Danger: The ‘Canary’ in the ‘COVID Coal Mine’ Is Very Sick
The “grim milestone” has made yet another appearance on Friday as the number of coronavirus cases in the US exceeded an astonishing 9 million, hardly representing Trump’s idiotic, and dangerous claim of “rounding the turn.”
The jump from 8 million to 9 million took just two weeks—the shortest amount of time 1 million cases have racked up in the United States since the pandemic started.
According to multiple trackers, ABC News notes that the country also set a single-day record for new cases for the second day in a row. Johns Hopkins University puts that number at 92,630 for the 24 hours between Thursday and Friday.
John Hopkins also reports individual states are continuing to smash their own daily case records: nine states—Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, North Carolina, and North Dakota—all reported their highest counts yet on Thursday.
Dr. Leana Wen, the former health commissioner of Baltimore says
“We now have one person being diagnosed [with] coronavirus every second. We have one American dying of coronavirus every two minutes, and that number is increasing.”
What’s worrying Wen most is the test positivity rates she’s seeing, with one out of every two people coming back positive in certain states. “That means that we’re not doing nearly enough testing and that every person who tests positive is a canary in a coal mine,” she says, noting that suggests “dozens” of positive cases not being detected.
According to CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, what’s driving the newest surge of COVID-19 cases is a “silent epidemic” of infections that show no symptoms and pass among 12- to 30-year-olds, before then being transmitted to older people. (Read more Coronavirus stories.)