Wednesday, July 01, 2020

A Few COVID-19 Notes

"To date, only two Rwandans are known to have died of Covid-19." - Farhad Manjoo, NYT. Rwanda, population 12.3 million.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), Tuesday: “We shouldn’t presume that a group of experts somehow knows what’s best.”

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation article (title): “The lessons Canada can take from the U.S.’s mishandling of Covid-19.”

Here's a graph from the CBC article.


If you adjust for populations, the current values would be

Arizona   9,000
Florida   7,800
Texas   3,400
California   2,500
New York   570

and the peak for New York in early April would be about 9,800.

From the Financial Times, via Twitter, showing why the EU is keeping Americans out (Update, 3 hours later - the US has denied EU citizens entry since March):


Donald Trump could not care less; he only wants someone to blame. And I do mean, he really couldn't care less. When is the last time he even mentioned the pandemic and 125,000 127,485 Americans dead? He will be remembered no better than a president who hid in the closet when foreign troops landed on our shores and invaded the country.

5 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

Cases in the US are trending up but not deaths. There would be some lag, true, but how much?

David in Cal said...

Any article about blaming someone for Covid 19 in the US must start with Governor Cuomo. His decision to require senior facilities to accept infected people was the single worst move. The failure of Cuomo and Mayor DeBlasio to deal effectively with public transportation is why the New York City area was such a disaster.

Cheers



Cheers

David Appell said...

David: Yes, nursing homes are responsible for a lot of cases and deaths. I read the other day 43% of US COVID-19 deaths occurred in or from nursing homes. But cases don't much get *out* of nursing homes, do they?

David Appell said...

WC, here's what I've heard about why deaths aren't rising:

1) maybe it's that younger people are making up more of the cases and they don't die relatively as frequently

2) maybe doctors are getting better at treating the COVID cases that do require hospitalization

3) increased testing is finding more (relatively) minor cases that wouldn't have required ER attention or otherwise come to the medical community's attention before

4) since deaths lag cases, maybe the increase in deaths just hasn't shown up yet. But this hypothesis can't last much longer, it seems. I saw this graph from a professor that shows deaths might be rising in Arizona, Texas and Florida:

https://twitter.com/profmjmack/status/1278138542955417601/photo/1

David Appell said...

Here's the article I was thinking of. (I knew it was in my tabs somewhere).

43% of U.S. Coronavirus Deaths Are Linked to Nursing Homes
By The New York Times, June 27, 2020
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html