I comment on COVID with data coming from the John Hopkins COVID dashboard, which is fantastic (and slow to load because it’s doing a ton).
Things are still terrible.
It looks like Asia is burning up right now; South Korea, Vietnam, Japan and China all have the highest peaks of infection ever recorded, and by far.
The pattern seems to be like this: Step one, drop all precautions and rules. Step two, get fucked.
China just confined Shenzhen, the Chinese Silicon Valley and top 10 financial hub in the world!
It is absolutely insane that two years in and we still don’t have accurate numbers in China, where it all started. See y’all in 30 years in a documentary with a voice over that says “we didn’t know at that time…” Well, it’s not like we didn’t want to but.
Here in America we probably already have crossed the 100K deaths in California (they say 86K) and 1M in the whole country (they say 967K). Cases are *extremely* down because testing is not done anymore while in Germany, where they keep testing, cases are still very high, in the million cases per week ballpark. Overall cases have stopped going down dramatically since we started to take less precautions, and are in some cases, up.
Between politics, local and international, variants and delays between real time and analysis, it is going to become really hard to know what’s going on with COVID this year. Stay cautious.