Aug 1, 2020

Dispatch from Coronaville: Need

 The highlights for today were a nice church service with the family and a wonderful Sabbath afternoon nap. There's nothing like slowly waking from a luxurious nap, that moment when everything is just perfectly right with the world.  And then you wake up.

Summer's end has arrived for us. Officially Barbara and I return to work on Monday, my birthday. (No teaching as yet, school starts for me on September 8). I'm not ready. There's still so much that I never got to this summer, not the least of which is a few days of complete rest.

I think these days we all are acting out of need. Need to feel safe. Need to be with people we love. Need to keep food on the table. We tend to judge others for the way they act to meet those needs. We say that people don't care if others die. We say that people are living in fear. We accuse some of selfishness, others of panicking. We tend to feel public policy should align with our needs, whatever they may be. I think most people are doing the best they can with what they believe to be true, even if what they are doing isn't the best and what they believe isn't true.

Right now the United States has recorded 4,627,042 total cases of COVID-19. This includes 193,666 new cases since Wednesday. This is about 19,000 fewer cases than I predicted, thought it is an increase in new cases from three days ago--just not as much of one as I forecast. We have had a total of 154,865 deaths, of which 3,767 occured in the past three days.  This is also less than I predicted by about 1,200 and about a thousand fewer deaths than occured in the last three day period but more about 1200 more than occurred the period before that. Based on these rates of increase, I would expect 4,830,631 total cases by Tuesday, August 4, and 158,737 deaths.


Florida's numbers did bounce back up, but only by a thousand or so, to 28,605 new cases in the past three days, not the low the 30's I'd expected, so I guess that's good news. Ohio on the other hand has shown the largest increase three-day increase in new cases in quite awhile though not approaching it's peak earlier in July. It's really hard to tell exactly what's happening with Ohio or Nebraska. We still need another few cycles to know for sure.
Total Cases: 
Florida: 480,020 total cases, 2.2% of the population
Ohio: 92,087 total cases, 0.79% of the population
Nebraska: 26,391 total cases, 1.4% of the population


Florida has now exited the death chart as well, logging a tragic 689 deaths in the past three days, which goes beyond the range of my chart. Praying we'll see those numbers fall. Ohio's deaths dropped, but it's worth noting that the current number of  93 is still the second highest number of deaths in a three day we've seen Ohio this summer.  The pattern so far is consistent with an increase in COVID deaths in the Buckeye state.  What I would expect to see is more than 115 new deaths by Tuesday, August 4.  Nebraska continues to trundle along. No meaningful change there.
Total Deaths:
Florida: 7,021, a rate of 1.5%
Ohio: 3,515,  a rate of 3.8%
Nebraska: 338, a rate of of 1.3%

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