Day 109: You Can't Handle the Flu

The Spain issue arises again, as news outlets attempt to claim Brazil has reached third place in the coronavirus rankings. But for those who count all tested Spanish cases, not just PCR-tested ones, Spain is still at #3 with 278,000 cases compared to Brazil's 271,000. (Brazil should level up tomorrow at the rate they're going.) Russia remains at #2 with as close to 300,000 cases as makes no difference. The US retains the lead with 1.57 million cases.

While no nations have exceeded China lately, PlagueBlog notes that Massachusetts, at 87,000 cases, recently exceeded China's current count of 84,000 cases. (We exceeded China's death toll some time ago.) CNN notes that the Navajo nation has exceeded New York State's infection rate, with 2,304 cases per 100,000 (still using old census data) versus 1,806 cases.

On the somehow-not-the-flu front, a Washington Post article put forth the strange notion that we should suddenly, after thousands of years, start mourning victims of disease as though this were a new, surprising, and meaningful way to die instead of one of the most pedestrian causes of death known to man. PlagueBlog is tempted to remind WaPo of the 500,000 or so flu deaths worldwide that we brush off every year, but instead I'll let some "trusted sources" make the unspeakable comparison for me:

The New York Post reported on the summer of '69, when people cowered in their houses and wore masks crowded together barefaced in the mud at Woodstock, because the Hong Kong flu had been ravaging the land that winter and was looking to do it again the next winter. The article gets into the weeds after that, though it does let slip a couple of reasonably coherent theories about why people back then brushed off a flu pandemic on the scale of our coronavirus pandemic: one, men were real men a belief that challenges were good for your immune system, not something to run away and hide from, and two, an optimistic attitude about the potential of science to triumph over disease.

The New York Times has also taken on our international flu legacy, reflecting on the almost universal lack of memorials to the Spanish flu that killed upwards of a hundred million people worldwide. They do come to the conclusion that men were real men back then and they didn't want to think about embarrassing deaths from pneumonia in hospital, but noble deaths from mustard gas in the trenches. Or something like that.

Massachusetts is up 1% today, our first full day of Phase 1. Middlesex County is up only 0.8%, and Somerville, never a hotspot of the county, is at this very moment cancelling most of Phase 1 because the mayor and the health department in his head think it's too dangerous for someone from a young, healthy, and well-to-do community to get a haircut in the city rather than in one of the many saner cities conveniently located within walking distance.