The coronavirus COVID-19 is affecting 210 countries and territories around the world and 2 international conveyances. The day is reset after midnight GMT+0. The list of countries and territories and their continental regional classification is based on the United Nations Geoscheme. Sources are provided under "Latest Updates". Learn more about Worldometer's COVID-19 data
New deaths:
DAY China Italy USA Spain Germany S. Korea WORLD
Apr 1 7 727 589 463 83 3 3239
2 6 760 522 709 158 4 4183
2 6 760 522 709 158 4 4183
3 4 766 716 587 123 5 3822
4 4 681 769 546 55 3 4755
5 3 525 909 471 106 6 3595
6 2 636 874 528 78 3 4414
7 ? 604 1371 556 95 6 6291
8 2 542 1400 628 176 8 5431
9 2 610 1286 446 82 4 3779
10 1 570 1739 523 121 4 6506
5 3 525 909 471 106 6 3595
6 2 636 874 528 78 3 4414
7 ? 604 1371 556 95 6 6291
8 2 542 1400 628 176 8 5431
9 2 610 1286 446 82 4 3779
10 1 570 1739 523 121 4 6506
11 3 619 1476 399 ? 3 5358
12 ? 431 1090 366 74 3 4533
13 2 566 1147 280 21 3 4489
14 ? 602 1754 300 100 5 5726
15 1 578 1558 324 97 3 6351
16 ? 525 1796 318 139 4 6239
17 1290 575 1338 298 151 1 6857
12 ? 431 1090 366 74 3 4533
13 2 566 1147 280 21 3 4489
14 ? 602 1754 300 100 5 5726
15 1 578 1558 324 97 3 6351
16 ? 525 1796 318 139 4 6239
17 1290 575 1338 298 151 1 6857
Summary:
- China did not suddenly jump to 1290 new deaths. This was just adjusting their actual Wuhan deaths. Similarly, the world new deaths total actually dropped for the second straight day.
- The USA had a decline.
- It was once seen as something of a success story - a region that worked to contain, trace and isolate the virus - leading to a huge drop in numbers. But Hokkaido is in the spotlight again as it struggles to deal with a second wave of infections.
- In late February, Hokkaido became the first place in Japan to declare a state of emergency due to Covid-19.
- Schools were closed, large-scale gatherings cancelled and people "encouraged" to stay at home. The local government pursued the virus with determination - aggressively tracing and isolating anyone who'd had contact with victims.
- The policy worked and by mid-March the number of new cases had fallen back to one or two a day. On 19 March the state of emergency was lifted, and at the beginning of April, schools re-opened.
- But now, just 26 days after the state of emergency was lifted, a new one has had to be imposed.
- Hokkaido had acted independently of the central government, which placed Tokyo, Osaka and five other prefectures under a state of emergency last week. A nationwide state of emergency was declared on Thursday.
- "It is relatively easy to tackle clusters, to contact trace and isolate," says Professor Kenji Shibuya of King's College London.
- In this respect, Hokkaido has some similarity to what happened in the South Korean city of Daegu. There, a large outbreak in a religious cult was aggressively traced. Those infected were isolated and the outbreak was suppressed.
- In the last week, Hokkaido has recorded 135 new confirmed cases of Covid-19. Unlike the first outbreak in February, there is no evidence the virus has been re-imported from outside Japan.
- After the Daegu outbreak, the South Korean government began a massive testing program to try and track the epidemic. Japan has done the opposite.
- Even now, more than three months after Japan recorded its first case, it is still only testing a tiny percentage of the population.
- Firstly, Japan's health ministry feared that hospitals would be overwhelmed by people who test positive - but only have minor symptoms. And on a wider scale, the testing is the responsibility of local health centres and not on a national government level.
- "The major lesson to take from Hokkaido is that even if you are successful in the containment the first time around, it's difficult to isolate and maintain the containment for a long period. Unless you expand the testing capacity, it's difficult to identify community transmission and hospital transmission."
- The third lesson is that this "new reality" is going to go on a lot longer than most people expect.
- "The key lesson" he says "is even if you are successful in containment locally but there is transmission going on in other parts of the country, as long as people are moving around, it's difficult to maintain a virus-free status".
Is anyone of leadership in the USA aware of the above? Europe actually one-upped Trump about loosening restrictions, also without having adequate testing. The Donald's ego might have actually been crushed by anyone beating him to prematurely restarting the economy.
