Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average improved (1.7 % lower than the 7-day rolling average one week ago). U.S. deaths due to coronavirus continues to worsen, and is 20.1 % higher than the rolling average one week ago. At the end of this post is a set of interactive graphs and tables for the world and individual states – as well as today’s headlines which include;
- Confusion spreads over system to determine priority access to Covid-19 vaccines
- JetBlue’s Founder Helped Fund A Stanford Study That Said The Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly
- Florida Is A Case Study In Media-Induced COVID-19 Panic
- Moderna Vaccine Candidate Heads To Widespread Phase 3 Testing In U.S
- Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t ‘particularly concerned’ about Moderna coronavirus vaccine’s new technology
- Sinclair says it will postpone and ‘rework’ segment featuring conspiracy theory about Fauci
My continuing advice is to continue to wash your hands, wear masks, and maintain social distancing. No handwashing, mask, or social distancing will guarantee you do not get infected – but it sure as hell lowers the risk in all situations. In addition, certain activities are believed to carry a higher risk – like being inside in air conditioning and removing your mask (such as restaurants, around your children/grandchildren, bars and gyms). It is all about viral load.
The daily number of new cases in the U.S. is remaining stubbornly and embarrassedly high.
The following graphs show the 7-day rolling average for new coronavirus cases and deaths has been updated through 27 July 2020:
z coronavirus.png
Coronavirus Statistics For 27 July 2020 |
| U.S. Only | Global | U.S Percentage of Total | ||||
| Today*** | Cumulative | Today*** | Cumulative | Today | Cumulative | |
| New Cases | 55,993 | 4,230,000 | 230,761 | 16,250,000 | 24.3% | 26.0% |
| Deaths** | 475 | 146,935 | 4,376 | 649,208 | 10.9% | 22.6% |
| Mortality Rate | 0.8% | 3.5% | 1.9% | 4.0% | ||
total COVID-19 Tests per 1,000 people | 2.41* | 152.98* | ||||
* as of 25 July 2020
** evidently several states included “probable” deaths today in the number
*** red color indicates record number
From CNN:
Coronavirus News You May Have Missed
Latin America leads world in coronavirus cases – Reuters
Coronavirus cases in Latin America for the first time have surpassed the combined infections in the United States and Canada, a Reuters tally showed on Sunday, amid a surge of infections in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Colombia and Argentina.
The quickly growing number of cases make Latin America the region most impacted by the pandemic globally, with 26.83% of worldwide cases.
Latin America now has 4,327,160 total cases of the novel coronavirus compared to 4,308,495 infections in United States and Canada, according to the count based on data provided by the governments of each country.
The United States continues to be the individual country with the highest number of infections and deaths from COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus, with more than 4.2 million cases and roughly 146,000 deaths, followed by Brazil, with 2.4 million cases and nearly 87,000 dead.
South Korea Confirms a Defector Swam Back to the North – New York Times
The authorities in South Korea confirmed on Monday that a 24-year-old man who had defected from North Korea in 2017 had secretly returned to the North, crossing one of the world’s most heavily fortified borders during a pandemic and possibly bringing the coronavirus with him.
On Sunday, North Korea claimed that a man had crossed into the country from the South, and that he was likely infected with the virus. South Korean officials went in search of any defectors who had gone missing, and by Monday they had zeroed in on the 24-year-old man, identified only by his family name, Kim.
In 2017, he swam across the western inter-Korea border, which traces a path through a narrow sea strait, to defect to South Korea. On July 19, he swam back across the border into Kaesong, a city in the North, after crawling through a drain under barbed-wire fences, his family said.
… North Korea said on Sunday that the man was “suspected to have been infected with the vicious virus,” adding that he could be the country’s first virus case. The reverse defection prompted the North’s leader, Kim Jong-un, to order a total lockdown of Kaesong, a city of 300,000 people on the border with South Korea, and to declare a “maximum” national emergency.
Confusion spreads over system to determine priority access to Covid-19 vaccines – STAT
As manufacturers around the world race to develop Covid-19 vaccines, a parallel effort has begun to figure out who in the United States should get them first — and how those doses should be distributed.
But already the effort is being complicated by tensions over who gets to make those critical decisions, with some groups feeling sidelined and multiple new actors crowding the stage.
On Tuesday, the National Academy of Medicine, tasked by top U.S. health officials, named an expert panel to develop a framework to determine who should be vaccinated first, when available doses are expected to be scarce. But that panel is ostensibly encroaching on the role of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel that has made recommendations on vaccination policy to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for decades, including drawing up the vaccination priority list during the 2009 H1N1 flu pandemic.
There is also the matter of Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine fast-tracking program that has claimed authority over, among other things, distribution decisions when it comes to Covid-19 vaccines.
Amid so many players, public health experts are expressing concern and confusion.
