The world is quickly approaching 4 million coronavirus cases, with 273,000 dead and about 1.4 million recovered. Although the BBC has noted Italy's landmark of 30,000 dead, the UK is actually ahead of them with 31,000 deaths. The UK is also eyeing Italy's 3rd place position in cases, though with #5 Russia still shooting up at 10,000 cases a day, they may not hold it long. (The Russian case count does not include the mysterious rash of COVID-19 defenestrations among health care workers there.) Brazil has surpassed Turkey to gain the #8 slot; Reuters reports on ongoing concerns about undercounting there.
The US is at 1.3 million cases and 77,000 deaths. The pandemic may be plateauing, but the unemployment numbers are not. The Washington Post is particularly pessimistic about the numbers of people who will end up returning to work. Well Being Trust predicts [PDF] 27,644 to 154,037 "deaths of despair" in America as a result of the growing coronavirus recession, depending on how long it lasts. Their middle-of-the-road prediction is 68,000 deaths.
P.S. Massachusetts is up 2% again today. No more Walmarts have been lost to coronavirus, but our US Congressional critters are making their displeasure with the chain known nonetheless.
Friday, May 08, 2020
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I can’t vouch for this but here is an Italian MP saying that most of Italy's deaths aren't from COVID-1984 (as some wag has dubbed it).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz5z126qliY
He certainly sounded Italian. I think it's difficult to say in any particular case what a fragile old person actually died of: their preconditions, a heart attack, some random pneumonia somehow not caused by the obvious pneumonia-causing respiratory virus that's going around at the time. That's why flu statistics are only statistics. The relevant statistic for Italy is the excess deaths over those expected for this spring; unless those people were all scared to death by coronavirus fear-mongering, they're pretty likely to have died directly because of coronavirus. One dead grandma is an accident, one hundred are a coincidence, but thirty thousand are a pattern.
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