,designing and producing curriculum. She had many depressed meltdown moments due to feeling inadequate to deliver what her students needed. But just reopening the schools is not the answer. The buildings are not designed for social distancing and good ventilation (for one example, think of a prek-5 school with 6 bathrooms (not counting the few classrooms with one stall for the littles. For another, many rooms have Windows that don’t open.) Little kids are body fluid emitters. My daughter doesn’t believe she can safely teach while keeping me safe,, and here in the Sf Bay area she can’t afford to live elsewhere. She is not by any means the only teacher with similar concerns. It will take a huge ” infrastructure week” applied to schools to make them suitable for pandemic safety. Obviously takes longer than a week.
Bluegirlfromwyo
@Elizabelle: Biden’s slogan just needs to be “vote for me if you want to live” at this point.
catclub
@Baud: Didn’t say that Biden would be there while he has access.
catclub
Hideous bugblatter beast of traal. You cover your own eyes (with your towel, of course!) and beast is so stupid it thinks that if you cannot see it, it cannot see you.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@trollhattan: Trump is against wearing masks because it smears his make up, that kind of worse.
SiubhanDuinne
@Baud:
Presumably observing all the protocols.
From the NYT (I know, I know):
Another Scott
@Fair Economist: +1
I cannot believe that she wants us to just give up, as one might infer from the press excerpts.
Forman’s 4/5 tweet above is the important part of this thread.
Cheers,
Scott.
zzyzx
I keep seeing this prediction and I’m terrified of it, but we’re halfway through the next week and deaths are still static. I posted in the morning Corona thread a long list of theories, but I’m very confused by the fact that we’re not seeing a huge rise yet. I don’t want to get complacent because it still can arrive but if another week or two goes by and we don’t see the huge increase, something else is going on.
M31
Doctors have gotten better at treating the illness, so the death rate per # of infections will likely be lower than in April/May when I think there was a lot of flying blind and experimenting. Ventilators are being used less, etc.
But that’s pretty small comfort
Felanius Kootea
@zzyzx: I have wondered about the fact that California has more cases but fewer than one-third of the deaths that New Jersey has. Is the west coast experiencing a strain of COVID-19 that is just less deadly than what the east coast and parts of the mid west have experienced? I wish I knew enough about infectious diseases to understand what is going on.
FelonyGovt
We worried we’d get hit with another 9/11 type event while Trump was in office. This is even worse, a perfect storm. A once in a century pandemic with a corrupt, lazy moron in charge. And too many Americans who are too stupid and selfish to take even minimal precautions. I don’t see an end to this anytime soon.
Felanius Kootea
@M31: Hadn’t thought of this – you’re right, fewer people may be dying because doctors have gotten better at treating COVID-19.
I still wonder whether there’s more to it than that. I’ve read articles that say a mutation on the European strain of COVID increases its ability to infect (spike protein) but not how sick people get. In other words the European strain and the strain from Wuhan cause the same amount of illness but the European strain is more effective at spreading. I’m wondering how sure they are that both strains cause equivalent illness (and death).
Brachiator
@Felanius Kootea:
The LA Times reports that Riverside County ICU beds are reaching 99 percent capacity. This is bad enough, even without a huge surge of cases overall in California.
Local hotspots, specific counties and cited can create significant problems without widespread breakouts.
mad citizen
We are currently a failed state. Sad.
zzyzx
@Felanius Kootea: my guess is that it’s a mixture of far better testing than we had in March meaning that you can’t compare the same number of confirmed cases, better ways of handling cases learned over time, and the people doing the stupid things now are largely young and they’re far less likely to need hospitalization.
Those are just guesses.
jonas
@Felanius Kootea: Average age of the populations that contracted the disease, would be my guess. Lot of the deaths in NJ were in nursing homes.
Barbara
@Martin: I don’t know about Spain, but Italy expanded its shutdown to areas outside of the hot spots. It definitely extended to Rome and other major cities. And when it meant “shutdown” it really meant shutdown. In most states, the shutdown is much less draconian than it was in Italy.
Soprano2
I just saw something insane on the TV in the lunchroom – a commercial for the Ozark Empire Fair the first week of August! I said “they’re still having the fair?” incredulously, and a couple of guys in the room said “yeah”. I mean I know it’s outside, but have you been to a fair?! I hope they limit the numbers of people there and make mask wearing mandatory, which is isn’t around here. Things are good in my county of Greene – 250 total confirmed infections in a population of over 290,000. Even if there are 10 times more cases than that, the percentage is still really small – .0086% by my calculator. If only these idiots would wear masks and keep their distance it could stay that way!! Although in talking to a co-worker she said cases are going up in Taney County, where Branson is, because there are NO RESTRICTIONS there. I said “yeah, and those people don’t stay in Taney County, they come here!” There are also no restrictions in Christian County just south of here, which is where a lot of people who work in Springfield also live. If things get bad in the surrounding counties, the hospitals in Springfield will start to fill up.