Sinclair says it will postpone and ‘rework’ segment featuring conspiracy theory about Fauci – CNN
The Sinclair Broadcast Group (SBGI) said Saturday it will postpone and rework a segment it planned to air this weekend that suggested Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, was responsible for the creation of the coronavirus.
The baseless conspiracy theory was set to air on stations across the country in a segment during the program “America This Week” hosted by Eric Bolling. The show, which is posted online before it is broadcast over the weekend, is distributed to Sinclair’s network of local television stations, one of the largest in the country.
In a memo sent to its local television stations on Saturday, Sinclair instructed news directors to avoid airing for now the most recent episode of Bolling’s show, which was supposed to include the conspiracy theory.
“After further review of this week’s originally planned episode, it’s clear that we need to provide additional context to the highly controversial segment regarding the COVID pandemic and Dr. Fauci,” Scott Livingston, Sinclair’s senior vice president of news, wrote in the memo, which was obtained by CNN Business.
JetBlue’s Founder Helped Fund A Stanford Study That Said The Coronavirus Wasn’t That Deadly – Buzzfeed
A highly influential coronavirus antibody study was funded in part by David Neeleman, the JetBlue Airways founder and a vocal proponent of the idea that the pandemic isn’t deadly enough to justify continued lockdowns.
That’s according to a complaint from an anonymous whistleblower, filed with Stanford University last week and obtained by BuzzFeed News, about the study conducted by the famous scientist John Ioannidis and others. The complaint cites dozens of emails, including exchanges with the airline executive while the study was being conducted.
The study — released as a non-peer-reviewed paper, or preprint, on April 17 — made headlines around the world with a dramatic finding: Based on antibodies in thousands of Silicon Valley residents’ blood samples, the number of coronavirus infections was up to 85 times higher than believed. This true infection count was so high that it would drive down the virus’s local fatality rate to 0.12%-0.2% — far closer to the known death rate for the flu.
Almost immediately, the study became a flashpoint in the increasingly politicized debate over whether and how to reopen the economy. Although many scientists assailed its methods, leading the authors to post a revision nearly two weeks later, it was trumpeted by conservative media to support a growing theory: that fears of the coronavirus are overblown.
Fragmented pandemic response may undermine push to address racial disparities – Politico
In late April, a coronavirus research team from the Centers for Disease Control fanned out across two predominantly Black counties in Georgia, going door to door in face shields asking for samples of blood with little prior warning.
Community advocates said they fielded call after call from scared Black residents who were reminded of the Tuskegee syphilis study conducted on African Americans from 1932 to 1972. Fewer than one in four households approached took part in the antibody research, which may have diminished its accuracy and value, the CDC revealed this week.
The episode was emblematic of the federal government’s ongoing failures to address the huge racial and ethnic disparities that have persisted throughout the coronavirus pandemic.
In 20 interviews across multiple states, health workers, civil rights advocates and state and local officials told POLITICO that efforts by the CDC and the broader Trump administration to mitigate the impact of the virus on communities of color are falling short. They cited cultural misunderstandings and asserted that mixed messages from the White House have made it harder for counties to get a handle on the disease.
Steroids such as dexamethasone appeared to help only COVID-19 patients with elevated initial C-reactive protein (CRP) – Journal of Hospital Medicine
The results of this study indicate that early treatment with glucocorticoids is not associated with mortality or need for MV in unselected patients with COVID-19. Subgroup analyses suggest that glucocorticoid-treated patients with markedly elevated CRP may benefit from glucocorticoid treatment, whereas those patients with lower CRP may be harmed. Our findings were consistent after adjustment for clinical characteristics. The public health implications of these findings are hard to overestimate. Given the global growth of the pandemic and that glucocorticoids are widely available and inexpensive, glucocorticoid therapy may save many thousands of lives. Equally important because we have been able to identify a group that may be harmed, some patients may be saved because glucocorticoids will not be given.
Florida Is A Case Study In Media-Induced COVID-19 Panic – I&I
[editor’s note: I TRY to fact check every link provided. I have not been passing along many Florida links because they differ from other official data. Another problem is that many media outlets duplicate the headlines from the day before.]
“Florida Sets Yet Another Coronavirus Record: 173 Deaths In A Day.”
“A record 173 Floridians died from the virus Thursday, an average of more than one every eight minutes.”
The 134 new confirmed deaths is the second-largest increase on record, coming five days after the largest one-day jump of 156 last week.”
“COVID-19 has ravaged Florida, with more than 237,000 people testing positive and 2,013 dying from the virus in July alone.”
So what characteristic do all of the reports share? They are all false.
It is not true that 173 people died from COVID-19 “in a day” in Florida. Nor did 134, or 156 on previous days.
It is also untrue than 2,013 had died in July when that story was published.
All of these scary headlines are based on the number of deaths reported by the state on any given day. This is not the same as the number of deaths that occurred on those days.
U.S. States Stall On Contact Tracing Technology – Statista
Alongside privacy concerns and low usage rates, the incompatibility of coronavirus tracing apps across different countries has been identified as a potential weakness of the technology. For example, if somebody travels from France to Germany and is diagnosed with Covid-19 in Berlin, a warning cannot be sent to his or her contacts through the French system.
The patchwork nature of the technology’s rollout is also a major issue in the United States which is not developing a single national app to identify infection chains and trace contacts. Rather, the decision is being left to individual states who have been given the choice to participate in a major partnership by Apple and Google who plan to build the technology into their operating systems.
The effort was announced by both companies on April 10 and according to research from website 9 to 5 Mac, only four U.S. states said they were participating in it as of July 13. On that date, no state had successfully released a contact tracing app and 17 said they would not participate while the rest provided no response regarding their status.
You will find more infographics at Statista
COVID-19 Vaccine Candidate Heads To Widespread Testing In U.S. – NPR
The COVID-19 vaccine candidate made by the U.S. biotech company Moderna and developed in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health starts its final phase of testing Monday.
This phase is called Phase 3 efficacy testing, and it is designed to see if the vaccine actually prevents disease. Up to 30,000 volunteers will be assigned to one of two groups. One group will receive two injections spaced approximately 28 days apart of mRNA-1273, as the vaccine is known. The other group will receive an injection containing only salt water. Neither the volunteer nor the person administering the injection will know what’s in the syringe in order to avoid bias in favor of one outcome or another. Of course, people running the trial will know who is getting what.
Researchers will monitor both groups to see who, if anyone, gets sick. Organizers of the trial say there will have to only be approximately 150 cases of COVID-19 among study participants to say with confidence that the vaccine is actually preventing disease. How long it takes to reach that number, and how many participants will have to be enrolled in the study, is an open question. It depends in part on how much the virus is circulating in the communities where the trial takes place. It could take as many as 30,000 volunteers to get the answer, and the entire process will probably take months.
Dr. Anthony Fauci isn’t ‘particularly concerned’ about Moderna coronavirus vaccine’s new technology – CNBC
- White House coronavirus advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci said Monday he is “not particularly concerned” about the safety risk of a potential coronavirus vaccine by Moderna, despite the fact that it uses new technology to fight the virus.
- The vaccine, which entered a large phase-three human trial Monday, uses messenger ribonucleic acid, or mRNA molecules, to provoke an immune response to fight the virus. While early studies show promise, mRNA technology has never been used to make a successful vaccine before.
- “I’m not particularly concerned,” Fauci said. “But I don’t want a lack of severe concern to get in the way that we are keeping an open mind to look for any possible deleterious effects as we get into and through the phase-three trial.”
How the eviction crisis across the U.S. will look – CNBC
- The impending eviction crisis will hurt some states more than others.
- African-American and Hispanic tenants are especially at risk of losing their homes.
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Hundreds jam airport as evacuations from Vietnam’s Danang begin
Luck? Genetics? Italian Island Spared from COVID Outbreak
Vietnam Confirms 11 New Coronavirus Cases, Imposes Quarantines And Evacuations
Pet cat becomes first animal to test positive for coronavirus in UK
Hong Kong banning in-person dining, limiting gatherings to two people
Death toll rises 55 percent for most of Mexico amid outbreak, officials say
China agrees to help build temporary hospital in Hong Kong, as city confirms record new cases
WHO Expert Warns Of An ‘acceleration’ Of Coronavirus Cases In Africa
Germany warns of new spike in Covid-19 infections as it tries to contain large farm outbreak
India reports nearly 50,000 new Covid-19 cases in highest single-day spike
Japan reports nearly 840 new Covid-19 cases as country grapples with spike
Australian state of Victoria sees worst day of pandemic so far
Mexico reports more than 46,000 coronavirus cases and 4,500 deaths in one week
The following are additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Chiefs RG Laurent Duvernay-Tardif first to opt out of NFL season
Trump administration renews public health emergency after urging from states
Covid-19 “will end up as a Top 10 leading cause of death” in 2020
Hertz Has To Sell 182,000 Cars By 2021
Google extends work from home order through summer 2021
Just Days Into Season, MLB Postpones Two Games Due To Coronavirus Concerns
Robert O’Brien, Trump’s National Security Adviser, Tests Positive For Coronavirus
Target to close for Thanksgiving: ‘This isn’t a year for crowds’
Death toll rises 55 percent for most of Mexico amid outbreak, officials say
Federal employees who were infected on the job face delays in receiving workers’ compensation.
