Tomorrow the US will pass China in cases per capita.
Canada's number of cases are up 20%. Italy up 15%. (Both absolute numbers, not per capita.) Canada's per capita cases are only 53% of the US's.
Two-thirds of worldwide cases are now outside China.
Italy's death rate has reached 8.3% of confirmed cases. Worldwide this number is now 4.0%. US is less than half that, but elsewhere it started out relatively low, too, and then increased as people were sick long enough to die. I suspect the large initial increase in the US was because the disease happened early in that nursing home in Washington state, which was just bad luck. But it'd be nice if the US death rate stays at its relatively low level.
The US edges closer to Italy:
12 comments:
Canada's number of cases are up 20%
I'm somewhat suspicious of this slowdown. We didn't do anything two weeks ago that would have warranted this. It seems we are continuing to test, but maybe not to the degree that we should be.
Off topic ... here's an interesting description of the experience of flying from London to Beijing now:
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Ugh ... better link:
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Damn. Today's press conference was utterly appalling.
It's the worst crisis for the USA in 75 years, and we have a deranged senile narcissist occupying the presidency.
Making it through this with minimal loss of life and minimal damage to the economy would have been difficult anyway, but how much worse is Trump going to make it?
Ned - my anti-Trump wife said this was Trump's best press conference yet. We have been watching the entirely of these conferences daily. (Being shut down here, we don't have much to do.) I agreed. Trump's way of talking is unbearably inappropriate to this topic. Today he was more bearable. Fauci and Birx and the others were fine.
I saw an article suggesting that China is under-reporting cases and deaths. If I find it again, I'll post a link here.
The huge daily US number of cases is a a combination of actual growth in cases along with dramatic growth in testing. Tomorrow's press conference will include a segment on testing. There is now mostly in place a system and procedures for tens of thousands of tests a day. Tomorrow we should have some actual figures on numbers of tests and their results.
Cheers
Regarding Chinese under-reporting of corona virus cases and deaths, see
https://www.theepochtimes.com/leaked-documents-reveal-chinas-shandong-province-faked-coronavirus-infection-data-real-numbers-up-to-52-times-higher_3251354.html
and
https://www.theepochtimes.com/experts-say-chinas-claim-of-no-new-ccp-virus-cases-not-credible_3278295.html
Cheers
Your tolerance for unacceptable behavior by this president is really something.
Trump undercuts his top infectious-disease expert on whether an unapproved treatment for the coronavirus is safe, a day after the FDA said it had not yet been approved
Trump’s expert urged caution about a coronavirus treatment. Trump hyped it up anyway
Then there was his bizarre lashing out at the softball question about what he would say to someone who is scared about the situation. That question should be a no-brainer for any president in any crisis! Yet Trump went totally off the rails over it.
Then there were the innumerable other little things. Fauci facepalming as Trump railed against his own "Deep State Department". Trump bragging about calling Comcast "Concast". Etc, etc, etc.
Your standards are very very low if this is what you think is acceptable at a time like this.
Here's a resource for number of tests per country: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing-source-data
Thanks, Layzej. That's a really nice site. Testing frequency has really shot up, as Trump promised. The 27,450 tests yesterday was 36% of the total number of all prior tests. 27,450 tests in a single day is part of the reason we're now seeing so many new cases. I would expect the number of tests per day to continue to increase.
At this rate, the testing backlog should be rapidly gone -- perhaps in just a couple of days. At that point, the trend in number of confirmed new cases will give us a more realistic idea of how the real number of cases is actually trending.
Cheers
It's great that we can now test almost 30,000 people in one day. But I remember two weeks ago Mike Pence's announcement that "over a million" tests had already been distributed and another four million more would be in use by the end of (that) week.
You're celebrating the fact that we just managed to use 3% of the tests that Pence claimed were distributed two weeks ago, and 0.6% of the tests that Pence said would be ready one week ago.
If we had been testing widely six weeks ago, we could have been isolating and contact-tracing each individual case, and the rest of the country could be still going about our business with little disruption. Instead, we have to isolate everyone because we have no idea who is infected, unemployment is headed to 25% and the economy is shutting down for an unknown length of time.
Do you understand what a massive failure that represents? Happy talk about how much better we're doing now doesn't erase the fact that we wasted weeks of time and there are serious consequences that can no longer be undone!
Ned -
1. Yes, you are right. It would have been far, far better if we had test more early on. The consequences are very bad.
2. According to Dr. Fauci, the shortage of tests was not the fault of the CDC or of Trump. Fauci said that our tests were simply not ready for a pandemic of this magnitude.
3. You seem to doubt that we could only use 3% of available tests. That seems plausible to me. Tests can't simply be distributed like cookies. They must be administered and evaluated by trained individuals using appropriate procedures.
4. Regardless of the initial SNAFU, developing the ability to do mass testing is an important, impressive victory. This will be a big help to not only the US, but too the entire world.
5. The fact remains that the US has done far better than Europe, in terms of cases per population and deaths per population. See this link. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ US is rising rapidly as the testing catches up. Still, USA is a 67, Germany 259, France 193, etc.
Cheers
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