Written by Steven Hansen
The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average is 8.8 % lower than the 7-day rolling average one week ago. U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 2.5 % lower 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;
- Global total cases of coronavirus now exceed 23 million
- Global infection fatality rate declined this past week whilst the U.S. infection fatality rate was little changed.
- U.S. Schools Face Shortage of 5 Million Laptops This Fall Amid Pandemic
- Sociopaths Are More Likely to Refuse Wearing a Mask, Study Finds
- Children more likely to catch COVID-19 at home than at school
- If everything goes well, India would get COVID-19 vaccine by year-end
- How Children’s Sleep Habits Have Changed In The Pandemic
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 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 have been updated through 23 August 2020:
z coronavirus.png
Coronavirus Statistics For 23 August 2020 |
| U.S. Only | Global | U.S Percentage of Total | ||||
| Today*** | Cumulative | Today*** | Cumulative | Today | Cumulative | |
| New Confirmed Cases | 43,848 | 5,670,000 | 252,531 | 23,240,000 | 17.4% | 24.4% |
| Deaths** | 956 | 176,362 | 5,517 | 805,740 | 17.3% | 21.9% |
| Mortality Rate | 2.2% | 3.1% | 2.2% | 3.5% | ||
total COVID-19 Tests per 1,000 people | 1.92* | 210.21* | ||||
* as of 20 Aug 2020
** evidently several states included “probable” deaths today in the number
*** red color indicates record number
A Look At This Week Vs. Previous Weeks
Both global and U.S. new cases marginally declined this past week.
Likewise, global and U.S. deaths declined this past week.
Global infection fatality rate declined this past week whilst U.S. infection fatality rate was little changed.
Econintersect published two summary articles of coronavirus news for the past week:
Coronavirus News You May Have Missed
U.S. Schools Face Shortage of 5 Million Laptops This Fall Amid Pandemic – Newsweek
With the move to distance learning due to COVID-19, and the upcoming start of the new school year, educators are having trouble sourcing much-needed laptops for students.
U.S. schools are facing a shortage of about 5 million laptops, according to an exclusive report from The Associated Press. The shortage stems from increased demand combined with sanctions levied by the U.S. against Chinese companies that are believed to use forced labor, or be involved with the human rights abuses against China’s Uighur population, a minority Muslim group in Northwest China.
Tom Baumgarten, superintendent of the Morongo County School District in California, told the AP he tried to order 5,000 Chromebooks from the company Lenovo in July. Instead, he said, the vendor told him that the computers were being “stopped by a government agency because of a component from China that’s not allowed here.”
He then tried to order the computers from a different vendor, who initially told him the required laptops would be there by the start of school—but then repeatedly delayed the delivery date. The district is currently due to receive their computers in October, over a month after the first day of school, August 26.
Though the Lenovo vendor told Baumgarten that a government agency had stopped the devices, U.S. Customs and Border Protection told the AP that the agency did not have any record of detained laptops. Lenovo declined to comment to the news service.
The Department of Commerce confirmed to the AP that the sanctions did not apply to Chromebooks.
The race to develop paper-based tests for coronavirus – Knowable
Across the United States, there is a crippling surge in demand for coronavirus tests. In North Carolina, test results took an average of six to seven days in July, double from the previous month. In the District of Columbia, some residents waited more than 14 days for results, rendering the tests essentially useless as tools to tell people to self-quarantine and help break the chain of infection.
The US is now running somewhere between 600,000 and 800,000 tests a day, according to the Covid-19 Tracking Project, a coronavirus data-gathering and reporting initiative. That’s an improvement over the roughly 150,000 daily tests run in April but still far short of the tens of millions daily tests that, according to one report, are “critical to our ability to go outside again.”
Our testing capacity, in my opinion, does not come anywhere close to our testing needs,” says Kevin Nichols, a diagnostics researcher at Global Health Labs, a nonprofit in Bellevue, Washington. And the scaling that’s needed is not likely to be achieved using current coronavirus tests, which require special equipment and expertise and can hardly keep up with demand as it is.
