March 30 Recap
Issue 5
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Summary
Nearing 800,000 confirmed cases and 40,000 deaths worldwide
US now at 164,248+ cases, which is a 15.5% growth rate…
Italy now at 101,739 (4.8% growth - trending down!), Spain at 87,956 (10%, stabilizing?), Germany at 66,885+ (6.5% growth) cases
Good places to find numbers and other Covid-19 info:
US testing tracking (US daily totals, as well as numbers broken out by state)
🇺🇸 US news
At a glance:
Total confirmed cases at 164,248+ (22,000+ more cases), 3,156 deaths
New York (67,384 cases), New Jersey (16,636), and California (7,413) continue to lead in case numbers
California STILL has 56,550 (!!) pending tests, potential answers below
Testing total at 944,854 (up 113,503 from yesterday, our highest single day of testing yet!)
State and Local News
LA Times on California’s (7,413 cases, 146 deaths) testing bottleneck: Quest only has one facility (located in Southern California) running tests. However, other labs are apparently ramping up processing capabilities.
Tarrant County in Texas (2,877, 38), in which Fort Worth is located, has started contact tracing. Its neighbor, Dallas county, is calling in health care works from the National Guard to assist with its own contact tracing.
Virginia (1,020, 25) Governor issued a stay-at-home order, effective until June 10.
Maryland (1,415, 15) Governor also enacted a stay-at-home directive.
Except for New Mexico (281, 4) and Louisiana (4,025, 185), fever numbers seem to be rapidly dropping around the country. This suggests the stay-at-home orders have been effective at reducing coronavirus spread.
Trends
New cases in New York (67,384 cases, 1,342 deaths) seem to be stabilizing, though this may be an artifact of testing numbers leveling off:
Map view of variation in stay-at-home orders:
Using Google Trends to predict the next hotspots?
Other news
Researchers at UCSB have a working paper estimating how seasonality affects Covid-19 transmission: 1 degree Celsius increase in local temperature reduces transmission by 13%; predicts changing seasons will cause transmissions to fall in the North Hemisphere as they increase in the Southern Hemisphere.
An uplifting thread from Andy Slavitt (ex-Obama healthcare head) yesterday. He does a daily Covid-19 twitter thread like this one from today. It’s frequently informative but usually ominous.
🌐 International News
🇩🇪Germany (66,885 cases, 645 deaths) might issue coronavirus antibody certificates to allow people to re-enter society. Antibodies indicate someone has had Covid-19 and beat it, so the obvious question is: what happens to those who’ve never had Covid-19?
🇫🇷Similar to South Korea (9,661, 158), around 2,500 cases in France (45,170, 3,030) are linked to a religious gathering in the French city of Mulhouse, located near France’s borders with Germany (66,885, 645) and Switzerland (15,922, 359).
🇵🇹Portugal (6,408, 140) temporarily gives migrants and asylum-seekers full citizenship rights during the coronavirus outbreak, granting them full access to the country’s healthcare system.
🇯🇵Now that the Olympics has been postponed, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe says Japan (1,953, 56) is on the brink of a huge jump in cases.
🇨🇴Columbia’s (700+, 10) left-wing ELN rebel group calls for a month-long ceasefire over coronavirus.
🌎A brief South America rundown. 🇪🇨Ecuador’s relatively high numbers probably suggest other countries are under-testing and/or Covid-19 spread has only just started
Interesting Things
A cool Twitter thread chronicling what daily life is like in Beijing: subways becoming more filled, small crowds in Apple stores, and social distancing in Starbucks
A comparison between Iceland (randomized testing of 3.2% of its population) vs Netherlands (only testing those with more severe symptoms)
Quaran-tweet of the Day
This is a work in progress, so please PLEASE let me know if you have any suggestions, and/or see anything that is wrong or missing, at dailycovid19updates@gmail.com; you can also tweet me @julienchien
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