I've long been mantra-ing the need for a lot more testing before returning to normality. What President Donald Trump is doing is to insure that the cost of testing kits will zoom up as has been the price of facial masks. Everyone will be competing for the same thing. This is insane!!! But I guess this is the American way so more companies can be induced to produce more test kits.
The following statistics are from yesterday:
The following statistics are from yesterday:
Country Total Cases Cases/1M Total Tests Tests/1M
World 2,182,197 280
USA 677,570 2.047 3,398,140 10,266
Spain 145,521 3,956 930,230 19,896
Germany 137,698 1,643 1,728,357 20,629
China 82,367 57
Russia 27,938 191 1,613,413 11,056
India 13,430 10 302,956 220
South Korea 10,635 297 546,463 10,659
Luxembourg 3,444 69 31,660 50,577
Finland 3,369 75 49,700 8,970
Taiwan 395 17 50,703 2,129
Under these conditions, there are a lot of people milling about with family and friends who are asymptomatic and infecting them. How large is this percentage? Here is an article that shows a table indicating mostly anecdotal examples:
- 18% (Diamond Princess--this is probably the most credible percentage)
- 50-75% (Italian village), 4%-80% (China), 94% of children (China)
- 31% (Japanese nationals evacuated from Wuhan)
- 57% (that nursing facility in the State of Washington)
- 80% (WHO indicated that this percent have no or only mild symptoms--this is a scary figure, because they are all contagious)
- Iceland (50%)
- CDC (25%)
- blood donors in Italy (67%).
- as an aside, 15% of pregnant women in New York City tested positive to COVID-19
If you look closely at these above bullets:
- Data are all over the map.
- However, the asymptomatic (those who are carriers, but show no symptoms) will be higher than 20%, and maybe more.
- The most dangerous condition are those COVID-19 infectees who only have mild symptoms, and, therefore, won't be tested...but are seriously contagious.
- This group of individuals, and they could represent up to 50% of people who have this novel coronavirus, will begin to join the public in the next phase of economic development recovery.
Based on the statistics of yesterday, I wondered how the lack of testing has misinformed authorities about what to do. So I found a recent article from The Atlantic:
- According to the Tracking Project’s figures, nearly one in five people who get tested for the coronavirus in the United States is found to have it. In other words, the country has what is called a “test-positivity rate” of nearly 20 percent.
- Such a high test-positivity rate almost certainly means that the U.S. is not testing everyone who has been infected with the pathogen, because it implies that doctors are testing only people with a very high probability of having the infection.
- South Korea—which discovered its first coronavirus case on the same day as the U.S.—has tested more than half a million people, or about 1 percent of its population, and discovered about 10,500 cases. The U.S. has now tested 3.2 million people, which is also about 1 percent of its population, but it has found more than 630,000 cases. So while the U.S. has a 20 percent positivity rate, South Korea’s is only about 2 percent—a full order of magnitude smaller.
- Hawaii, meanwhile, has tested twice as many people per capita as Illinois, but its positivity rate is only one-tenth as high as the larger state’s. As the outbreak comes under control, more states should have positivity rates closer to Hawaii’s, Andrews, the Stanford professor, said. At the beginning of a pandemic, both the actual number of infections and the number of tests per day shoot up, and the positivity rate is controlled by whichever happens to grow faster, he said. In this case, the faster-growing number appears to have been infections. “As things stabilize, if the testing rate declines and the positivity rate declines, you have some good signal that the epidemic is declining,” he said.
- .....if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. And combined with the high test-positivity rate, it suggests that the reservoir of unknown, uncounted cases of COVID-19 across the country is still very large.
A lot of words above. What are they saying?
- Mayors and governors need to be very careful about releasing their voters and immigrants into the general public until a lot more testing is made available.
- When will sufficient test kits be available? Yesterday I indicated that if the 50,000 15-minute kits daily production rate by Abbot Labs is maintained, it will take 20 years to test all 327 million Americans.
- Then what about those antibody tests to safely clear people to return to work, schools and theaters/stadia? There is no national plan, and most of the 70 methods available are currently inaccurate.
- Clearly, there needs to be the full power of the Defense Production Act applied by the President to develop both pre- and post-testing.
- This is being totally ignored by President Donald Trump.
Never knew what Kyu was singing about in Sukiyaki, but it has been resurrected for COVID-19 recovery inspiration by the Sing for Hope Project as an uplifting theme, with the Japanese words translated into English. This organization hails from Houston.
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