Roy Tang

Pandemic thoughts and updates, Aug 9 edition:

• So, NCR got sent back into MECQ, a stronger quarantine lockdown. I haven’t actually felt the difference, since I’m at home most of the time. We went out yesterday for a grocery run, and not much seemed different out there either, still a lot of cars and people out of doors. I don’t actually remember what the last MECQ was like, but I kind of assumed things would be closer to how they were at the onset of the lockdowns in March, but this feels still mostly like the GCQ of past weeks. IDK if this 2-week MECQ stretch really serves any purpose except to show the government is trying something.
• Watching mass via Facebook again today.
• • As of last night, we are at 126,885 cases (+4226 from the day before, +28653 from last week, huge jump week-on-week), 2,209 deaths (+41 from the day before, +170 from last week, thankfully not as big a jump as from last week), 67,117 recoveries (+287 from the day before, +1852 from last week, a predictably much smaller jump after last week’s miraculous “mass recoveries”). We hit record high daily deaths again over the first few days of the MECQ. We seem to have settled at a much higher average daily rate since then. Luckily, the death rate hasn’t gone up that much. We are now #1 in confirmed cases in SEA, overtaking Indonesia. The govt claims nothing to worry about, it’s only because we are testing more, but our relatively large positivity rate (around 8.6% as of this writing) implies transmission is outpacing testing? Reference.
• Worldwide, we are at around 19.8 cases (+1.8M from last week, slope holding steady for maybe 3 weeks now?) and almost 730k deaths. Caveat: these numbers are from Worldometer.