OH, and I heard that our regular customers at the pub had a birthday party for one of their number at someone’s house on Sunday. At first I was hurt that we weren’t even invited, but upon reflection I’m glad we weren’t. I just hope none of them get sick and bring it to our pub. We’ve been pretty decent so far at distancing and keeping our numbers of customers within the guidelines, I don’t want them to fuck it up! A lot of the customers spend a lot of time on our relatively large patio. My biggest fear is one of my employees gets sick. I wish people could understand it isn’t as easy as “open everything up, everyone will come back and the economy will be great again!”. Our business is way down even considering the restrictions. The only thing that saves us is that we own our building, so rent isn’t a factor.
Barbara
@Felanius Kootea: People who study these things do not believe that molecular differences in the virus account for the disparity of the death rate that is seen. They don’t think the mutations are significant enough.
Other things that are more likely to account for differences include, in no particular order — misattribution of cause of death (especially likely at outset of the disease); differences in age and health status in populations; overwhelming of health systems increasing likelihood of suboptimal care; delay in seeking care because of fear or financial status or just ignorance about the disease; PPE shortage that increases the likelihood of exposure to “high viral load” cases — especially likely for deaths seen among HCWs; blood type (positive correlation between disease severity and Type A blood); living conditions that make it harder for high risk individuals to avoid infection by social distancing — clearly one thing that is happening in New York City.
Thus, in New York City, multigenerational families living in Queens and the Bronx are at much higher risk than people living in Manhattan. There cannot possibly be different strains of COVID-19 circulating in Manhattan versus Queens.
A lot of little things can add up to an apparently dramatic difference.
zzyzx
@Barbara: I’ve wondered if the relative sprawl of Seattle is one of the things that has helped us.
One thing that’s amused me is seeing urbanists trying to argue that density is completely unrelated to Corona spreading, instead of saying something like, “Yeah, this can be a downside, but the advantages to urban living are worth it in more normal times.”
Roger Moore
@Felanius Kootea:
There are two big differences:
Roger Moore
@jonas:
So have a lot of the cases in California. Here in LA County, for example, something like 50% of the deaths have come in nursing homes, even though they make up only about 15% of the cases. There is something deeply, deeply wrong with the way we run nursing homes in this country.
Cathie from Canada
IMHO, public health authorities in North America failed us. They had a century to prepare for a pandemic and they didn’t.
First they engaged in wishful thinking and refused to accept evidence of asymptomatic transmission in February. Then, in March, they misled us about the importance of masks because they wanted to save the PPE for health providers. Hundreds of thousands were infected because of these failures.
The mask message is painfully simple: You can infect others with COVID before you have any symptoms yourself. Wearing a homemade mask and keeping your distance can save them.
It is a tragedy that our public health authorities couldn’t seem to articulate this message until May.
Barbara
@zzyzx: Maybe. But it could also be the lack of multi-generational households — which are not the norm in most places in the U.S., and where they are common, it’s typically among immigrant or lower income households. That is more likely than density per se to be a cause of higher death rates. Meat packing plants, prisons, and churches are all present in less dense environments and have been shown to be the cause of significant spread. But yes, natural social distancing among members of a group probably does reduce the spread.
greenergood
I’m sorry – I’m at work (live in the UK) and don’t have time to give full attention to all the posts – It’s just that in the past week or so, something is sinking in, and I find it very difficult to reason with or accept. I spent nearly three months last autumn helping my mom move out of the house that she lived in for nearly 60 years – an enormous project of what clothes/furniture/pictures/ etc. do you want to take with you to your new apartment in a really lovely assisted living complex in Pennsylvania (thank you Dad for leaving her enough $$$ to be able to afford this …), they are incredibly attentive to their residents. She’s been in lockdown for months – she’s 90 – and pretty bewildered by most of life. But I am getting the sense that in many parts of the US, the pattern of just not worrying very much – if folks die, they die, big deal – is growing big-time. The way Repug governers are handing responsibilities to county and town officials is the way of saying ‘it’s not my problem anymore’ so authority is shrinking and becoming less responsible, and who the eff cares who dies, as long as they’re not white and rich and have good medical insurance. Land of the free, home of the hopeless.
J R in WV
@Cathie from Canada:
You are completely wrong about who failed us. Public health authorities knew exactly how to cope with this pandemic. We dealt successfully with several potential pandemics in the very recent past. Who has failed us is elected “conservative” politicians who refuse to follow the recommendations of the public health experts.
There was a briefing book with specific directions for how the American federal government should have coped with an epidemic like this one — it was discarded without being read. There were CDC epidemiologists located all over China, who were fired not long before this disease took off over there. They were the first line of America’s defense against a new pandemic erupting in Asia, and were let go just as our need for that expertise became so obvious I still wonder how stupid Trump’s staff can be — no bottom yet discovered!
The briefing book was at the level of “If Proposition A is true, go to page 17.a.1, but if Proposition A is false, go to page 18.a.1” — literally an “Idiots Guide to Surviving the Next Plague for Politicians!” — and they, Trump’s staff, didn’t even bother to refer to it at all. Trump can’t read, so he couldn’t have done that, but I expect Jared can read, but did not.