Apr 5 US Confirmed Coronavirus Cases

The news for Sunday is very good; so good, in fact, that I don't believe it. The number of new cases was a little over 25,600. That represents an increase of only 8.21% over the cumulative total from Saturday, roughly 2/3rds of Saturday's already low increase. And while Saturday's numbers were believable, I don't feel Sunday's are. The number of deaths fell on Sunday as well, from 1322 to 1137. And while this drop is not as dramatic as the drop in the increase of cases, it is still pretty big, and I can't help but notice that the last time we saw a drop in the number of deaths was March 29, the previous Sunday. We'll have to watch Monday and Tuesday's numbers carefully.

Because these numbers are suspiciously low, and there were no big movements on the lists of states and counties, I won't have much to say about them. I'll skip the chart, and go straight to the states:

There are essentially no changes worth noting here.

Here's the counties I'm tracking:

I added one new county to the list, Galveston County in Texas.
Notes:

• We've added a couple more counties to those over 300 cases per 100,000: Putnam County, NY and Fairfield County, CT--both more distant suburbs of NYC.
• I added Galveston when I suspected its population might be low enough to make its 240 cases significant, and I was more right than I could have guessed--Galveston is now by far the county with the highest case rate that I'm tracking in Texas, two-thirds higher than the next closest, Dallas.
  For those of you not familiar with Galveston County, it is in the Houston metropolitan area, a coastal county, with a significant petrochemical industry but also tourism. In particular, the city of Galveston lies on a barrier island and draws people to its beaches and Mardi Gras festivities. It's also a major US cruise port, 4th in the country (after the three South Florida ports) and 11th in the world, and its destinations are very popular in the winter and spring.
  But one of the main reasons that Galveston is so bad is a senior home in Texas City, where to date 68 residents and staff have tested positive. Without these 68, Galveston would have a rate of about 50 cases per 100,000; still higher than any other county I'm tracking in Texas, but not as dramatically so.

Thought for the day:

I haven't talked about testing lately, but that's not because the issue has been solved. I went back and looked at the last time I updated my lists on tests, and it was 8 days earlier, on March 28. Nationwide at that point we had conducted 700,000 tests. (Please bear in mind this number is subject to many caveats. A few states don't provide negative test numbers, while others aren't as accurate in collecting data on tests done by private labs). Sunday, 8 days later, we had added roughly 1 million more tests. That's 125,000 tests per day, and while that's a big improvement, it's nowhere near enough.

This is frustrating on so many levels. For one, there is the issue of competency in understanding the problem. The reality is, the Trump administration has shown little to no interest in actually doing the work of helping people during this crisis. The CDC has done its job okay (and my understanding is that the original, poorly functioning test was a not unheard of situation that represented bad luck at the worst time, rather than incompetence). But there was no urgency to federal response in terms of altering regulations to get tests out to the public, and we lost SO MANY WEEKS on this. It's as though it was thought that we'd shut down travel from China and all was good (though as I pointed out in yesterday's post with a linked NY Times article, that ban was both way too late and horribly executed). To this day, tests are still a precious resource. Here in Houston, if you suspect Covid symptoms you can call a public testing site where you may not qualify to be tested, or go to a private site where anyone can get tested but they can only do a few hundred a day (in a region of 7 million).

It's also frustrating because I'm hearing so many voices of resistance to stay-at-home orders, all seemingly coming from the Right (Republican governors dragging their feet on statewide orders, attempts to exclude religious gatherings and gun stores from the orders, OAN (Trump's new favorite "news" organization which makes Fox News look "fair and balanced"), Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick's claim that old people should volunteer to die to save the economy, etc. The large majority of these voices of resistance seem to be based on economic concerns. Those concerns are real, but what I don't understand is that the way to solve those concerns is to defeat this virus as soon as possible, and the best model for us to do so is the South Korean model, and that requires massively more testing than we're doing (as a first step, with contact tracing the second part of that).

Even worse, the NY Times is reporting today that we are certainly underreporting Coronavirus deaths, in part due to a lack of tests and in part due to the very patchwork system we have of reporting deaths in this country. Here in Houston a doctor who is creating the main drive-through testing facilities in the area mentioned that until the last few days there was no option to list Covid-19 AT ALL on electronically filed death reports.

The New York Times also has an opinion piece today about the significant lack of testing, even to this day, even in NYC.

Guys, it's really simple. We cannot defeat what we do not know.