2020.03.05

Official Numbers:

Keep in mind that all of these numbers are wrong, and likely dramatic underestimates

• 100,329 confirmed infected
• 3,406 confirmed deaths
• 55,694 confirmed recovered
• 80,556 Mainland China
• 6,593 South Korea
• 4,747 Iran
• 3,858 Italy
• 696 Others
• 577 Germany
• 423 France
• 381 Japan
• 360 Spain
• 233 US
• 138 Switzerland
• 130 Singapore
• 128 Netherlands
• 116 UK
• 109 Belgium
• 106 Norway
• 106 Hong Kong
• 101 Sweden
• No other country reporting >100 infections

Website and Links:

• If you think there are any errors on this site, open a pull request to correct it. If you think there is any content I should include, please open an issue. You can do both of these things at the Github repo
• I don’t want to add any Javascript to this site, but it would be nice if I could make these sections collapsible. There is a <details> HTML5 tag that would work, but I can’t figure out how to make it play nice with Jekyll. If anyone knows how to do this, please contact me
• I have update the title of this website to “daily(ish) updates” to reflect that I’m a guy with other things to do and can’t commit to publishing updates 100% for sure at the same time every day. In general, I will push updates to the daily page throughout the day, and if you can guess the URL you can read them early. Otherwise, I will publish daily updates to the front page at some undetermined time in the evening

Middle East:

• “We’re estimating 30 to 40 percent of Tehran’s population will be infected with COVID-19 by March 20,”. HOLY HELL. Tehran: 12 million people. 30%: 3.6M people. 720,000 people in severe or critical state, needing immediate medical care. 70,000 deaths. IN THREE WEEKS
• Iran to close all schools for a month
• First confirmed case in Saudi Arabia
• Israel to cordon off Bethlehem
• Person on Twitter (location unknown, presumably Washington state in Iran) with dire warnings about the state of preparedness of our hospitals. “icu got overcrowded in less than 2 days. now staff are getting ill too”. Shit’s getting real, real fast

China:

• A patient who was discharged as recovered has died. This may be evidence that reinfection is occurring, however I still believe it’s inconsistent testing. There are rumours that China is discharging patients who have not yet fully recovered, in order to make numbers look better. If, as the one recent article said, 14% of ‘recovered’ patients are getting sick again, I’d expect a lot more than one death

Asia:

• Thailand to start disinfecting mail packages. I don’t know if this is necessary or not, but you might consider spraying down amazon boxes with lysol before picking them up

Europe:

• French police are threatening to invoke their right not to enforce the law if the French government does not supply them appropriate PPE by March 9th
• Netherlands top health authority intentionally suppressed news about infection, telling patient to keep quiet. Confirmed infected individual was not quarantined

US:

• Coronavirus Testing designated an ‘essential health benefit’, which means that insurers, medicare, and medicaid must cover it. I am still skeptical that anyone is getting tested at all
• The Feds finally admit that they are liars. Test kits won’t be available for days or weeks.
• CDC started reporting state level infected counts again. Reminder that these numbers are off by at least a factor of ten, due to lack of testing
• Apple pulls out of SXSW. Please, please, please, let enough people pull out that they cancel it.
• Medical Screener at LAX tests positive for Coronavirus. Normally I wouldn’t report something like this (“oooh another person got infected” WE KNOW) but this is a useful pretense to highlight: CANCEL ALL YOUR TRAVEL PLANS. Travelling by air puts you in close contact with a lot of people and you have no way of knowing if they’re sick or not. It is likely that this disease will be spread far and wide by the very same people tasked with stopping it (since they come into the most contact with infected) so the easiest way to stay safe is to avoid those people. Your trip can wait.
• Port of Seattle before and after pictures. International shipping is fucked and our economy is going to get super fucked real soon This is fake
• First confirmed infection in Nevada. Said it before, I’ll say it again: Assume that there are (unconfirmed) cases in literally every state except maybe Alaska
• Quarantined nurse in northern California who has since become sick is stonewalled when she tries to get tested.
• California declares state of emergency. This is getting so absurd I think I will stop reporting state-level things like this. Just assume every state has cases and will or has declared emergency
• RUMINT: NYC making plans to shut down mass transit once they pass 1000 cases. Be aware that r/wuhan_flu is considered to be unreliable by the authorities (it is a quarantined subreddit and you will need to log in to view it
• Cruise ship “Grand Princess” off the coast of San Francisco being denied permission to dock. I lost the link for this one.

Canada:

• Canadian military expecting 25% absentee rate. At least they’re planning for it
• Two Canadian insurance companies stop covering Coronavirus-related trip cancellations. I understand why they’d do this but this is bad, it’s going to encourage more people to not cancel trips. DO NOT BOOK ANY TRIPS FOR THE NEAR FUTURE

Tech:

• RUMINT: Linkedin California offices closed, mandatory WFH. I can’t confirm this in actual news yet, but I trust the source.
• Microsoft HQ in Redmond tells employees to work from home. I’m working on confirming if this was a suggestion or an order
• Google tells Seattle-area employees to work from home. Unclear if suggestion or command

Science/Medical:

• Research paper from 13 years ago about nonpharmaceutical interventions during the Spanish Flu epidemic. TL;DR: The faster that schools and public places were closed, the fewer people died. CALL YOUR LOCAL POLITICIANS AND TELL THEM TO SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING
• Australian National University did some pandemic modelling. It’s not looking good. In the best-case pandemic scenario, they get 15 million worldwide deaths. In the worst-case scenario, 68 million. Direct link to research paper
• Dr. Campbell’s video today explained the S-CoV & L-CoV dual strains I posted about yesterday
• Contra what our health authorities tell us, Hong Kong Medical Authorities believe that everyone wearing masks is why they haven’t seen more infections
• Study suggests that Children get infected just as much, but don’t get as sick / don’t get sick as often. Weirdly good news, in a way, but also makes quarantine that much harder, and the school closures we’re not getting that much more important