A panda at the Chengdu Research Base of the Giant Panda Breeding Center
Good morning. This is Jonathan Spira reporting. Here now the news of the pandemic from across the globe on the 1,172nd day of the pandemic as well as Nothing to Fear Day.
OP-ED ON SATURDAY
‘The Only Thing You Have to Fear is Fear Itself’
On this day in 1941, then President Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared in a radio address to the American people that “the only we have to fear is fear itself.”
That wasn’t, however, the first time he made a reference to “fear itself.”
Paraphrasing Thoreau, his inaugural address as president in 1933, in his remarkably brief, 1,833-word, 20-minute-long speech he sought to outline his plans to pull the nation out of the Great Depression with a plan he referred to as the “New Deal.”
He would come back to the “fear itself” phrase time and time again, most famously in 1941.
His inaugural speech would have made an excellent primer for our approach to the coronavirus pandemic in the early days, to wit:
“So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and of vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. And I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.”
To gain the support of the American people for his plan, he compared the Great Depression to a war that had to be won.
Roosevelt placed blame for the Great Depression on bankers and businessmen.
“[The] rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated.”
Perhaps in part because the world was far less prepared for a global pandemic than a global war – and there was no playbook left over from 1918 on how to respond to SARS-CoV-2 – and I would place blame squarely on the millions of people who put their heads in the sand and tried to go about their daily lives as if nothing was wrong.
In other news we cover today, China is preparing for a major wave of Covid cases, prominent immunologist at Yale said that we are “not even close” in being done with Covid, and U.S. hospitalizations from the virus are at a record low.
UNITED STATES
Hospitalizations due to SARS-CoV-2 fell below 9,000 for the first time since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first began tracking this metric over the summer of 2020, early during the pandemic.
The number of hospitalizations is one of the few remaining metrics the CDC is using to track the spread of virus in the wake of the end of the public health emergency on May 11 of this year.
Meanwhile, the tally of SARS-CoV-2 cases after CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service conference April has now climbed to 181. The event drew 1,800 in-person attendees and it was the first in-person Epidemic Intelligence Service gathering in four years. According to reports by various attendees, the gathering was crowded, with much face-to-face contact. Many events held in small rooms that were not well-ventilated and there was lots of socializing without social distancing,
A CDC post-event survey found that 70% of attendees did not don a face mask for the vent.
In an interview with the Guardian, Professor Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, said that “[W]e are not done with Covid, not even close,” responding to a question about the World Health Organization’s declaration of an end to the “emergency of international concern” and President Joseph Biden’s move to end the public health emergency in the United States.
“I get that people want to move on from the pandemic, but the virus is still out there, people are getting infected, and there’s the possibility of developing long Covid,“ she told the newspaper. “I’m still wearing masks and following preventive practices as much as possible.“
GLOBAL
More health experts in China are saying that another wave of SARS-CoV-2 is coming, with the possibility of up to 65 million new cases per week, but the Chinese government is determined not to return to its draconian “Zero Covid” policies which included rather severe lockdowns that left many people in economic distress.
In Hong Kong, a health expert, Dr. Lau Yu-lung, a professor of paediatrics at the University of Hong Kong, warned on Saturday that the Covid-19 wave might have peaked but parents should still be aware of rising cases of respiratory diseases following the lifting of the mask mandate.
““In terms of preventing deaths and severe cases, Hong Kong is among the top in the world, so we can all be reassured,” the professor said. “However, these small waves will appear repeatedly as this is the nature of coronaviruses.” He added that later infections were likely to be milder and the city’s vaccination rates “were satisfactory.”
TODAY’S STATISTICS
Now here are the daily statistics for Saturday, May 27.
As of Saturday morning, the world has recorded 689.4 million Covid-19 cases, an increase of 0.1 million from the previous day, and 6.88 million deaths, according to Worldometer, a service that tracks such information. In addition, 661.8 million people worldwide have recovered from the virus, an increase of just under 0.2 million from the previous day.
