Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Pandemic Timeline (What Happened?)

Johnny Harris is a travel blogger; his videos are engaging and often have a political or historical 'hook'. I also enjoy the videos he publishes with his wife, Iz, and his kids, as they travel the world (the Portugal videos are fascinating and fun). Today, I am happy and surprised to see his face on the front page of the digital New York Times with an opinion piece (link to video on YouTube) that echoes my own experiences and the data that I've been tracking.

He uses the latest 'US versus EU' COVID-19 cases-per-capita data graph to tell a story, along with Pulitzer winning journalist Nicholas Kristof and producer Adam B Ellick. Here is their basic graph from the video:

Looking back, when we arrived home from Madeira in February, and settled into the pandemic in March, my lockdown began with a feeling of devastating tragedy for things that were not done. As I knew we would not be traveling and searching for catharsis, I felt I should record the events of the pandemic on this blog. From that early post, the initial tragedy was the decade of inaction described by Dr. Peter Hotez at a Congressional hearing on March 5th:

The bottom line is had we had those investments early on to carry this through to clinical trials years ago. We could've had a vaccine ready to go. So we've got to figure out what the ecosystem is going to be to develop vaccines that are not going to make money.

Now, the Harris video explains that the second Bush Administration wrote the first "pandemic playbook" fifteen years ago. The Obama Administration expanded and updated the playbook, and specifically warned about coronaviruses. They handed the playbook to the Trump Administration, who ignored it.

There is a list of tragedies, in number and dimension to shock Shakespeare, as Johnny asks:

The US government has an actual playbook that tells us what we need to do in the case of a pandemic. Not to mention it's like the richest country in the world with the best health institution on earth, the CDC, which literally fights pandemics in other countries and teaches even our peers how to do epidemiology. And yet you look at this graph and you wonder, what happened?

To review my journey-in-graphs, start here, on April 29th. Just as the seven-day case averages for the US and the EU diverged, so did the trend-lines for Georgia and Portugal – I've updated my list of graphs as well (below). Recently, the US numbers have fallen, and the EU numbers have risen. Overall the data from the EU is still not nearly as bad as that from the from US.

In many ways, Georgia's case numbers are better than the US's national graph would suggest. Georgia is trending 'down' as the US seems to be bouncing 'up'. Portugal's numbers are also better than the EU's graph would suggest. For example, Portugal's seven-day average has not gone above the peaks of early April; the averages for the EU, the US, and Georgia all remain much higher than their peaks in April.

It's the last day of September, 2020. I'm simultaneously trying to process and ignore the fallout from last night's Presidential debate. The world has passed one million deaths; Georgia will pass seven thousand deaths tonight. Similar to what I wrote a few days ago, in the EU and Portugal, numbers are getting worse, but things aren't so bad. In the US and Georgia, the numbers are getting better, but things are awful.

Note that Georgia and Portugal have about the same size population and that both places recorded their first cases of COVID-19 on the same day (March 2). Georgia mandated a stay-at-home order about about a week later than Portugal (March 20 vs March 12), and opened up about a week earlier (April 24 vs May 2). It's clear what those few days now mean.

For a baseline, on April 7, seven-day averages in Georgia and Portugal were about the same in terms of both cases and deaths (GA: 719.9 / 31.9 vs PT: 714.1 / 26.4). Accounting for the two-week incubation of COVID-19, this shows how closing earlier and re-opening later has benefitted Portugal. Also when outbreaks did occur, Portugal went back to local lockdowns; Georgia has not done this. Data points from July 24 are illustrative of the greatest gap (GA: 3745.4 / 44.3 vs PT: 230.7 / 4.3).

Today's averages reflect a significant change in the case trends (GA: 1155.0 / 45.3 vs PT: 722.0 / 5.4). As it was in May and June, the gap is around four hundred cases per day. At the same time, the overall totals of cases and deaths remain multiples apart (GA: 316, 306 / 6,994 vs PT: 74,717 / 1,963).
     cases: 34,071,124 global • 7,433,558 USA • 75,542 Portugal
    deaths: 1,016,229 global • 211,406 USA • 1,971 Portugal
    Boston.com reports that after the debate: "Google searches soared for phrases regarding moving to Canada after Tuesday night’s heated presidential debate between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden — especially in the Bay State."
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