Dozens of academic research groups and companies are racing to bring tests to the market that can rapidly detect SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19. Several of them use paper strips, borrowing a tried-and-true technology used for years in over-the-counter diagnostics such as pregnancy tests. These tests promise to be relatively cheap — perhaps under $10 each — and run without complicated instruments, meaning that they could even be used at home.
Early data suggest that these tests may not offer the nearly 100-percent accuracy of the currently used molecular tests. But the trade-off may be worth it: The ease and low cost of paper-based tests could help people return to some pre-pandemic activities with lower risk, Nichols says. “You buy a kit at the pharmacy, you test yourself and you know whether you can go see your grandparents this weekend.”
Trump will reportedly announce emergency authorization for coronavirus plasma treatment – The Hill
- President Donald Trump on Sunday will announce the emergency authorization of convalescent plasma for Covid-19, according to the Washington Post and other reports.
- The president will make the announcement at a press briefing on Sunday evening. White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the 5:30 pm briefing will involve “a major therapeutic breakthrough on the China virus.”
- Convalescent plasma use blood from Covid-19 patients that have recovered and built antibodies against the virus and infuses it into people with Covid-19 to prevent severe disease, according to the Mayo Clinic, which is conducting studies on the treatment.
Sociopaths Are More Likely to Refuse Wearing a Mask, Study Finds – Newsweek
A new study from Brazil has found that people with sociopathic traits are more likely to not comply with mask-wearing and other measures to limit the spread of coronavirus.
The study investigated the relationship between antisocial personality traits and compliance with COVID-19 measures using a sample of 1,578 Brazilian adults aged between 18 and 73.
Between May 21 and June 29, participants completed a test that assessed maladaptive personality traits as well as assessments on apathy and compliance with coronavirus-related measures. The findings were published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The researchers found that those who had higher scores in traits including callousness, deceitfulness, hostility, impulsivity, irresponsibility, manipulativeness and risk-taking tended to be less compliant with COVID-19 containment measures, such as mask-wearing, hand-washing and social distancing.
But those who had higher levels of empathy tended to be more compliant with the measures.
“Our findings indicated that antisocial traits, especially lower levels of empathy and higher levels of Callousness, Deceitfulness, and Risk-taking, are directly associated with lower compliance with containment measures,” the authors wrote in the conclusion of their study.
Children more likely to catch COVID-19 at home than at school, Public Health England study finds – Sky News
Children are more likely to catch coronavirus at home than at school, a Public Health England (PHE) study has found.
The findings come after England’s chief medical officer said reopening schools brings less risk of long-term harm than keeping children at home.
PHE’s research detected just 67 single cases and 30 outbreaks, defined as two or more linked cases, in schools across England in June.
The study also found:
- Only 0.01% of open educational settings had an outbreak
- Out of more than one million children attending pre-school and primary school in June, just 70 children were affected
- Infections in the wider community likely driving cases in schools
- Children were more likely to acquire SARS-CoV-2 infection at home than in school
If everything goes well, India would get COVID-19 vaccine by year-end – The Tribune
Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan has said that if everything goes well, India would get a vaccine against the novel coronavirus by the end of this year.
Three COVID-19 vaccine candidates, including two indigenous ones, are in different phases of development in India.
The phase-one human clinical trials of the two indigenous COVID-19 vaccine candidates, one developed by Bharat Biotech in collaboration with the ICMR and the other by Zydus Cadila Limited, have been completed and the trials have moved to phase-two, ICMR Director-General Dr Balram Bhargava had said recently.
The Serum Institute of India, which has partnered with AstraZeneca for manufacturing the COVID-19 vaccine candidate, developed by the University of Oxford, has been permitted for conducting its phase two and three human clinical trials in India. It is likely to start the trials next week.
