The sum of average daily new deaths in the worst states appears to have bottomed, but it's still too soon to say for sure

I measure this weekly through Saturdays, and using Saturday 7/25 we did bottom, as the latest chart shows.

However, on Monday 7/26 the sum fell to 778, and 778 was just re-tested on Sunday 8/2.

So . . . we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Clearly though the trend lower has slowed dramatically and is skipping along sideways for a week.

Drudge implies the woman shown is the woman named in the article, but that's not her

The 102 year old woman mentioned in the Drudge headline, story here, turned 102 in January and came down with COVID-19 in May, in the US. She was born in Massachusetts.

The woman pictured above the Drudge headline is 101. Found her. Here's another story about her. She contracted the illness in late March, also in the US. She is Italian. Her mother died giving birth to her on the ship bringing them to the US.  

Another story is here about a yet different woman, 102 years old, who contracted the illness in Italy in early March and survived.

The Drudge headline originally brought to my mind a story from early April, about still one more woman, 103 years old, in Italy who beat the disease, which I have finally located here.

There are many examples giving reason for hope, even for old people.

Real Clear Politics has moved Minnesota into "toss-up" status because of Trafalgar Group poll

The poll has Biden beating Trump by only five points in liberal Minnesota.

"A five-mile stretch of Minneapolis sustain[ing] extraordinary damage" recently, per the New York Times, probably had something to do with it.

It doesn't follow that rigorous measures against coronavirus fail to produce low new daily cases, unless you are an asshat who thinks 10x more cases or 22x more deaths on the way there is preferable

Finland: 7,443 cases; 329 deaths from COVID; 4.4% case fatality rate

Norway: 9,249 cases; 255 deaths from COVID; 2.75% case fatality rate

Sweden: 80,422 cases; 5,743 deaths from COVID; 7.1% case fatality rate

Sweden remains among the very worst states for deaths per million of population from COVID-19

Today's coronavirus hospitalization snapshot for California, Arizona, Texas and Florida shows all states turning the corner or flattening

California is in blue, Arizona is in orange, Texas is in pink, and Florida is in green in the graphs. None have experienced anything as dire as experienced in New York (gray) at the extreme.

Johns Hopkins University today shows US COVID-19 deaths hitting 150,034

The progression by 10k since hitting 50k on 4/24 slowed down until 6/22 at which point it had taken 15 days to get to 120k from 110k instead of the five, six and seven days for 10k jumps at the beginning.

Since 6/22, however, the pace has quickened again, taking 14, then 12, and now 11 days to add 10k deaths to bring us as of today to 150k.

This is due in large measure to "backfilling" of death totals by various states since 6/22, combined with big death increases in CA, AZ, TX and FL.

See the following, which represent not quite 4k deaths since 6/22, many of which are backfills, previous deaths from who knows when which required investigation or were in abeyance for one reason or another.

There have also been policy changes, as in Texas, where death certificates attributing deaths to COVID-19 are now added to the total despite not having laboratory proof. Completed death investigations of coronavirus deaths languish well below 1,000 in Texas where there have been over 6,500 COVID deaths according to the NYT data. Texas is clearly responsible for closing the latest gap to 11 days with its recent data dump.

As I've indicated elsewhere, the sum of the average daily deaths since the beginning in the 15 worst states has been falling for a month. These recent death data dumps and the death increases in the south are producing a bottoming effect this week. We'll see on Sunday where we are.  

The federal government could have read the news wires in Jan and Feb like the rest of us and learned that the coronavirus spread asymptomatically, but no, that was too hard

As coronavirus threatened invasion, a new 'Red Dawn' team tried to save America:

'In some cases, government officials appeared to be learning about developments for first time from the Red Dawn emails. In one exchange, Eva Lee, the director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare at Georgia Tech, flagged a study showing a 20-year-old woman left Wuhan with no symptoms and had infected five family members.

'Dr. Robert Kadlec, the Trump administration’s Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, appeared surprised. “Eva is this true?!” Kadlec replied. “If so, we have a huge [hole] on our screening and quarantine effort.”'

Anyone carefully following the news about coronavirus knew there already were confirmed reports of asymptomatic spread by air travelers before the end of Jan: to Japan, Washington State, and Germany, but a week before Feb ended the Trump administration and many US health authorities were still clueless about them.

And then this curious story about the 20-yr old Wuhan woman came out on Feb 21/22, long after the fact refocusing attention on the issue of asymptomatic spread, curious mostly because she infected others far away from Wuhan around Jan 10 but a month later was herself still symptom-free.

But did it do anything to get the feds to move? Obviously not.

It took another almost four weeks from Feb 22 before the US instituted the half-hearted stay-at-home advisory, triggered mostly by community spread in Washington State. And air travelers didn't abandon flying until after Mar 15, when they finally realized the feds were taking the epidemic sort of seriously and the threat was real.

