The odds kept climbing that eventually I would know someone killed or seriously affected by COVID-19. That time appears to have come near.
Pervert Justice
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The odds kept climbing that eventually I would know someone killed or seriously affected by COVID-19. That time appears to have come near.
So there’s a story I’ve been meaning to get to this week. This will have to be a sort of placeholder for something longer. While there’s a lot to say, the particular outrage can be summed up in this comment by Esther Lucero from the Seattle Indian Health Board:
So, PZ has planned a hangout for Patrons this Sunday where scientists will be talking about debunking pseudoscientific nonsense. Of course, this doesn’t come up out of nowhere, it’s obviously in response to the misinformation woo-peddlers and right-wingers spew generally and the misinformation that Trump is spewing about Coronvirus “cures” more specifically. All of which makes this meme not only funny, but tragically relevant to our current moment:
So many sources have shown total deaths in the USA to have already surpassed 50k. Now, even those sources are undercounts, we are sure. (NYC has experienced 4000 deaths more than would be expected for the period of the pandemic even after subtracting deaths confirmed to be a result of COVID-19.) Nevertheless, data collated by the European Center for Disease Control & Prevention are considered just as “official” and yet aren’t the same as those presented by the USA CDC. Since I started off with the ECDC data, I have to continue to use it for consistency’s sake, but it is interesting to note that it appears to be somewhat behind.
Well, despite my dramatic and terrifying underestimate of how US residents would pull together and alter their behavior to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2, there are still many COVID-19 deaths happening around the USA. Looking at graphs, the growth of the disease looks a lot more linear than exponential lately, and that’s a very, very good thing. With linear growth, each doubling takes twice as long as the last doubling, which means that we buy ourselves lots and lots of time to make vaccines and take more preventative actions before reaching megadeath-scale numbers. Of course, this is still much worse than negative growth rate in COVID-19 deaths or just stopping the disease in its tracks, but when the choice is between linear growth and exponential growth, as it was for the USA at the end of last month, you have to choose the former.
So just recently I wrote a post pointing out how reasonable it was to expect 6 doublings of COVID-19 deaths in the USA by early May (which would have given us a bit over a quarter million total persons dead), and how after that even one more doubling would be an unthinkable tragedy. But we’re not seeing doublings on the rate I feared (and which seemed reasonable given a comparison to other nations then-current rates of doubling when they had initiated nationwide stay-at-home policies before the USA). Commenter militantagnostic was early on the case, informing me on April 6th:
So I linked to one important source I used in my non-professional but (hopefully) mathematically literate guesswork about how COVID-19 deaths in the US will increase over the next while. What I didn’t appreciate at that time was that the graphic that they used to discuss geometric growth in deaths in various countries is a dynamic graphic. Every time a country updates its total deaths on its own official websites, which happens once a day or more for Eurpoean and North American countries, the graphic itself updates. This means you can’t click on the link from a past article (or in this paragraph) and get easy access to the numbers I used when writing a particular blog post.
SARS-CoV2 infections were originally doubling once every 2.5 days, according to the CDC and the WHO. Over the last 4 days, deaths in different countries have had different doubling rates, but US deaths doubled very close to once in that 4 days.
This is a result of the fact that the places with the highest numbers of deaths also have done the most to slow transmission via shelter-in-place orders and other measures. So even if infections and deaths are doubling much faster in counties and states that haven’t yet been hit hard, the total number of deaths they add from a single doubling might yet be small compared to deaths in, say, New York City, which had over 500 on Friday. (By the way, New York City’s measures haven’t yet been effective at slowing the doubling: their deaths doubled in a mere 3 days.) We are not likely headed for a slowdown of the doubling rate because there are so many places where the virus is just beginning its infectious burn, and while each individual county might be small, there are many counties with many, many people in Texas and Florida and Georgia and other red states.
Now you have instant options! The website “Wash Your Lyrics” will generate a poster copied from the NHS but with the lyrics to the song of your choice – automatically, no typing of lyrics whatsoever. Input the song name and artist & away you go! My first creation was based on Bikini Kill’s Tony Randall, off the album Reject All American. This is how it came out: