On Friday I noted news reports that claimed US military intelligence was warning as far back as late November of a possible new virus in China with a possible global impact. The problem is that these US intelligence reports would predate by weeks our earliest understanding of when the first cases emerged and well before the Chinese themselves knew they had a new disease on their hands. That chronology of the outbreak comes from news reports from major dailies in the United States and Hong Kong. But there’s another body of evidence which points to a similar and more definitive timeline. That’s hidden in the COVID-19 genome itself.
I wanted to flag your attention to this oped in the Times, now a couple weeks old. It notes that other countries in Europe are not seeing the scale of job loss that we are in the US, even though they’re shutting down their economies just as much. It’s from March 30th. So it’s from eons ago in COVID terms. But it holds up pretty well. There are two points I want to focus on.
As Congress is consumed by how best to confront and combat the spread of the novel coronavirus, Senate Republicans have been forced to toss their efforts — to confirm a string of conservative judges while Republicans still hold the majority in the upper chamber — to the backseat.
Wisconsin Republicans took the unconscionable step of forcing an in-person election during a deadly pandemic last week because they were sure a low turnout election would ensure victory for the conservative candidate in a state Supreme Court race. But in a stunning development, the conservative lost. Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate in a technically non-partisan race, is the winner.
His impeachment acquittal may have left him with the impression that he holds the keys to an unbound presidency. And he may be stoking secret pipe dreams that the pandemic will delay the presidential election. But President Trump is clearly getting increasingly fed up with the fact that he is leading a democratic nation and not something more totalitarian.
A small but notable collection of data was published yesterday in The New Journal of Medicine. One major New York City hospital evaluated and tested every expectant mother who was admitted to the hospital for childbirth. Almost 14% were COVID positive and almost all of lacked any symptoms. This is an early and still very small window into the kind of universal and/or random sample testing that will be necessary to get an accurate understanding of the prevalence of COVID19 in the population at large.
Sometimes we adopt a metaphor for a big societal question that, even though we know it’s a metaphor, still significantly distorts our thinking about what we’re talking about. I’m thinking here of when we “reopen the economy”. At least in its more antic forms, President Trump himself seems to be the big driver of this catchphrase. So that may explain the confusion behind it. The economy isn’t closed and we’re not going to reopen it. Not any time soon.
Important new numbers out this evening from New York City that for the first time allow us to take a preliminary look the city’s excess deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Josh Kovensky has pulled together the numbers.
As you know, we’ve been focusing heavily on the ‘excess mortality’ question in the COVID19 pandemic across the world. Excess mortality is the number of deaths in a given region over a particular period of time which is in excess of the average number of deaths in previous years. We’ve looked closely at analyses from Italy and Spain which show dramatic discrepancies between the reported number of COVID19 fatalities and actual amount of excess mortality during the periods in question. In many cases, when this full excess mortality is calculated the number is two, three or even four times higher than the official COVID19 death toll.
What remains unknown in these other cases is how many of these additional deaths were ‘hidden’ COVID19 fatalities versus people who died as a result of the overall crisis but not the disease itself. This can range from an overwhelmed hospital system which creates a degraded level of care, to stress imposed by the totality of the crisis to people who do not seek medical attention for health crises they could have survived.
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We can thank Rush Limbaugh for this one.