It is a brutal, merciless race. But Italy has now surpassed China in its death toll from COVID-19. To date, Italy is now over 3,400 fatalities. China’s current number is 3,245. China still has double the number of confirmed cases. But the growth in China is minimal while it rushes ahead in Italy.
A TPM reader who is a physician and on a medical school faculty is watching the Trump’s ongoing press conference at the White House:
Today’s presser is unbelievable. I am an MD and member of our hospital executive administration in the thick of Covid preparation.
As I mentioned on Tuesday, many of us are struggling with time dilation, difficulty remembering what happened when, feeling like four days ago was a month ago. This has made me eager to start building timelines of recent events both to place ourselves in time and keep a clear sense of the progression of events that got us here. On this front, I’m particularly interested in locking down when public officials said what, when claims were made, promises were made, decisions were made. This will be a work over time. But I am going to be asking for your help pulling this information together.
Even as President Trump and his White House task force have shifted their tone to a more grave note in recent days, some Republicans continue to downplay the spread of the virus.
The stances vacillate somewhere between an adherence to harmful conspiracies about COVID-19 and a refusal to put outbreak preventions ahead of the economy.
From TPM Reader ZH …
I’m an American living in Portugal for the last 3 years. We just entered a state of emergency at midnight suspending many civil rights (eg strike, demonstration), enforcing restrictions on movement that are slightly escalated versions of what we did voluntarily for a few days, compelling essential businesses and workers to continue operating, allowing military deployment to assist, and vesting more power in the Prime Minister. This will last 15 days and is renewable.
A brief reminder that we have placed all our coverage of the COVID-19 Crisis outside the Prime paywall.
Give a read to TPM Reader EM’s report from South Korea …
I write this partly in response to CJ’s letter, but more to express what has been concerning me for the past few days.
I’ve been living in South Korea for over a decade where the response to the virus has been rightly praised, having brought daily infections back into the double digits, at least for now. As I see it, there are broadly three possibilities. The worst case is that we have uncontrolled spread of the virus to much of the population within a short time, greatly exceeding health system capacity and resulting in over a million deaths in the US alone. The best case is something along the lines of what has happened in South Korea or China, which both brought substantial outbreaks more or less under control by using various measures. The middle case, which I’m starting to see as most probable, is where we have radical social distancing and a shutdown of a large part of the economy for four months or more, with localized periodic major outbreaks along the lines Italy is experiencing.
Today I’ve frequently found myself overrun by the flow of new information, new data on the unfolding pandemic. It’s not clear to me whether that is more a reaction to an accelerating of new information or some cognitive fatigue or degeneration due to everything that has happened over the last three weeks. But my reading today drives home for me just how much we and really the whole world are still flying largely blind as we navigate one of if not the greatest global crisis of our lifetimes.
A few times over recent days I have encouraged people to reach out to elderly relatives or just friends or older people you don’t even know. FaceTime, Zoom, any of the other ubiquitous applications all work just fine. Loneliness and isolation are intrinsic risks of old age under the best of circumstances. Here we have an urgent clinical need for people over 65 or 70 to isolate themselves to a stringent degree. Stay in the house. Don’t have any visitors. Maybe even have the delivery people leave things at the door and come out later to bring it in.