Glenn gives the latest coronavirus numbers, updating YOU on everything needed to know as Americans and officials monitor China's new COVID-19 virus:
Daily Stats as of 5:30 AM CT (from John's Hopkins)
- Total Confirmed Cases Worldwide: 2,014,006 (up from 1,934,754 yesterday)
- Total Confirmed Deaths Worldwide: 127,594 (up from 120,438 yesterday)
- Total Confirmed Recovered Worldwide: 491,824 (up from 456,776 yesterday)
- US has 614,246 Confirmed Cases and 26,064 deaths, up from 587,173 cases and 23,644 deaths yesterday
- US now leads the World in both total Cases and Deaths from COVID-19, but is 15th in Deaths per 1 Million people, and 19th in Cases per 1 Million
- Officially All 50 States Now Have at Least 1 Death Attributed to COVID-19
- Note: Traffic-related fatalities in the US were down by 23% in March compared to same month 2019 (CDC)
- In December 2019, epidemiologists in Taiwan issued urgent memos to the WHO about numerous cases of atypical pneumonia in Wuhan, China.
- The memos suggest human to human transmission and urged WHO action to prevent further testing to find the pathogen.
- WHO ignored warnings from Taiwan and continued to reiterate China's false talking points — that "there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission" of the novel pathogen even as late as Jan 14.
- Just two days earlier, by January 12th, more than 700 people were hospitalized and as many as 102 had died in Wuhan.
- In addition, WHO failed to mandate that Chinese officials share the viral strains that would have allowed diagnostic tests to have been produced significantly earlier worldwide, Taiwan said.
- The WHO has come under fire because it refuses to include Taiwan in any official communications, panels or research studies, formally refusing to recognize that Taiwan even exists.
- The U.S. will suspend funding to the World Health Organization while it reviews the agency's response to the COVID-19 pandemic, President Donald Trump announced Tuesday,
- According to Trump, the International health agency made mistakes that "caused so much death" as the coronavirus spread across the globe.
- "Today I'm instructing my administration to halt funding of the World Health Organization while a review is conducted to assess the WHO's role in severely mismanaging and covering up the spread of the coronavirus," Trump said at a White House press conference.
- The US provides as much as 40% of the WHOs annual operating budget of over $1 Billion per year.
- Trump also noted that the WHO spent more on travel than it did on medical research in 2018, the last year for which a budget was presented to the UN.
- It's unclear exactly how the Trump Administration will withhold funding, since UN/WHO funding comes from Congress, not the White House.
- Death toll in the US increased yesterday after New York included at-home COVID-19 fatalities for the first time, with over 270 new deaths yesterday attributed to the virus from people who died at home in New York City.
- New York City's health department said the total death toll is now over 10,000, including the 3,700 total deaths added on Tuesday, including a backlog of several thousand people who'd died at home and previously weren't counted as COVID-19 deaths.
- Health officials have cautioned that deaths are a "lagging indicator" and do not mean that the sweeping stay-at-home restrictions are a failure.
- The peak in Deaths across the US has been expected this week, according to the US CDC.
- Discrepancies in how countries count COVID-19 deaths compared to US CDC or WHO standards make numbers unreliable.
- Some countries only count deaths as COVID-19 if there are no underlying or known health conditions (US/UN standard is to consider COVID-19 as the cause of death even if a Comorbidity-factor exists)
- Many countries have yet to count deaths that occurred at home, even in instances with hundreds of at-home deaths in small villages.
- Some towns have taken to burning bodies or burying in mass graves as hospital systems are overwhelmed, so official numbers may never be known.
- An estimate by the Wall Street Journal indicates undercounting EU deaths from COVID-19 by as much as 50% if official CDC/WHO standards were applied.
- A study of anonymized mobile phone data shows only about 35% of Americans are following stay-at-home orders across the US.
- The study included thousands of mobile phones tracked from all 50 states.
- On average, Americans were still taking about 2 non-work-related trips out by car per day, researchers said.
- Utah, Colorado and New Mexico were the worst offending states, with over 2.5 non-work trips out of the house by car each day.
- Texas was among the most compliant states, with just below 2 trips out per person per day so far in April.
- Top destinations for non-work trips included fast-food restaurants, grocery stores and hardware/home-improvement stores.
- Study of 10 cases among 3 families who ate in a single restaurant in China suggests AC systems may help spread aerosolized droplets.
- Direction of airflow from air-conditioning ventilation found to be the key factor in what was believed to be oral droplet transmission.
- Air flow from AC systems effectively 'push' the respiratory droplets around, spreading them further than previously expected.
- Rate of spread among the 3 families cannot be explained by simple respiratory droplet transmission alone, based on review of closed-circuit video footage.
- Restaurants were also advised by the researchers to increase the space between tables to at least 10-12 feet apart once allowed to reopen.
- The research was revealed in an early-release article for the July edition of Emerging Infectious Diseases, the peer-reviewed journal published by the Centres for Disease Control of the United States.
- Any state reopening must meet four conditions:
- The incidence of infection is "genuinely low."
- A "well functioning" monitoring system capable of "promptly detecting any increase in incidence" of infection.
- A public health system that is "reacting robustly" to all cases of COVID-19 and has surge capacity to react to an increase in cases.
- A health system that has enough inpatient beds and staffing to rapidly scale up and deal with a surge in cases.