2020.03.31
Official Numbers
- 855,007 confirmed infections (Δ 70,291)
- 42,032 confirmed deaths (Δ 4,346)
- 177,857 confirmed recoveries (Δ 11,020)
- 16 confirmed infections in my ZIP code (Δ 2)
- 186,265 US
- 105,792 Italy
- 95,923 Spain
- 82,278 China
- 71,690 Germany
- 52,827 France
- 44,605 Iran
- 25,479 United Kingdom
- 16,605 Switzerland
- 13,531 Turkey
- 12,775 Belgium
- 12,667 Netherlands
- 10,180 Austria
Updates
Another slow news day. I also forgot to keep my sources handy, so no links today
- The pastor of a megachurch that continued to hold services in the face of lockdown orders has been arrested. This is mind-blowing to me. If you had told me that in my lifetime a Christian pastor would be arrested for practicing his faith, in America, I would have laughed you out of the room. This shit is getting real
- There’s a US Aircraft Carrier with an outbreak on it. They have formally requested permission to disembark their crew and quarantine everyone for 14 days. We’ll wait and see what happens.
- I’m going to start tracking the confirmed infections in my ZIP code. Because this is my site and I felt like it.
- I’ve also decided to start posting daily deltas for infections/deaths/recoveries.
- Finally, I’ve raised the cutoff for listing country-level numbers again, from 1k to 10k. Again, purely an aesthetic decision. If you want to see the numbers for any countries not included on this site, you can grab it from the Johns Hopkins dashboard where I get these numbers
A Mystery For You
I have some food for thought. If anyone knows the actual answer to my mystery, please email me, as I would really like to know.
San Francisco and NYC are often compared to each other (at least they are in SF; I’m sure NYC thinks this is quaint and funny). They are both very urbanized areas, with lots of people living in close proximity to each other. They’re both heavily reliant on crowded public transit. They are also both coronavirus hot spots.
If I recall correctly, SF saw their first cases before NY did. And yet, NY has a hospital-crushing outbreak with like a thousand people dead now, and SF has not. (note: I have top autists listening to EMS radio scanners, I don’t need numbers to prove this to my satisfaction).
Now, SF had a lockdown early on, but from everyone I know in SF, the lockdown is super half-assed. People still go out to grocery stores, people still mingle outside, go to the park, etc etc. And because the city is so crowded, it’s impossible to go to the park and keep the appropriate amount of distance to other people.
And yet they don’t have a massive outbreak there. My question is: what is the difference? I can only think of two explanations, although I’m sure there are ones I’m missing:
- The climate actually significantly affects transmission
- A half-assed lockdown is good enough
I think that both of these explanations are contradicted by other data, but I think it’s all suggestive in the direction of “actually this plague isn’t nearly as bad as I thought”.