Brazil and India are getting hammered


For the first time in the pandemic, daily new cases aren’t really going up or down – they’re staying at the same level. On NPR this morning, Dr. Ashish Jha described this as the result of two counteracting forces: the broadening rollout of vaccines and the new variants causing a rapid rise in cases among the unvaccinated (and especially the unvaccinated who are acting as if they’re vaccinated and can get on with their normal lives). But the real message is this: If unvaccinated people were still taking proper precautions, new cases would be at a much lower level than they are now, and would still be falling.

However, at least we can be thankful we’re not India or Brazil. Both of these countries are paying the price for mismanagement of the crisis, although Bolsonaro has to win the prize as the leader who’s most tirelessly worked to put his country in the lead for daily deaths – and he’s achieved that goal in spectacular fashion (although Brazil’s total deaths so far are still a couple hundred thousand below ours).

The numbers

These numbers are calculated based on those reported on the Worldometers.info site for April 11.

Month

Deaths reported during month

Avg. deaths per day during period

Deaths as percentage of previous month’s

Month of March 2020

4,058

131

 

Month of April

59,812

1,994

1,474%

Month of May

42,327

1,365

71%

Month of June

23,925

798

57%

Month of July

26,649

860

111%

Month of August

30,970

999

116%

Month of Sept.

22,809

760

75%

Month of Oct.

24,332

785

107%

Month of Nov.

38,293

1,276

157%

Month of Dec.

79,850

2,576

209%

Total 2020

354,215

1,154

 

Month of Jan. 2021

98,064

3,163

123%

Month of Feb.

68,918

2,461

70%

Month of March

72,693

2,345

105%

Total Pandemic so far

581,075

1,380

 

 

I. Total deaths

Average deaths last seven days: 1,756

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 2.2%

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases as of yesterday: 32,424,500

Increase in reported cases last 7 days: 490,879 (=70,126/day)

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 2.4%  

 

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com.

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356 th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog ) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here. I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later: Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as pos
Read more

It’s all about health care

Over the weekend, there were two momentous events in Washington that will undoubtedly have a seriously negative effect on the health (or lack thereof) of the American people. However, just one of these events on its surface seems to be about healthcare. In this post, I will discuss the one that doesn’t seem to be about healthcare, but actually is. Barring some unforeseen development before then, in my next post I’ll discuss the other event. The former event was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and Mitch McConnell’s immediate (i.e. about 1 ½ hours after her passing was announced) announcement that he would push through Trump’s nominee before the election – assuming four Republican Senators don’t block that process. Why is this event about healthcare? Because the Supreme Court is set to decide in December a case that would literally overturn Obamacare and cause more than 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage in the middle of a pandemic.   The case is based on a ridi
Read more

An up-close look at a hospital breaking under the Omicron load

This opinion piece in WaPo today provides a horrifying perspective by an ER doctor on the situation in her ER on a “typical” day of the omicron wave. It shows very clearly that lack of beds is just the beginning of the problem. The lack of staff at all levels – EMTs through nurses through physicians – is really hurting, but even worse, it’s leading to more burnout among the existing staff, which of course is making the staffing shortage worse, which of course is increasing burnout…lather, rinse, repeat. I have two ideas for Joe Biden: First, turn Build Back Better into another Covid relief bill, this one focused entirely on building back the hospital staff (and infrastructure, although that’s not the main problem) that we need to handle what – as the author points out – will undoubtedly be an overload of the system for a long time to come. This is both because we’re almost certainly not finished with Covid, even when the omicron wave subsides, but because there is a big backlog
Read more