On March 17 or 18, I listened to an Amy Goodman podcast from Democracy Now. She interviewed Avi Schiffmann, a 17-year-old kid from Seattle who had created a website that tracks the spread of corona.
Thanks to the way the designer created this, it updates more regularly than the CDC website or the site from John Hopkins. At some point in March, I did a blog post on his website and double posted to Facebook. A few days after it went up, I got a warning from FB that the post violated one of their policies and only I could see it. I removed the post.
At any rate, I decided I wanted a record of how fast this virus spread. I took the photo at the top of his post on March 19. The global number was under a quarter of a million.
Here’s one from three days later, March 22, then another for March 25, and then for tonight, April 14. I fully expect that by tomorrow the global number will be two million or more.
March 22: Global: 312,458
March 25: global 438,667 – more than 100,000 cases in just 3 days
April 14: Global, 1,930,262
For Florida, the picture looks like this.
April 4. At this point, other states were already locked down or in the process. But here, Governor DeSantis hadn’t bothered locking down the state or closing beaches so springs breakers had arrived in droves and left. Total confirmed cases in Florida: 11,111
Ten days later, today, April 14, those numbers have nearly doubled.
And are still rising.
And here, on April 15, just after midnight:
It took several months for the global number to reach a million. It took only 2 weeks to reached double that. And trump wants to open the country by May 1? Really?
Please stay safe. Only go out if extremely necessary.
How’re you doing, Alisha?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WkTJLS60A_c
We don’t really have a central government at this point, as far as I can tell. Nothing trump says or does is consistant or even seems to be very much aware of what a pandemic is, outside of some kind of conspiracy to hurt him in the polls (yes, he actually said something like that to a reporter). Sometimes it looks to me like what little governmental sanity we still have simply work around him, trying to ignore him as much as possible. Increasingly, as far as dealing with this crisis, the individual states, their governors and community leaders, have been left to deal – some more successfully than others. I’m pleased with AZ and Tucson – things are in lockdown, schools not opening until next year, all public events and most public places are closed, and it seems to be helping.
More and more, trump is unhinged. I’m glad your area is safe.
I can only assume you haven’t watched any of the daily briefings with Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx and the rest of the task force, or you wouldn’t think that. Look, I’m not much of a Trump fan either, but there is a lot of good information coming out of those briefings. The federal government is getting a lot of things right, maybe in spite of Trump, maybe because of him, I don’t know, but a lot of things are happening that you wouldn’t know about unless you watch those briefings. They’re long (often more than 2 hours), and it’s a shame CNN and the other networks only show a few minutes of them and then cut away (then I have to switch over to Fox to see the rest), because they are denying their viewers the chance to see what’s really being done. Even our (NY) governor Cuomo (as much of a Democrat as anybody out there) said the federal government has been instrumental in their efforts to fight the virus and that the administration has given them all the tools they need to get it done.
If you’re not watching the daily briefings, I strongly suggest you do – there’s a lot of the usual Trump bravado mixed in, of course, but if you can stomach it, watch the briefings. They are informative, hopeful, and really the only way to know what’s going on behind the scenes, because one thing Trump is right about is that the news organizations aren’t covering any of this accurately. CNN will tell you it’s “all lies”, but when I listen to what’s being said in the briefings, and I check it against what I see with my own eyes (I’m a nurse in NYC, front lines), that’s where you’re getting the most accurate information.
I hate to see this turned into a Trump/anti-Trump thing because it’s not. We’re all in this together, and no one saw this coming. Anyone who says they should have done this or that is speaking with 20/20 hindsight, and anyone who says things would have been better under different leadership is just showing their own internal bias. People would have died no matter who the president was, and saying it would have been less (or more) is just throwing out numbers without anything to back them up. We’re in this together. I don’t especially like this president either, but it’s not about him. It’s about doing what needs to be done to get through this, and I can see light at the end of the tunnel. If you take off your “Trump is bad” glasses you might see it too.
Since you’re a nurse on the NY front lines, describe what it’s like.
What’s it like? Well, nothing like what you see on TV. I’m not in the ICU, so I don’t see the worst of it, but I rotate through ED and triage and I see patients coming in. Most have fairly mild symptoms – a cough, fever, etc, not much worse than what we would see in a normal flu season, just a higher overall volume of pts. Most are less worried about the symptoms they have than they are about what might happen if their symptoms escalate – and I blame the media for most of that. For most people it’s not much worse than a bad cold, and I should add that for many of them it actually IS just a bad cold. We have the testing supplies we need and can confirm a diagnosis in about 15-20 minutes. Of the pts I see complaining of cough and fever, I’d say only about 10-15% of them test positive. The news media would have you believe half the population of NYC are dying of Coronavirus, but that’s just not the case. And most of what you hear about mask and gown shortages isn’t true either. For a few days in early-mid March we ran low on masks and gowns and we had to conserve what we had. Not because it was anybody’s fault, but because we just had a lot more pts than usual coming into the ED with a cough and we went through more than usual. After a few days we got more in, and we haven’t had a problem since. Overall it’s not nearly as bad as what you’re being told by the news media – they hype everything to death and want people to believe the sky is falling but it’s not. There are some serious cases too, of course – mostly elderly or otherwise unwell to begin with, and they’re the ones that end up in ICU and on ventilators (which we have plenty of, and I wish the news people would stop saying there’s a shortage of them because it makes people come in here in a panic wanting to get on one before we run out!).
So no, it’s nothing like what you see and hear on TV. We have what we need to deal with a higher than normal volume of patients, but people aren’t dying in the streets or lined up outside the door waiting for a vent. I work longer hours and different rotations than usual just to handle the volume, but it’s nothing like what you’ve been led to believe.
This is good to know. Which hospital do you work in?
And just to be clear, I don’t wear hate trump glasses. But I also don’t wear I love to hear him rant glasses. Let the health experts speak.
I have 353 reported recovered to add to that dashboard. And unreported by it, though other stats seem up to date. Good news to balance the bad.
Good!
More testing means more confirmed cases. You seem surprised by this. Why?
Not surprised by that. I’m not surprised by the ineptness of this administration to do what needs to be done, either. They’ve botched this since the beginning.
Look, Sinque or whoever you are (mackenzie?). There’s no platform here for trump supporters. Start your own pro-trump blog. Volunteer for his campaign. Write him fan letters. Suck up to him. I can keep going if you’d like.
Since you seem to be itching for an argument, how about a real name and email address and we can continue that way instead of you hiding behind a bogus identity.
Hey, sharp knife sinque. Just as I figured. Your email is bogus. So you do hide.
I don’t have to knock myself out. In trump’s own words, with a calendar to help you out. All laid out for you in You Tube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ch7_t2Ri2Zg
You either haven’t been paying attention or are so enmeshed in the cult of trump that you drank his Kool-Aid long ago.
LOL, mackenzie. You and sinque are part of the same brainwashed trump cult. Talk about living in the a bubble.
This is all soooooo upsetting. But that’s not news.