Roy Tang

Pandemic thoughts and updates, July 12 edition:

• haven’t had a haircut since January. Been urged to go out and get one, but feels like an unnecessary risk. As a friend of mine said “Like, it’s one thing to get sick because I picked up groceries or something. Would feel really dumb to be intubated because I wanted a haircut”
• Did a grocery run yesterday. Not too crowded. Hopefully didn’t get sick.
• Watching mass via Facebook again today
• As of last night, we are at 54222 cases (+1387 from the day before, +12392 from last week), 1372 deaths (+12 from the day before, +82 from last week), 14037 recoveries (+807 from the day before, +2584 from last week). Record high week for number of new cases. We broke past 2000 new daily cases this week, three times! One thing that still surprises me is how long recoveries take. Even though we only quarantine for 14 days if sick (in theory), many cases seem to be lasting a month or more. Like four weeks ago we only had 25k cases, but now we only have 14k recoveries, so there’s 11k active cases that have had the virus for four weeks now? It may also be due to a lag in testing, reporting and verifying recoveries I guess. I wish someone would come out with an analysis of all the deaths/recoveries to break down how long their cases lasted. Reference.
• Worldwide, we are at 12.8M cases (+1.5M from last week) and around 567k deaths. Rate of new cases accelerating worldwide as well. US and Brazil still a strong no. 1 and no. 2 respectively, India and Russia jostling for 3rd place. Caveat: these numbers are from Worldometer.