Meanwhile the disease is obviously still spreading asymptomatically in the United States like wildfire, and the feds are doing . . . what exactly to stop it? The weakness and incompetence the Trump administration has shown have only encouraged the nay-sayers to masks and social distancing.

The stay-at-home period should have been used to mobilize production of adequate masks for the population and to prepare schools to social distance, at a minimum, but now we're at war over both of those, too.

Sad!

Reuters had the Wuhan woman story on Feb 22 and it was picked up immediately by The Straits Times in Singapore:

Wuhan woman with no symptoms infected five relatives with coronavirus: Study:

"A 20-year-old Chinese woman from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, travelled 675km north to Anyang where she infected five relatives, without ever showing signs of infection, Chinese scientists reported on Friday (Feb 21), offering new evidence that the virus can be spread asymptomatically."

The SS United States' debt engine ran out of fuel in 1989 and rolled over, coasted until it hit the iceberg in 2007, and has been taking on water ever since

Stocks since the year 2000 continue to underperform the previous period of equal length by over 70% on an average per annum basis, inflation adjusted

Pretty shocking when you really think about it.

The coronavirus death trend is going the wrong way, however, in the "second tier" states

Mostly driven by AZ, but also by SC, and to a lesser extent by AL. Many of these states are treading water, which means current deaths are enough to keep the average from falling as time proceeds. We don't want to see that. We want to see deaths slow enough for the averages to fall naturally with the passing of time. For the period shown, only MN has dropped (-1).

Seeing that AZ averaged just 11 per day in mid-June but is now at 18 is bad news. 18 was the floor I used to incorporate TX in my list of worst 15 states back in late June. Otherwise it had been a list of 14 worst.

Four weeks in a row of declining coronavirus daily new deaths averages in the worst 15 states

Despite CA rising from 38 per day to 46, TX from 18 to 30, and FL from 28 to 39, all included over the period shown.

Current projection for US coronavirus deaths by the end of September

On May 20 I projected about 262,000 US deaths by Thanksgiving.

Two months later it's time to revisit the projection.

Johns Hopkins lists deaths at 144,524 as of right now.

Using New York Times data we're at 144,283, as of yesterday.

The interim daily new deaths low occurred on Jun 21 with 257 in that data set.

From Jun 23 through Jul 23 the United States has added 1.69 million new cases.

The vast majority of those new cases have occurred in CA AZ TX and FL, where we know about 66% of cases have been aged 0-49.

That would imply approximately 1.12 million of the new cases in the last month have been aged 0-49, and approximately 575,000 have been aged 50+.

Using California data as a proxy, we know 7% of coronavirus deaths there have been 0-49, and cases 0-49 have been 69% of total cases.

That means the case fatality rate among the 0-49 in CA has been just 0.19% (562/293,675).

The situation for those 50+ is far more grave.

93% of coronavirus deaths in California have been aged 50+, and cases 50+ have been just 31% of total cases, which means the case fatality rate among the 50+ has been 5.66% (7,465/131,941).

Applying those CFRs to the new case population Jun 23 -- Jul 23 we project 2,119 new deaths aged 0-49 and 32,526 new deaths aged 50+, probably in the next 8 weeks.

That puts us, at minimum, at 179,000 total coronavirus deaths before the end of September.

Add as many again another two months after that, which is by no means certain, of course, but not unthinkable, and you're at approximately 214,000 deaths by Thanksgiving. Clearly not as bad as 262,000 but still bad enough. A bad flu season in America, remember, was 80,000 flu deaths in 2017-18. Normal is about 34,000. We are way past the flu comparisons, and those who were making them have shut up about it. They should be reminded of their ignorance and stupidity, which misled many. 

The future of this all depends on case growth, and whether the infection profile changes back from younger to older. It's always been about stopping the spread because spread inevitably leads to deaths.

Case growth continues to trend up robustly in California as of today, but appears to have rolled over in Arizona, Texas and Florida, flattening the curve for the United States overall. But even with flattening that means we're still feeding the beast.

Stay tuned.

You wouldn't know it from the news, but Texas' hospitalization picture has turned sharply for the better and was never as bad as New York

Whether it's total currently hospitalized, percent hospitalized per 100k of population, or percent of beds occupied by COVID-19 patients, Texas has turned the corner in every category, and turned sharply lower in each as well.

Texas is in pink in the graphs below. Florida in green and New York in gray are shown for comparison purposes.

Neither Texas nor Florida has ever approached a New-York-level-of-bad.

Texas has turned sharply for the better, and Florida is flattening the curve in all three as well, and rolling over.

"Some people without brains do an awful lot of talking" about this, "don't they?"

