2020.03.19
Official Numbers:
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BNO Newsroom with a poignant illustration of exponential growth
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This list is getting unwieldly. Previously I was including all countries with at least 100 confirmed infections. Now I’m setting the cutoff at 1000. This is purely an aesthetic decision, and I apologize to anyone who feels I am unfairly excluding their countries. If it makes any difference, I’m pretty sure that basically all of these numbers are made up, and so obscured by fog-of-war as to be meaningless. I’ve wanted to discontinue this category for a week now, but I figured that logging it for posterity would be useful
- 242,714 confirmed infections
- 9,867 confirmed deaths
- 84,972 confirmed recoveries
- 81,156 China
- 41,035 Italy
- 18,407 Iran
- 17,963 Spain
- 15,320 Germany
- 13,680 US
- 10,886 France
- 8,565 Korea, South
- 4,075 Switzerland
- 2,716 United Kingdom
- 2,465 Netherlands
- 2,013 Austria
- 1,795 Belgium
- 1,746 Norway
- 1,439 Sweden
- 1,225 Denmark
USA
- New York numbers on their way to be as bad as Italy. If any of you live in NYC, I would recommend extremely strongly to get the fuck out
- Texas is one step below lockdown, with the mandated closure of most public places.
- I keep hearing rumours of national guard mobilizations and nationwide forced lockdowns. I mean, I’ve been hearing these rumours for a week already, but today they seem more frequent than usual. Take with a grain of salt, but it is what it is
- Gavin Newsom estimates that 56% of the population of California, 25.5 million people, will be infected within 8 weeks. This cannot possibly be true. Maybe, MAYBE if they did nothing, but they’re already locking down. If that number was true, and the CFRs we see are anywhere near reality, then there’d be the better part of 1 million dead in Wuhan alone.
Europe
- Netherlands is going to test a bunch of donated blood for coronavirus antibodies to try and answer once and for all how far it’s spread in the popuatlion already. Interesting to me because it implies that we have an antibody test and the ability to scale it up already.
- Italian death toll officialy higher than China’s. Judge for yourself whether you think it actually is
Asia
- Unnerving video of the Wuhan skyline, showing a lot fewer lights than I’d expect. Note that I have had a weird feeling that this particular twitter account is unreliable, although I can’t point to any specific reason why
Science/Medical
- Discovery of a 382-nt deletion during the early evolution of SARS-CoV-2 Paper makes the claim that there’s been a deletion mutation detected in Singapore that dramatically reduces the lethality of this virus. Perhaps that explains Singapores surprisingly low numbers?
- Tracking another mutant, with a mutation that the researchers fear is being selected for. They don’t know what it changes and they advise keeping an eye on it
- Some attempts at estimating the ratio of asymptomatic infections. [This one estimates it at 30%](https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712(20%2930139-9/pdf) using data on repatriated Japanese citizens from China
- This paper estimates there to be a massive amount of asymptomatic infection. It posits that there are 2 million infected in Wuhan, but an infection fatality rate of only 0.04%. Unless I’ve done my math wrong, that implies only 800 deaths in Wuhan, which, even China’s fake-low numbers are higher than that
- This paper says that severity of symptoms rises dramatically with age.
- The CDC jumps in with actual observed data. Their age bands are weird (“20-44”, really?) and their numbers are shockingly high (15-20% of that age group got hospitalized). Potential confounds are a) that ‘hospitalization’ doesn’t mean what I think it means; and b) These are US-confirmed infections and we all know what kind of fiasco testing has been. This is likely to heavily bias the sample in the ‘severe’ direction
- Antibody test?!?!?!
- Observation that IL-6 levels are much higher in people who die of COVID19. Perhaps this is a useful screening tool for predicting who goes severe