Shock! A new country in the top 10
I wasn’t going to do a post tonight but last night, when pulling in the latest set of numbers, something shocking jumped out at me: China became part of the top 10 countries in the world with the most daily cases over the last 14 days.
I never really seriously tracked China largely because I did not trust their numbers. If China would not work with the WHO to determine where and how the virus began back in 2019, why would I believe that China would be forthcoming about their numbers? China would not open up their country for WHO to do an investigation, which opened them up to lots of stories about their “complicity” on spawning the virus upon the world. Are those stories true? Probably not, but their obfuscation does not help their reputation for devious secrecy.
Last night, when I did my usual collection, China popped up on the top 10 list, which surprised me. I know originally, China had been reporting nearly zero cases daily until recently, when the counts jumped to roughly 25,000 daily. I think it’s the Omicron (both variants) that is driving the vertical ascent in the chart on the right.
China has zero-Covid policy which I think means when cases start to spring up, the provinces spring into action to place cities or provinces into lockdowns to force a dramatic halt to the spread. This latest surge has placed 37 million people in lockdowns. I’ve seen news where the doors are padlocked, and people are locked in without food. I’m not sure of the validity of that kind of news because that is a rather brutal way of handling the people. If the people don’t die from the Covid, they are starved to death.
The latest news are residents being evicted from their apartments to make room for “quarantine living spaces”. How real is this news? Again, I don’t know. These stories are from videos rather than from print so I’m holding off on relying on videos. I use videos as an addition to the print. If prints and videos converge on a set of truth, especially if the larger newspapers/newsroom agree, then I place more confidence on those stories. So, for now, I’m holding off on those evictions. Besides, if they are truly evicted, where do they go? Doesn’t that place them out of lockdown mode?
Can you imagine the US going through such lockdowns? I can’t either. Lockdowns may be a little too draconian because it substitutes one set of problems (grave illness and deaths from Covid) with another set of problems (no income coming in and becoming impoverished). It seems to me social distancing, ventilation, and masking is the “happy” medium where people can try to protect themselves but still go about their everyday business, depending on their risk profile.
Lockdowns also introduces economic shortages since people are not producing – they are locked in their homes. The lockdowns are one aspect of the drivers of inflation.
So yeah, I wasn’t going to do a post, but this development was striking enough to do a quickie.
Sources of Data
WORLD : Cases and deaths from Wikipedia website https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_and_territory
US and STATES : Five main sources of data are available – Wikipedia, COVID Tracking Project, CDC, JHU, and HHS
Wikipedia: Wikipedia has broken out their tables into four links, separating out the cases from deaths and separating out the years.
New Cases 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_data/United_States_medical_cases
New Cases 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_cases_in_2020
New Deaths 2021: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_deaths
New Deaths 2020: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:COVID-19_pandemic_data/United_States_daily_deaths_in_2020
COVID Tracking Project: The COVID Tracking Project was a collaborative effort of free labor overseen by The Atlantic. This project ended on 3/7/2021. The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project was provided under Common Creative license “CC BY-NC-4.0” and covered cases, deaths, hospitalization, and positivity, amongst other data.
API: https://covidtracking.com/api/v1/states/daily.csv
Table: daily
CDC: CDC has become a replacement for the COVID Tracking Project for me although the data will often come in a few days later. Hospitalization comes in a week later. I’m tracking cases, deaths, hospitalization, and positivity.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, COVID-19 Response. COVID-19 Case Surveillance Public Data Access, Summary, and Limitations
Table: rows
API:
Cases and deaths: https://data.cdc.gov/api/views/9mfq-cb36/rows.csv
Hospitalization: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/g62h-syeh/rows.csv (Good data doesn’t start until about 7/15/2020)
Testing: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/j8mb-icvb/rows.csv
Positivity: https://beta.healthdata.gov/api/views/j8mb-icvb/rows.csv
John Hopkins University (JHU): I rarely show these sets of data; I mostly use Wikipedia or CDC but sometimes I like to reference the JHU.
Please cite our Lancet Article for any use of this data in a publication (link)
Provided by Johns Hopkins University
Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE):
https://systems.jhu.edu/
Terms of Use:
1. This data set is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) by the Johns Hopkins University on behalf of its Center for Systems Science in Engineering. Copyright Johns Hopkins University 2020.
2. Attribute the data as the “COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University” or “JHU CSSE COVID-19 Data” for short, and the
url: https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19.
3. For publications that use the data, please cite the following publication: “Dong E, Du H, Gardner L. An interactive web-based dashboard to track COVID-19 in real time. Lancet Inf Dis. 20(5):533-534. doi: 10.1016/S1473-3099(20)30120-1”
Website https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19
HHS: Hospitalization data for US – can be US level, state level or county level
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