3 Million Confirmed COVID-19 Cases Worldwide, Business Bankruptcy Filings On the Rise, Reports of Coronavirus Relapse Among Survivors in South Korea and China
ALSO: New Zealand's Number of New Cases Down to Single Digits
The Butcher’s Bill
3,043,122 confirmed cases worldwide
894,997 recovered worldwide
211,221 deaths worldwide
Data is current as of 11:00 p.m. Pacific time on Monday April 27, 2020.
Sources: Johns Hopkins, U.S. data is from the New York Times, Italian data is from the Dipartimento della Protezione Civile, Spanish data is from the Ministerio de Sanidad.
NOTE: Some of the Johns Hopkins data is broken down to the state or provincial level, rather than a figure for the entire country. In these cases, the data is marked in the column as N/A.
To see the full list of data, go to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Research Center. I also recommend checking out the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Situation Dashboard. Italy’s Department of Civil Protection has its own Italian-centric version of the Johns Hopkins website which you can view here.
Some observations about the numbers from the past 24 hours:
§ There are now more than 3 million confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide.
§ France’s death toll is almost equal to Spain’s.
§ Germany and the United Kingdom have almost the same number of cases.
§ Russia passed China in number of cases.
§ The United States will probably cross the 1 million case mark tomorrow (April 28).
§ From Washington Post reporter Matt Viser: The Boston Globe ran more than twenty pages’ worth of obituaries in the Sunday edition of the paper.
§
§ For additional context, see the latest numbers on how the coronavirus pandemic compares to other events in American history.
Top Health Official Expects Dramatic Decrease in Number of COVID-19 Hospitalizations and Deaths By End of May
Dr. Deborah Birx – who is currently acting as the U.S. government’s Coronavirus Response Coordinator – said she expected a decline in number of new cases and deaths by the end of next month during an interview with Fox News over the weekend. Her exact words:
“We believe that both the hospitalizations, the ICU need and, frankly, the number of people who have succumbed to this disease will be dramatically decreased by the end of May,” Birx, the White House coronavirus task force response coordinator, said on Fox News Channel’s “Watters World.”
“The cases are a different issue because now, as we’re expanding more and more testing and — remember, our testing was very much prioritized to people who really needed it for decision making to people who were in the hospital, people who were sick, front-line responders and nurses,” Birx said.
“As we expand testing more and more into the greater community with much less symptoms, we’ll see cases — and additional cases, but we believe that those will be identifying the cases that may have been and are currently circulating in the community but maybe in that more asymptomatic or very mild state that we really want to understand,” she added.
An Oral History of March 11, 2020
This is an excellent piece by Garrett M. Graff in Wired. If you haven’t read his book The Only Plane in the Sky, it is in that vein and at that quality.
The two things I remember most about that day are the NBA suspending its season and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson disclosing their coronavirus diagnosis, for two different and similar reasons.
First, that the NBA would shut down indefinitely with a month to go in the regular season before the playoffs and (presumably) forfeit millions – if not billions – of dollars in revenue from ticket sales and television broadcasts. That they were shutting down and the federal government wasn’t was a massive disconnect. I immediately thought Rudy Gobert’s positive coronavirus test would have a similar bombshell impact to Magic Johnson’s HIV announcement and retirement decades earlier.
Second, in publicly disclosing his diagnosis, Tom Hanks became the Rock Hudson of the COVID-19 pandemic. Anyone familiar with the history of the early years of the AIDS pandemic knows that Rock Hudson’s diagnosis and eventual death was a tipping point in the public consciousness in terms of awareness of the disease.
As Randy Shilts wrote so eloquently in his magisterial book And the Band Played On: “The implications would not be fleshed out for another few years, but on that October day in 1985 the first awareness existed just the same. Rock Hudson riveted America’s attention upon this deadly new threat for the first time, and his diagnosis became a demarcation that would separate the history of America before AIDS from the history that came after.”
He added, “Doctors involved in AIDS research called the Hudson announcement the single most important event in the history of the epidemic, and few knowledgeable people argued.”
Having won his first Academy Award for portraying a gay man dying from AIDS, Hanks would most certainly be aware of the significance of Rock Hudson’s role in the history of the pandemic. It is hard to imagine that Hanks – one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time – was not at least thinking of Hudson when he made the announcement.
How Cruise Ships Became Coronavirus Incubators
This is a fascinating and lengthy investigation by the Washington Post.
Army Reservist Falsely Accused of Starting Pandemic Targeted Online By Conspiracy Theorists
This is a horrifying story on the power of disinformation and the Internet, especially when amplified by Chinese state-controlled media.
Bookmark This
The Centers for Disease Control has updated its list of possible coronavirus symptoms.
