This is a brief snapshot of the status of COVID-19 in the United States. All data are derived from Worldometer.info or COVIDTracking.com.
The United States is no longer in the top 10 countries based on either deaths per million population or cases per million population (it’s #11 in both). California continues to have an increasing number of new cases diagnosed. Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona all have declining numbers of new cases diagnosed. To the best of my ability to determine no state has an increasing total number of hospitalizations due to COVID-19. There’s no way for me to determine whether that’s because new cases are not severe enough to require hospitalization, people are avoiding hospitalization regardless of the severity of the disease, or physicians are treating the disease without hospitalization more effectively.
In states in which governors continue to tighten restrictions, like California and Illinois, although the new cases continue to increase, the governors continue to claim that they’re formulating their policies based on science but it remains unclear to me what science that might be. Here in Illinois, for example, although the number of cases diagnosed is increasing, the number of deaths due to COVID-19 has been stable for months and the number of new hospitalizations and total hospitalizations continues to decline, Gov. Pritzker still wants to tighten restrictions.
There continue to be battles, IMO mostly politically based, on effective treatments for the disease.
I remain highly skeptical that an effective vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 will be available by the end of 2020 and I certainly find the prospect of such a vaccine being available in substantial quantities in the next six weeks farfetched indeed.
Not what I Expected:
South Dakota’s covid numbers reveal Native Americans are infected at higher rate than the general population, but not that much more.
Data from two large Rapid City health care providers reveals that 53% of people with confirmed cases in Pennington County are tribal members, the Rapid City Journal reported. Statewide, Native Americans account for 14% of all cases, while they make up about 9% of the population.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/south-dakota/articles/2020-06-26/tribal-health-board-native-americans-hit-hard-by-covid-19
APM Research continues to update their statistics of mortality due to COVID-19 by race. I think the figures are startling, revealing, and outrageous. That resources are not being focused where they are most needed, in communities with largely black, Hispanic, and indigenous populations, is a scandal for federal, state, and local governments that is not getting enough attention.
Two points bear mentioning. The first is that the white mortality rate is actually better than that of countries usually deemed to have handled the pandemic well. That means that the best hope of attacking the pandemic is with measures along the lines I have described.
The second is that the very high mortality rate of COVID-19 among blacks is probably a contributing factor to civil unrest. Stress will do that.
Just waiting to see what happens with the flu season.
Steve