HOW CHILDREN’S SLEEP HABITS HAVE CHANGED IN THE PANDEMIC – LBN Examiner
Two sleep specialists, in Cincinnati and London, published an editorial, “Perils and promise for child and adolescent sleep and associated psychopathology during the Covid-19 pandemic,” at the end of May in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. Stephen P. Becker and Alice M. Gregory discussed possible impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on children’s sleep, arguing that because of the importance of sleep for many aspects of children’s well-being, ranging from mental health to immunological well-being and disease resistance, it would be important to look closely at how sleep might be changing, for children and for adolescents, at whether those changes are problematic when children have to return to school, and at which factors are associated with better — and worse — sleep.
In a study published in late July in the Journal of Sleep Research, researchers looked at how 1,619 children in China were doing in terms of sleep. The children, ages 4, 5 and 6, were recruited from 11 preschools in the province of Guizhou, in the city of Zunyi, about 650 miles from Wuhan. Parents and caregivers completed a questionnaire about how the children were sleeping during their time “sheltering at home” in February, after the children had been confined at home for nearly a month. The reported sleep patterns were compared to a similar group in 2018. Dr. Zhijun Liu, an associate professor in the department of applied psychology at Zunyi Medical University who was the lead author on the study, said in an email that the expectation had been that the confinement would have a negative effect on children’s sleep: “Here in China, most families underwent days of confinement to cope with the pandemic, which means much less outdoor activities, less face-to-face interpersonal communications and even less sunlight for some of them than usual.” Both parents and children spent more time on electronic devices and less time moving around. He continued, “Living in a limited room is usually no good for one’s mood either.”
The results of the study showed that kids at home in the pandemic were going to sleep later — 57 minutes later, on average, than 2018 weekday bedtimes, and 30 minutes later than weekends — and they were also waking up later, and the differences in wake-up times were larger: They were waking an hour and 52 minutes later than on weekdays in 2018, and an hour later than on weekends. Tellingly, the researchers did not distinguish between weekdays and weekends in the 2020 sample, concluding that the children were essentially on “holiday schedule.”In other words, they were sleeping longer at night than the children in 2018 and, perhaps not surprisingly, sleeping less during the day; only 27.5 percent routinely took daytime naps, compared with 79.8 percent in 2018 (69.4 percent on weekends). It added up to about the same amount of sleep in a 24-hour period, and, interestingly, “somewhat unexpectedly,” as the researchers noted, the caregivers in 2020 reported fewer sleep disturbances. Daytime sleepiness, night wakings, bedtime resistance and sleep anxiety were all lower in the pandemic sample than in the 2018 group.
The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
South Korea sees 10th-straight day of triple-digit coronavirus case increases
Sicily Gives 24-Hour Notice to Migrants, NGOs to Leave or Risk Arrest
Large social gathering leads to lawmakers’ resignations in Ireland.
Lebanon imposes a new lockdown as cases spike in the wake of the Beirut port explosion.
Waits of up to 12 hours at Austria’s border as vacationers return from the Balkans.
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Tymoshenko Tests Positive For Coronavirus
The following are additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts
Rep. Dan Meuser tests positive for COVID-19
Roughly 4 Million Employees to Remain Unemployed Amid Pandemic
Wedding Reception Leads to 53 Coronavirus Infections and 1 Death
Georgia Fraternity House on Lockdown Following Coronavirus Outbreak
IRS is Sending Interest Checks to 14M Tax Payers Who Filed After April 15
Twitter hits Trump for ‘misleading health claims’ that could dissuade people from voting
Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks
Emerging Bond Markets And COVID-19: Evidence From Mexico
The Disproportionate Effects Of COVID-19 On Households With Children
Infographic Of The Day: Reevaluating Screen Time In An Age Of Social Distancing
Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 23August 2020
Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 23August 2020
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 although there is now a discussion of whether T-Cells play a part in immunity [which means one might have immunity without antibodies]
- 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? [current thinking is that they are becoming a major source of the pandemic spread]
- 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 farm workers. 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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