The reader should note that infrequent reporting from some sources may appear as spikes in new case figures or death tolls.
Worldwide, the number of active coronavirus cases as of Saturday at press time is 20,724,551, a decrease of 15,000. Out of that figure, 99.8%, or 20,686,415, are considered mild, and 0.2%, or 38,136, are listed as critical. The percentage of cases considered critical has not changed over the past eight months.
The United States reported 72,136 new cases in the period May 4 through May 10, a figure that is down 26% over the same period one week earlier, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The death toll for the same period is 840, a figure that is down 20%, and the test positivity rate is 5.2%, up 5% over the 14 days preceding May 11.
Finally, the number of hospital admissions from over the past week Covid was 8,256 as of May 16, a figure that is down 10% over the preceding 7-day period.
Starting on March 25, 2023, the Morning News Brief began to update case data as well as death tolls on a weekly basis. In addition, starting on May 15, 2023, the Morning News Brief has pressed pause on certain data sets as we assess the update of changes in reporting by U.S. health authorities at the CDC.
Since the start of the pandemic the United States has, as of Saturday, recorded 107.1 million cases, a higher figure than any other country, and a death toll of 1.16 million. India has the world’s second highest number of officially recorded cases, just under 45 million, and a reported death toll of 531,856.
The newest data from Russia’s Rosstat state statistics service showed that, at the end of July, the number of Covid or Covid-related deaths since the start of the pandemic there in April 2020 is now 823,623, giving the country the world’s second highest pandemic-related death toll, behind the United States. Rosstat last reported that 3,284 people died from the coronavirus or related causes in July 2022, down from 5,023 in June, 7,008 in May and 11,583 in April.
Meanwhile, France is the country with the third highest number of cases, with just under 40.1 million, and Germany is in the number four slot, with 38.4 million total cases.
Brazil, which has recorded the third highest number of deaths as a result of the virus, 702,664, has recorded 37.6 million cases, placing it in the number five slot.
The other five countries with total case figures over the 20 million mark are Japan, with 33.8 million cases, South Korea, with 31.6 million cases, placing it in the number seven slot, and Italy, with 25.8 million, as number eight, as well as the United Kingdom, with 24.6 million, and Russia, with 22.9 million.
VACCINATION SPOTLIGHT
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that, as of May 11, over 270.2 million people in the United States – or 81.4% – have received at least one dose of the coronavirus vaccine. Of that population, 69.5%, or 230.6 million people, have received two doses of vaccine, and the total number of doses that have been dispensed in the United States is now over 676.7 million. Breaking this down further, 92.23% of the population over the age of 18 – or 238.2 million people – has received at least a first inoculation and 79.1% of the same group – or 204.3 million people – is fully vaccinated. In addition, 20.5% of the same population, or 53 million people, has already received an updated or bivalent booster dose of vaccine, while 23.7 million people over the age of 65, or 43.3% of that population have also received the bivalent booster.
Starting on June 13, 2022, the CDC began to update vaccine data on a weekly basis and publish the updated information on Thursdays by 8 p.m. EDT, a statement on the agency’s website said. Starting on May 11, 2023, the CDC pressed pause on reporting new vaccine data, a hiatus it said would end on June 15 of this year.
Some 70% of the world population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine by Saturday, according to Our World in Data, an online scientific publication that tracks such information. So far, 13.39 billion doses of the vaccine have been administered on a global basis and 151,931 doses are now administered each day.
Meanwhile, only 29.9% of people in low-income countries have received one dose, while in countries such as Canada, China, Denmark, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States, at least 75% of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine.
Only a handful of the world’s poorest countries – Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia and Nepal – have reached the 70% mark in vaccinations. Many countries, however, are under 20% and, in countries such as Haiti, Senegal, and Tanzania, for example, vaccination rates remain at or below 10%.
In addition, with the start of vaccinations in North Korea in late September, Eritrea remains the only country in the world that has not administered vaccines.
Anna Breuer contributed reporting to this story.
(Photo: Accura Media Group)
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