Linked List: July 8, 2020

Wednesday, 8 July 2020

Arizona Is #1, Bahrain Is #4: COVID-19 Outbreak in the U.S. Sunbelt Is Worse Than in Any Country in the World 

David Leonhardt, reporting for The New York Times:

There is no country in the world where confirmed coronavirus cases are growing as rapidly as they are in Arizona, Florida or South Carolina. The Sun Belt has become the global virus capital.

This chart ranks the countries with the most confirmed new cases over the past week, adjusted for population size, and treats each U.S. state as if it were a country. (Many states are larger in both landmass and population than some countries.)

The only countries with outbreaks as severe as those across the Sunbelt are Bahrain, Oman and Qatar — three Middle Eastern countries with large numbers of low-wage migrant workers who are not citizens. These workers often live in cramped quarters, with subpar social services, and many have contracted the virus.

Don’t tell me the problem here in the U.S. is not the south.

And it keeps getting worse:

As President Trump continued pressing for a broader reopening of the United States, the country set another record for new coronavirus cases on Wednesday, with more than 59,000 infections announced and some states’ final numbers still unreported, according to a New York Times database. It was the fifth national record set in nine days.

The previous record, 56,567, was reported on Friday.

The country reached a total of three million cases on Tuesday as the virus continued it a resurgence in the West and the South. At least five states — Missouri, Texas, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia — set single-day records for new infections on Wednesday.

As of Tuesday, there had been a 72 percent increase in the daily number of new cases over the past two weeks.

All in the last two weeks. Almost entirely in the south. And all of these states had months of warning from the northeast, west coast, and, you know, the rest of the entire world. Months of warning, and all we had to do was listen to the experts. Stay at home. Close all non-essential businesses. Forbid large gatherings. Wear masks. It fucking sucks but it’s not complicated. You just have to follow the advice of experts who know what the fuck they’re talking about.

More on COVID and Brain Damage 

Melinda Wenner Moyer, in an op-ed for The New York Times:

The more we learn about the coronavirus, the more we realize it’s not just a respiratory infection. The virus can ravage many of the body’s major organ systems, including the brain and central nervous system.

Among patients hospitalized for Covid-19 in Wuhan, China, more than a third experienced nervous system symptoms, including seizures and impaired consciousness. Earlier this month, French researchers reported that 84 percent of Covid patients who had been admitted to the I.C.U. experienced neurological problems, and that 33 percent continued to act confused and disoriented when they were discharged.

Warning of Serious Brain Disorders in People With Mild Coronavirus Symptoms 

Ian Sample, reporting for The Guardian:

Neurologists are on Wednesday publishing details of more than 40 UK Covid-19 patients whose complications ranged from brain inflammation and delirium to nerve damage and stroke. In some cases, the neurological problem was the patient’s first and main symptom.

The cases, published in the journal Brain, revealed a rise in a life-threatening condition called acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (Adem), as the first wave of infections swept through Britain. At UCL’s Institute of Neurology, Adem cases rose from one a month before the pandemic to two or three per week in April and May. One woman, who was 59, died of the complication. […]

One coronavirus patient described in the paper, a 55-year-old woman with no history of psychiatric illness, began to behave oddly the day after she was discharged from hospital. She repeatedly put her coat on and took it off again and began to hallucinate, reporting that she saw monkeys and lions in her house. She was readmitted to hospital and gradually improved on antipsychotic medication.

Another woman, aged 47, was admitted to hospital with a headache and numbness in her right hand a week after a cough and fever came on. She later became drowsy and unresponsive and required an emergency operation to remove part of her skull to relieve pressure on her swollen brain.

Germany yesterday reported 298 new cases of COVID-19.

The U.S. reported over 55,000. Just yesterday. It is raging out of control here in the United States. It’s that simple. We’ve lost any handle on it we might have had, infections are now — I repeat myself because there’s no other way to accurately describe it — raging out of control, and a large segment of the population has decided to pretend it isn’t happening and isn’t a big deal if you do get it.

For those of us who’ve been taking this seriously since March, it’s soul-crushing that this is where we’re at after four months of isolation. It sucks. We who’ve done the right thing are the ones most yearning for — and let’s be honest, most deserving of — a few tastes of normalcy. I see people in the south complaining about the physical discomfort and social awkwardness of wearing a mask because they’re new to it and I could not be more “Fuck you”. We should be over the hump, easing our way back to normalcy with confidence, like every country in the world that isn’t led by a dimwitted angry sociopath, but we’re not, and we have to face the fact that we’re in this indefinitely.

Do the right thing — stay home as much as you can, wear a mask and keep your distance when you’re out. You don’t want to get this and you don’t want your family to get it.

New Work by Gary Larson 

Gary Larson:

So here goes. I’ve got my coffee, I’ve got this cool gizmo, and I’ve got no deadlines. And — to borrow from Sherlock Holmes — the game is afoot.