2020.03.24

Official Numbers:

• 417,698 confirmed infections
• 18,614 confirmed deaths
• 107,823 confirmed recoveries
• 81,591 China
• 69,176 Italy
• 53,268 US
• 39,885 Spain
• 32,986 Germany
• 24,811 Iran
• 22,622 France
• 9,877 Switzerland
• 9,037 Korea, South
• 8,164 United Kingdom
• 5,580 Netherlands
• 5,283 Austria
• 4,269 Belgium
• 2,779 Norway
• 2,587 Canada
• 2,362 Portugal
• 2,286 Sweden
• 2,201 Brazil
• 2,044 Australia
• 1,930 Israel
• 1,872 Turkey
• 1,718 Denmark
• 1,624 Malaysia
• 1,394 Czechia
• 1,329 Ireland
• 1,193 Japan
• 1,099 Luxembourg
• 1,049 Ecuador

Updates

Today is another slow news day. I didn’t find a lot of things worth reporting. I’m wondering if things are really going to slow down, as infections become normalized, as places get locked down, and as society goes on pause. I will continue to post updates here, but the updates may look more like this one, where I post “nothing to report”

Today’s updates, further, are mostly unsourced, as I either didn’t save the links, or the source is the White House’s coronavirus briefing

• My city goes on lockdown at midnight. It looks to be broadly similar to the California rules. People who are not sick are ordered to shelter in place, but can leave their homes to engage in “essential activities”. These activities are defined as, basically, “going outside to do whatever you want, alone”, and “patronizing any business that is still open”. The list of “essential businesses” is so exhaustive that I struggle to identify a commercial business that is forced to close.
• The concerning part to me is how draconian the rules are for people who are sick, or people who are suspected of being sick. If you are sick with COVID, if you are suspected sick of covid (‘suspected’ is not defined), if you are sick with something else, if you are not sick but awaiting test results, or if anyone else in your household satisfies these constraints, then you are blanket-forbidden from leaving your house without a mask on. You are only permitted to leave your house to either go outside (and only on your property), or to go to a hospital. Non-compliance faces six months in prison. A lot will depend on how heavily this is enforced, but the government just gave itself the power to declare you “suspected” infected, to lock you in your house (because remember, nobody has masks!), and to imprison you if you leave. I know I have been sounding the alarm on this disease, and been advocating for a lockdown for a month now, but holy civil rights, batman!
• You can read the full text of our lockdown here.
• In today’s coronavirus task force briefings, three points of interest came up
• First, the president is becoming reassured by the data coming out suggesting the fatality rate is much lower than expected due to asymptomatic infection and young people being less at risk. He is making statements that could be interpreted as him wanting to relax social distancing rules in order to improve the economy. I am of two minds on this, as I would agree with him if I was convinced that this disease is not as deadly as originally believed. However, while there is promising data suggesting that, I don’t find enough reliable data to lower the risk estimate enough to make me comfortable at this time
• Putting a date on it, the president has signalled that he hopes to be able to relax or reduce these measures by Easter, which is April 12th.
• The infection in New York City has reached 0.1% of the population, which sounded like a lot to me until I realized that that’s only 8000 people.
• Wuhan is apparently going to end their lockdown in the near future. I am very hopeful about this. I have long believed that China is lying, blatantly, about their stats, and that the epidemic in their country was somewhere between 10x and 100x as bad as reported. It has been nearly impossible to find reliable data to judge either way, but the one piece of ironclad trustworthy data is “Wuhan is shut down”. If Wuhan gets back to business as usual, that is a very strong sign that the worst in China actually is over.