Fort Worth Star-Telegram publishes pure coronavirus porn about Starr County, Texas

Texas has 250 counties.

Starr County is next door to hard-hit Hidalgo County.

For "daily new cases" in the 7-day, 14-day, 30-day, 90-day and since the beginning of the pandemic, Hidalgo ranks 4th, 5th, 5th, 6th and 6th.

For "daily new deaths" Hidalgo ranks 1st, 1st, 1st, 3rd and 3rd.

Starr County?

Daily new cases: 29th, 34th, 31st, 34th and 34th.

Daily new deaths: 16th, 19th, 27th, 33rd and 36th.

Hidalgo's had 14,529 cases to date, and 433 deaths.

Starr County? 1,519 cases to date, and . . . 20 deaths.

Twenty! Since the beginning!

Yet here's the headline from the geniuses at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

COVID-19 patients will be ‘sent home to die’ if deemed too sick, Texas county says

BY CHACOUR KOOP

I don't know what's worse, that the newspaper actually published this drivel, the money line of which is that "On Sunday, Gov.Abbott announced U.S. Navy teams will go to South Texas to provide medical assistance, including the hospital in Starr County", or that Drudge put this fourth in his lineup this morning.

The hysteria mongers never stop.

Lynn Afendoulis running vs. Peter Meijer in MI-3 says attack ad against her traces to Meijer crony "former" Democrat Greg Orman

Afendoulis says Orman is behind the Fix Congress Now! mailings attacking her.

She says Peter Meijer donated in 2017 to Orman's failed run for governor in Kansas in 2018.

She also says Orman's Fix Congress Now! is funded by Unite America, whose board members include Orman.

Unite America stands for Ranked Choice Voting, Open Primaries, Vote By Mail, and Independent Redistricting, all of which traditional Republicans have opposed.

Orman ran as a Democrat against Republican Senator Pat Roberts in Kansas in 2008 but now claims to be an independent.

DeVos money is backing Meijer.

I recommend a vote for Afendoulis, and shopping at Sam's Club.

 

Somebody's pretty worried Peter Meijer needs help to win in MI-3 over Lynn Afendoulis

Fix Congress Now!, 1580 Lincoln Street, Suite 520, Denver, CO 80203, has sent a mailer to Michigan voters claiming Lynn Afendoulis got rich as an executive of a company which laid off Michigan workers, apparently in 2011. Or was it 2008?

It says "Michigan got screwed by Lynn Afendoulis".

Quite the hatchet job. I'm sure as an executive she made all those decisions to fire the workers and to enrich herself, herself, right?

Anyway, GREAT BIG SCREW on the cover drilling down into Grand Rapids. Unflattering photo of Lynn on the other side. Classic low brow stuff.

Billionaire kid Peter Meijer, who has nothing to do with this whatsoever, no, no way, needs this kind of help to get elected?

Just my opinion, but the guy's not much of a muchness. Otherwise we wouldn't be seeing this. Seems like kind of an admission that his unimpressive record in life so far is just that.

But, he's just the sort of person who will fit right in up there in DC, yes sir!

Nice to know someone in Colorado is working so hard to interfere in Michigan's primary election and elect Peter Meijer.

Got a call today from the Peter Meijer campaign, running for Justin Amash's seat (MI-3)

I asked about Meijer's position on immigration. Got the typical "he supports Trump's position" and favors lots of LEGAL immigration.

When probed on H1B visas the caller didn't know what they were. When I explained they allowed foreigners to work in the US, he offered that he thought Meijer was in favor of lots of those, too, even after I pointed out that tens of millions of Americans are out of work and don't need the competition. 

The campaign worker clearly expected me to be a libertarian who is in favor of lots of immigration, which is what you'll get from Peter Meijer, Republican, if he's elected.

The caller wasn't prepared to encounter a voter who has often voted Republican who is against that.

Shows you how thimble deep Republican thinking is on the issue, and that Trump's GOP hasn't moved an inch in the direction of immigration restriction, mostly because Trump's a phony on immigration.

Won't be checking the box for Peter Meijer.

"To impose upon nations the domination of majorities is to subject them to mediocrity"

The liberal Russian Prince K., in EMPIRE OF THE CZAR, by the Marquis de Custine.

Oh. So now it's BHLM, huh? What about the Asians? BHALM? How about BLAHM instead (goes with all the noise they make while rioting, right)? Native Americans? BHANALM? NAHBALM? (heh, rhymes with napalm)

So all lives do matter, unless they're white. Got it, chief. Got it, jefe. Got it chīfu. Got it kungo.

Here:

"Strikers are demanding sweeping action by corporations and government to confront systemic racism and economic inequality that limits mobility and career advancement for many Black and Hispanic workers, who make up a disproportionate number of those earning less than a living wage."