Not really. Absolute numbers are useful if you’re hoping to contain the pandemic, but all of these are out into thermodynamic scale where percentages are what matter. Herd immunity is when the remaining susceptibles are starting to vanish, but in the meantime we’re looking at (dn/dt)/n for other reasons.
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people in usa refuse to wear masks, I would say only 1 out of 3 people will wear one, either because the president and every republican governor refuses to set example or emergency orders or because they just do not give a damn about anyone else if it’s a bother for them
this is why the usa is in for a long long nightmare, leaders don’t want to lead with emergency orders and people won’t obey them anyway because it’s “annoying” to their “freedoms”
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I’d say that the lock-step is more aligned with inept authoritarian regimes.
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It’s important to remember context and consider all the data when looking at stuff like this. Given BB’s usually is heavy on the science of this, it’s a bit disappointing we don’t also show the rest of the story.
Part of the reason for the spike is we are finally getting decent testing numbers. It is confirming what we already knew - it was way more prevalent than the numbers showed. Look at this graph - we are FINALLY getting 500k in a day sometimes. Hopefully that continues to increase and we get over a million a day. Wide spread, common testing is going to let us open up more safely as we will finally will be able to say with more certainty who does and who does not have it and reduce the number of asymptomatic carriers. The percentage of positive tests seems pretty steady, which to me indicates we are more or less plateauing. There won’t be a second wave as we aren’t done with the first one, we are just risking a second rise after some stability for a time.
And deaths are still falling, which is a good sign.
BUT - this data clearly shows that Covid hasn’t magically “gone away”. It is lurking and shadowing us. Lax or no precautions is going to get us into trouble. The interactions in small groups like restaurants and businesses are going to see localized clusters. But things like political rallies, music or entertainment events, sporting events, etc - anywhere you have thousands of people gather is where we run the greatest risk of a large outbreak.
But even if we keep it small and cautions, we are going to keep hurting. Even if you opened everything up now, most of the confidence the public has has been shattered. Yeah, you will have some who don’t care or will ignore the risk, but if business is down say 30% across the board (a modest reduction) from people staying home, that is going to seriously hurt the economy further. People stayed home because they were told to. People keep staying home because 7 people at Chik-fil-a tested positive and they don’t want to catch it. It won’t be “business as usual” until we have a clear vaccine - or possibly you can have a daily test for anyone entering the grocery store etc.
Sigh. Stay safe, fellow mutants.
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But increases in deaths tend to lag increases in cases by 1 to 2 weeks. So we won’t know for another week or so how bad this new uptick is going to be.
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Sadly, the graphic in the original post might be downplaying the current situation.
Because it shows a 7-day moving average of the number of new cases, it fails to show that three of the last four days have seen over 30,000 new cases per day.
Effectively, what we’re seeing here is that the last few weeks’ fall in cases has been mainly driven by the drop-off of cases from badly-affected areas of the US. We’re now seeing the surge from places that were less affected, where politicians jumped on board the " What? Me worry ?" train.
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Yep. I have seen (but cannot currently find) a graph showing US incidence with NY/NJ removed. The drop in the NY metro area has effectively hidden the terribly frightening growth in cases from other areas. That is no longer the case.
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Depends where you are. Here in Upstate NY within the daily commuter ring (ca. 90 miles of NYC), 99.9% of the people are complying with the mask order. Many of them work in NYC, were there for 9/11, Hurricane Sandy and a dozen other events that disproportionately impact the only high-density city in the US. My mom who lives in Oklahoma says that basically nobody is wearing one.
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That’s because we don’t teach it in an effective manner, and so everyone thinks it’s all stuff in the distant past with no actual meaning. 
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Quick side note: I’ve found people from places like India and Brazil aren’t exactly fans of the “third world” label and prefer something like “developing country” instead. Given the loaded history and implications of first, second, and third world classifications, I can see where they’re coming from.
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Yup, that would do it!
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The problem isn’t really the origins of the term “third world” as it was developed by people in the third world in their attempt to forge an alternative to either aligning with the US or the Soviets, though even then the preferred term was “non-aligned movement”. It was originally a political term, not an economic one.
But it became an economic term by the 70s and 80s, because most non-aligned countries were considered “backwards” by the first world. The term “developing” is also problematic, as it’s the preferred term of neo-liberalism.
Global south is probably the least problematic term, as that, like Non-aligned, it was deployed as a means of more accurately describing the relationship between more wealthy places and those who had been colonized and had their resources exploited:
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it’s basically impossible to directly compare countries, even by percentage.
if you’re going to use per capita, why use “country” at all. india has some of world’s biggest metropolitan areas, and rural areas - germany’s response ( so far as i understand ) is largely state by state, not nationalized. the us has “red states” and “blue states”, china in some places is incredibly rural and isolated and in some places modern metropolitan sprawl, etc.
just going by country per capita says very little, especially if the country has very different responses in different areas ( ex. wuhan )
these sorts of comparisons aren’t meant to be absolute reckonings of good and badly handled responses. they’re supposed to give a general indication of what’s going on.
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I’m convinced that one of the Covid symptoms (even in otherwise asymptomatic carriers) is severe hubris.
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If/when they have a debate where they take questions from the audience (or for that matter the moderators), I’m hoping one of them will be: “In the past 20 years we’ve seen numerous pandemics from previously unknown pathogens. What have you learned from the covid-19 pandemic, and what resources will you put in place to deal with the next one?”
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This is a much more useful site on the subject
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i dont have it handy, but i saw a graph of florida’s testing ratea. not only has it been dropping ( after reaching a peak a few weeks ago ), the positivity ratio has been shooting up.
both of those indicate that testing - at least in florida’s case - isn’t related to the increasing cases. it’s increasing spread, period.
my understanding is elsewhere, it’s more of a mix. increases in testing elsewhere have driven rates up, but even there: positivity rates are indicating it’s not fully ( or even mostly ) testing.
i’m thinking that while hospitalization and death rates always lag, people in there 20s-30s seem to be the demographic being hit right now, so hopefully - even though some may have long term healthcare issues from lung and tissue damage - this second swell of our first wave will be less proportionally deadly than the initial swell was.
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… AND be more likely to be socially mobile thereby increasingly spreading the fun
… AND some will seriously suffer, just not in as great numbers as older folks.
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