Coronavirus Numbers

I would very much like to stop thinking about Covid-19. I'm already doing all that I can do to keep myself and my kids safe, and knowing how bad it is in other cities doesn't do me a damn bit of good. But I keep coming back to it. Like the dog in Proverbs 26:11.

Yesterday (3/27) when I saw the Total Cases and Deaths numbers in the corner of the screen on CNN, I had the intuitive sense that there was something odd about what I was seeing:                 


Total Cases     Deaths
World            585,040         26,819     
USA                97,028           1,475     

So I applied my admittedly limited math skills, and found what was tickling my ventromedial prefrontal cortex. 

The death rate for the world at large was 4.58%, while for the USA it was at 1.52%. And even more shocking, the number for the USA would probably be even lower if we had an accurate count of the cases.

That means USAmericans are dying at about 1/3 the rate of the rest of the world. (In fact, if USAmericans were dying at the same rate as the rest of the world, we would now be looking at 4,444 deaths.) I would think that this would have to be due to the superior healthcare of the USAmerican system. Is there any other explanation? If there is, I'm not seeing it. Which is a subject worth returning to at some point...though I doubt that it will be me who does that bit.

Anyway, I checked the numbers again this morning (3/28) and they were unfortunately much worse:

World      607,965+    28,115
USA         102,702+      1,590

I don't know if I didn't notice + marks before or if that was a new addition, but it was chilling...suggesting that the numbers were rising so quickly that they could no longer be accurately reported. I also found that the numbers reported by CNN (above) were different from the numbers being recorded on MSNBC:

World        594,525    27,233
USA         102,074       1,605

And neither set of numbers matched what I found online @ worldometer:

World    614,158     28,239
USA       104,256       1,704

Last night I tried to watch Rachel Maddow and Chris Cuomo (jumping back and forth between the two), both of whom I have great respect for, and I just had to shut it off. I started feeling like there was no chance for me to survive this crisis. And I'm living in Kentucky, where there have been 302 cases recorded and 8 deaths. And in Jefferson County, of which Louisville is a part, there have been 103 cases recorded and as of 3/25--the only reference I could find--there have been 2 deaths. I can't even imagine the fear that must be gripping people who live in New York City or Los Angeles or New Orleans or Detroit. 

The news came on and it seemed to me — impression, not memory — that the coronavirus numbers had grown quite a bit. I checked, and they indeed had, so I went over to the worldometer site to see what their current figures were. It was astonishing.


World     650,913     30,299     4.65%
USA       116,448        1,943     1.67%

And once again, if USAmericans were dying at the World Rate, we'd be at 5,415 deaths right now. A chilling thought.