Papa John’s continues hiring spree with pledge to bring on 10,000 more workers
Pandemic pushes travelers to take to the road in RVs
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks
July 2020 Texas Manufacturing Marginally Improves
Headline Durable Goods New Orders Improved In June 2020
MBS Market Dysfunctions In The Time Of COVID-19
A Modern Jubilee As A Cure To The Financial Ills Of The Coronavirus
Could Employers And States Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations? Here’s What The Courts Have Ruled
Coronavirus INTERACTIVE Charts
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Analyst Opinion of Coronavirus Data
There are several takeaways that need to be understood when viewing coronavirus statistical data:
- The global counts are suspect for a variety of reasons including political. Even the U.S. count has issues as it is possible that as much as half the population has had coronavirus and was asymptomatic. It would be a far better metric using a random sampling of the population weekly. In short, we do not understand the size of the error in the tracking numbers.
- Just because some of the methodology used in aggregating the data in the U.S. is flawed – as long as the flaw is uniformly applied – you establish a baseline. This is why it is dangerous to compare two countries as they likely use different methodologies to determine who has (and who died) from coronavirus.
- COVID-19 and the flu are different but can have similar symptoms. For sure, COVID-19 so far is much more deadly than the flu. [click here to compare symptoms]
- From an industrial engineering point of view, one can argue that it is best to flatten the curve only to the point that the health care system is barely able to cope. This solution only works if-and-only-if one can catch this coronavirus once and develops immunity. In the case of COVID-19, herd immunity may need to be in the 80% to 85% range. WHO warns that few have developed antibodies to COVID-19. At this point, herd immunity does not look like an option.
- Older population countries will have a higher death rate.
- There are at least 8 strains of the coronavirus. New York may have a deadlier strain imported from Europe, compared to less deadly viruses elsewhere in the United States.
- Each publication uses different cutoff times for its coronavirus statistics. Our data uses 11:00 am London time. Also, there is an unexplained variation in the total numbers both globally and in the U.S.
- The real question remains if the U.S. is over-reacting to this virus. The following graphic from the CDC puts the annual flu burden in perspective [click on image to enlarge]. Note that using this data is dangerous as the actual flu cases are estimated and not counted – nobody knows how accurate these guesses are.
What we do not know about the coronavirus [actually there is little scientifically proven information]. Most of our knowledge is anecdotal, from studies with limited subjects, or from studies without peer review.
- How many people have been infected as many do not show symptoms?
- Masks do work.
- Do we develop lasting immunity to the coronavirus? Another coronavirus – the simple cold – does not develop long term immunity.
- To what degree do people who never develop symptoms contribute to transmission?
- The US has scaled up coronavirus testing – and the accuracy of the tests has been improving. However, if one loses immunity – the coronavirus testing value is reduced.
- Can children widely spread coronavirus?
- Why have some places avoided big coronavirus outbreaks – and others hit hard?
- What effect will the weather have? At this point, it does not seem hot weather slows this coronavirus down – and it seems air conditioning contributes to its spread.
- Outdoor activities seem to be a lower risk than indoor activities.
- Can the world really push out an effective vaccine in 12 to 18 months?
- Will other medical treatments for Covid-19 ease symptoms and reduce deaths? So far only one drug (remdesivir) is approved for treatment.
- A current scientific understanding of the way the coronavirus works can be found [here].
Heavy breakouts of coronavirus have hit farmworkers. Farmworkers are essential to the food supply. They cannot shelter at home. Consider:
- they have high rates of the respiratory disease [occupational hazard]
- they travel on crowded buses chartered by their employers
- few have health insurance
- they cannot social distance and live two to four to a room – and they eat together
- some reports say half are undocumented
- they are low paid and cannot afford not to work – so they will go to work sick
- they do not have access to sanitation when working
- a coronavirus outbreak among farmworkers can potentially shutter entire farm
The bottom line is that COVID-19 so far has been shown to be much more deadly than the data on the flu. Using CDC data, the flu has a mortality rate between 0.06 % and 0.11 % Vs. the coronavirus which to date has a mortality rate of 4 % [the 4% is the average of overall statistics – however in the last few months it has been hovering around 1.0%] – which makes it between 10 and 80 times more deadly. The reason for ranges:
Because influenza surveillance does not capture all cases of flu that occur in the U.S., CDC provides these estimated ranges to better reflect the larger burden of influenza.
There will be a commission set up after this pandemic ends to find fault [it is easy to find fault when a once-in-a-lifetime event occurs] and to produce recommendations for the next time a pandemic happens. Those that hate President Trump will conclude the virus is his fault.
Resources:
- Get the latest public health information from CDC: https://www.coronavirus.gov .
- Get the latest research from NIH: https://www.nih.gov/coronavirus.
- Find NCBI SARS-CoV-2 literature, sequence, and clinical content: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sars-cov-2/.
- List of studies: https://icite.od.nih.gov/covid19/search/#search:searchId=5ee124ed70bb967c49672dad
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