Monday, June 01, 2020

Day 122: Another Great Leap Forward

Today marks the beginning of meteorological summer in the northern hemisphere. The world is at 6.37 million cases, with 377,000 deaths. Saudi Arabia has passed the China mark, and Mexico has surpassed both China and Canada to take fourteenth place (after Chile with 105,000 cases). And defenestration is still a major coronavirus complication in Russia.

Massachusetts cases are up only 0.33% today by our normal accounting methods, but, due to advice from the CDC about counting "probable" cases, our total case count has make an unexpected leap to over 100,000 cases, and our death count a smaller leap to 7,035 victims. PlagueBlog expects a similar disturbance in the cities and towns data come Wednesday, which will probably leave nothing useful to map until things settle out next week. At least we'll always have the Financial Times' excess mortality data.

On the scofflaw front, the town of Swansea apparently held a special town meeting today, apparently with social distancing. PlagueBlog suspects that more than ten persons were in attendance, but PlagueBlog also doubts that the constitution of the commonwealth permits the governor to cancel town meeting for the flu.

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