New cases rise like inverted "V"
The USA's COVID-19 situation getting dramatically worse as unchecked community spread occurs almost everywhere. Researchers trace spread to our partisan divide.
The latest data from the virus trackers at Johns Hopkins is depressing for anyone who wants the COVID-19 pandemic controlled. New cases (and hospitalizations and deaths) are rising sharply in many places, but the USA’s numbers are the worst, because the steep climb underway started at a rate significantly higher than anywhere except India. As of Sunday, there were nearly 48,000 Americans hospitalized with COVID-19, including more than 9,500 in intensive care — those numbers are the highest since August.
Before we get to today’s headlines, a little reflection:
As the USA careens towards 100,000 new COVID-19 cases a day, this may be a good time to review some history so that we might correct our missteps. The virus that causes COVID-19 may be new, but Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all took steps to protect the nation against a new infectious disease. Even Trump Administration officials took part in a pandemic planning exercise arranged by the Obama White House during the transition in 2017, and, in 2018, then-Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats warned the president and Congress:
“[T]he United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or largescale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy [and] strain international resources…”
Around the time of that report, the White House reassigned the National Security Council’s health security experts and slashed funding for pandemic preparedness. We are living this reality now.
For more on some of the history, read this article I put together awhile back showing the warnings about and planning for pandemic diseases going back more than 20 years.
Now, today’s top stories:
Nurses wanted: The surge of new cases across the USA is worsening a nursing and healthcare provider shortage that has been underway for years. In addition to deaths among healthcare professionals, some are quitting or retiring to avoid risk of COVID-19 or because they are exhausted.
El Paso, Texas set up its fourth mobile morgue, as COVID-19 deaths keep coming. State officials have sued to block El Paso from imposing stricter social distancing and other anti-COVID measures.
Epidemiologists trying to understand why the USA’s COVID-19 epidemic has been so terribly uncontrolled already knew that increased use of face coverings and social distancing would have helped. Now, a team of researchers from Yale, MIT and New York University analyzed mobility data covering more than 15 million people a day in 3,000 counties across the USA and found strong evidence that the partisan divide has fueled COVID-19’s spread, including new cases and deaths. Even the researchers were surprised when they found that as COVID-19 spread, people in counties that supported President Trump reduced social distancing and increased non-essential activities.
Gathering in large crowds without masks or social distancing linked to COVID spread: Stanford researchers traced 30,000 COVID-19 cases, including 700 deaths, back to 18 Trump rallies between June and September, CNBC reports.
The genetic signature of the virus that infected two White House journalists turns out to be a rare version of COVID-19. The New York Times explains how this was determined and what it could mean.
Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Laurie Garrett notes how dramatically different the COVID-19 outbreak has been in Canada vs. the USA, even though both nations experienced their first cases around the same time.
And something amusing and maybe useful:
