Parsing Out Dystopia: COVID-19 30,000+ Days

New confirmed cases per day in the US from the Johns Hopkins site.  As you can see, we are approaching a new peak.  The overall downward trend flattened about a month ago.  Now the count is going up. 

June 23 globally.

I have been watching the excellent Johns Hopkins Medical Center COVID-19 dashboard on a daily basis since before the pandemic was declared a pandemic.  It now shows a disturbing upward trend that theoretically was not supposed to happen until the fall.  Hell, Trump, in his infinite wisdom said "it will just go away."  Well, clearly that is not the case.

There are two critical pieces of information that are just being glossed over by the media, or not mentioned at all.

1) Barring a vaccine or a mutation of the virus into a less harmful form, 60% to 70% of the United States population will eventually become infected. That's 200,000,000 Americans.  This virus hasn't even gotten started yet.  Just to make sure "politics" is taken out of this scientific fact you can verify these percentages at Fox News here or at CNN here.  Pick your poison.

2) More importantly, no one is reporting this data straight from the graph above.  As of yesterday, there have been a total of 17 days where the United States experienced 30,000+ new confirmed COVID-19 cases in a single day.  

Four of the last five days have exceeded 30,000 in the United States.

We are essentially back to where we were at the end of April, only moving in the opposite direction. Up instead of down.

No one is reporting the 30,000+ days, which I think is critical.  It is one measure that common Americans can relate to and understand.  But we have no unified leadership, no unified policy, no unified massage about the virus.  There is no one in government to report this important fact/trend to the apparently ignorant general public.

Now the first way to spin this is that we are testing more than ever so naturally there will be more new cases discovered.  But that statement is too simplistic.  Testing is increasing everywhere in the US but the virus is increasing in most states while decreasing in others.  If more testing automatically led to more new confirmations, we would see it more evenly distributed across all the states. 

What we are seeing is not just an increase in new cases but also an increase in the "positivity rate" in states that chose to reopen quickly.

As The Washington Post reported a couple of days ago: "The way to tell whether a rise in cases is indicative of increased spread in the population — rather than a byproduct of conducting more tests — is by seeing how many tests are identifying infections.

"To get a sense for this dynamic, consider New York. At the beginning of April, when testing was constrained at around 20,000 tests per day, positivity reached a peak of 50 percent. No one thinks that anywhere near half the state’s population had covid-19 at that time, so those results would imply that testing was overly focused on a subset of the population highly likely to be infected. Indeed, health officials were limiting testing to health-care workers and patients requiring hospitalization. These days, upward of 50,000 tests per day are conducted in New York and positivity is less than 2 percent.

"Overall test positivity in the United States has fallen dramatically (partly because we tested so few people early on). Across the entire country, positivity is currently running at just under 5 percent, down from a peak of 21 percent in early April. That’s a good sign, in general. However, more than 20 states — most of them in the South and Midwest — still have positivity rates higher than 5 percent. These include Arizona, at 17 percent; Alabama, at 12 percent; Florida, at 10 percent; Texas, at 9 percent; and Georgia, at 8 percent.

"These states have also made news for their rising covid-19 case numbers. Arizona had 14,107 cases last week, when it tested 67,235 people — up from 8,802 cases and 56,424 tests in the previous week At a glance, it may look as if Arizona found more cases last week because it tested more people, but the reality is that new cases outpace the spread of testing.

"In the last week, the incidence of new cases has increased in nearly half of the states. (Nationally, an average of about 20,000 cases have occurred each day since the beginning of June). For some of these states, such as West Virginia and Oregon, these increases may be due to week-to-week fluctuation, not increasing transmission. Recently, West Virginia and Oregon have both increased the number of people tested and seen a decline in test positivity. But for some states with rising case growth, it is almost certainly because more people are becoming infected."

To simplify this, I will be looking not only at new cases but at number of deaths, which are still declining on a daily basis as of today.  Since May 27, when the US passed 100,000 deaths, we have averaged about 734 per day.  That's down from 2,000 - 3,000 a day in April.  When that average starts to tick upward (or not) then the negative impact of the trend will be (or not be) confirmed in my mind.

What we are seeing is exactly the type of numbers and behavior that will drive that 60% to 70% fact.  If you have eased up on your view of social distancing then you are basically begging to be infected.  

Almost all of us are going to get this virus.  The time frame is within about two years.

There has never been a vaccine developed for any coronavirus.  So, my bet is we won't get one this time either.  Instead, I find news of possible effective treatments to be more promising. Remdesivir is the first drug to have genuine clinical promise to abate the severe symptoms of COVID-19 that are experienced by about 20% of those who become infected.

This is encouraging news.  I have every reason to believe that other drugs and possibly combinations of drugs will be found to help mitigate the impact of the virus.  It is far more likely that most of us are going to catch COVID-19.  Effective treatment protocols should significantly reduce the death rates and the suffering.  Our dystopian reality is that we are going to have to learn to live with this virus until it plays itself out.

Note:  After posting this piece I read in Forbes and HuffPost that the Trump administration announced today it plans to cut Federal Funding for several COVID-19 testing facilities at the end of this month.

Let it be known this will cover-up the rise in cases, whether intended or not.  Let it be known what the 30,000+ days were and what they meant before this scheduled cut in funds.

I hope the states will pick up the tab for these facilities.  Trump's lack of leadership during this crisis is mind-boggling.  The president does not seem interested in how many Americans are catching this virus.  The president, who once said "anybody who wants a test can get one," seems hell-bent on making it harder to get tested while rendering proactive testing impossible.  

He wants to move on.  The virus does not care what Trump wants.  And we are all about to the pay the price over the next two years.  Cutting testing will only increase deaths in the long run.  

Apparently, seven of these facilities are in Texas where rates are rising and people are waiting two hours to get a test now.  Good.  That should set well with the average Texan voter.  Who is putting Texas into play for the election now?  You idiot.

You cannot make this type of stuff up.  Reality has become far more interesting and frustrating than any dystopian novel or TV show.