COVID19 Update - Day 215

US Tests: 109,978,606*

US Cases: 7,727,630*

US Deaths: 206,597*

Worldwide Cases: 37,395,029*

Worldwide Deaths: 1,075,750*

* - Numbers are a lower bound.  True numbers are being suppressed by the Trump administration

The next wave is here.  After a summer spent reopening schools, reopening businesses, reopening sports, refusing to wear masks, and basically behaving as if there were no pandemic going on, we're starting to see the predictable results:

What’s so worrisome is that no one state or region can be blamed for this new wave. Just 13 states have seen their number of new Covid-19 cases drop over the last two weeks, according to Covid Exit Strategy. Cases are up in all the others.

Raw case numbers can, of course, obscure important differences in population; 100 new cases means something different for California than it does for Wyoming. Experts will use another metric — new cases per million people — to gauge how saturated a given state is with Covid-19.

The goal would be to have fewer than 40 new cases per million people. But just three states — Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire — meet that threshold. Meanwhile, North Dakota (627 cases per million), South Dakota (596), Montana (474), and Wisconsin (434) are some of the states seeing very high levels of new infections.

As Vox’s German Lopez reported this week, just one state — Maine — meets all of the benchmarks established by experts for a state to consider its Covid-19 outbreak contained. And yet, most states have reopened many of the businesses that were closed in the spring: 40 or so states have reopened restaurants, bars, gyms, movie theaters, and nonessential retail.

“Part of the problem is America never really suppressed its Covid-19 cases to begin with,” Lopez wrote, explaining why experts were anticipating a new surge in cases. “Think of a disease epidemic like a forest fire: It’s going to be really difficult to contain the virus when there are still flames raging in parts of the forest and small embers practically everywhere. The country always risks a full blaze with each step toward reopening and with each failure to take precautions seriously.”

Just remember, it didn't have to be this way.  America could have performed a more or less COMPLETE shutdown early on, and then reopened safely, using quarantines and contact tracing to keep the #TrumpVirus in check.

Unfortunately, there were too many selfish and entitled people who believed that spreading a deadly disease was their God-given right.  And so, 8 months in, and after more than 200,000 deaths, we are no closer to beating the #TrumpVirus than we were in March.

Nice work, everyone!