Wall Street Update
Business Bankruptcy Filings Up 18 Percent Compared to One Year Ago
For all the government loans and grants and bailouts, for some small businesses it may not be enough. From the Associated Press:
The number of Chapter 11 filings rose 18 percent in March from a year earlier, a dramatic swing from the 20 percent decrease in February, according to the American Bankruptcy Institute, a trade organization for attorneys and other professionals involved in bankruptcy proceedings. The numbers don’t break out filings by company size, but given that the vast majority of companies are small to mid-size, it does give an indication that smaller companies are struggling.
The federal government has already approved or given out more than 2 million loans and grants to small businesses totaling nearly $360 billion; another $310 billion is on the way to one of the programs. Still, the money may be at best a stopgap for companies with little to no revenue coming in. And the new funds are expected to go so quickly that thousands of owners won’t get loans.
There’s no way to predict how many companies will file for bankruptcy. There were over 160,000 bankruptcy filings from 2008 to 2010, during the Great Recession and its aftermath, according to statistics compiled by the federal court system. The numbers don’t break out filings by company size. The majority were for liquidations. although some companies restructured their debt and continued operating under Chapter 11.
Many companies, however, just shut their doors, and that’s likely to be the case again, Singerman says. According to some estimates, 170,000 companies failed during the recession.
Global Coronavirus Death Toll May Be 60 Percent Higher Than the Official Counts
Most experts already assume that the official numbers are underreported because of lack of testing. The Financial Times ran numbers for 14 countries and points out a discrepancy between mortality statistics and the official death counts in these countries:
Some of these deaths may be the result of causes other than Covid-19, as people avoid hospitals for other ailments. But excess mortality has risen most steeply in places suffering the worst Covid-19 outbreaks, suggesting most of these deaths are directly related to the virus rather than simply side-effects of lockdowns.
David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge university, said the daily counts in the UK, for instance, were “far too low” because they only accounted for hospital deaths.
“The only unbiased comparison you can make between different countries is by looking at all cause mortality . . . There are so many questions about the rise we’ve seen in death that have not got Covid on the death certificate, yet you feel are inevitably linked in some way to this epidemic.”
The extra deaths are most pronounced in urban areas with the worst virus outbreaks, and have completely overwhelmed reporting mechanisms in some. This is especially worrying for many emerging economies, where total excess mortality is orders of magnitude higher than official coronavirus fatalities.
WHO, France and Germany Team Up for $8 Billion Vaccine Fund
The World Health Organization along with the French and German governments launched an $8 billion effort to finance the development of a COVID-19 vaccine, with the idea that it should be available to everyone without preference or regard for the country that develops it first. This is in direct contrast to politicians, such as British Health Secretary Matt Hancock, who have emphasized the idea that if their country develops the breakthrough, then their people should be first to get it.
The European Commission will host a virtual summit on May 4 to secure funding commitments from countries and organizations around the world for the estimated €7.5 billion in initial funding for the Coronavirus Global Response.
“We need to bring the world, its leaders and people together against coronavirus. In just 10 days, we will launch a global pledging effort. A real marathon,” European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen said in a press release. “Because beating coronavirus requires a global response and sustained actions on many fronts. We need to develop a vaccine, to produce it and deploy it to every corner of the world. And we need to make it available at affordable prices.”
Reports of Coronavirus Relapse Coming from South Korea and China
Following up on Friday’s news about the World Health Organization expressing doubt about the viability of immunity passports – Chile is already doing it, the United Kingdom and France have expressed interest in the concept – reports from South Korea and China are testing the assumption that survivors of the virus are subsequently immune to it.
In mid-April, South Korean health authorities reported that more than 2 percent of the country’s recovered patients were in isolation after testing positive again. In Wuhan, ground zero for the pandemic, several quarantine facilities that were housing COVID-19 patients after being discharged from the hospital reported that as many as 5 to 10 percent of recovered patients tested positive.
Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory or plausible explanation for this yet. According to NPR, “It remains unclear why this is occurring — whether it is a sign of a second infection, a reactivation of the remaining virus in the body or the result of an inaccurate antibody test.”
New Coronavirus Cases in New Zealand Down to Single Digits
New Zealand continues to set the bar pretty high for how to handle this pandemic. Government officials claim to have “eliminated” the virus in their country, as they announced during a press conference the loosening of restrictions from level four to level three. The basis for this proclamation was the fact that health authorities managed to get the number of new cases down to single digits, a feat it has accomplished for ten consecutive days, with only 239 active cases and 19 deaths in the entire country.
According to one study, New Zealand had a higher rate of infections than neighboring Australia at the beginning of the lockdown. They were able to bring that curve down to equal Australia’s within an estimated three weeks, and the current rate is 59 percent that of Australia’s.
Despite their success, the government does not want people to become complacent. Ashley Bloomfield, the Director General of Health, said that the low number of new cases “does give us confidence that we've achieved our goal of elimination, which -- that never meant zero but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from.”
However, Bloomfield also noted, “We do not want to see the sorts of rebounds we have seen in other countries.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, “We will have to keep stamping Covid out until there is a vaccine.”
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“What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well.
It helps men to rise above themselves.”
Albert Camus, The Plague