Knowledge about the coronavirus is crucial in a democratic society. The knowledge that is shared on media outlets should be truthful, and based on medical and scientific observations and research. My first post on the COVID-19 virus, Seeking Knowledge About Coronavirus, was on February 25. On this day, China reported 77,754 cases of coronavirus, while there were only 51 cases in the United States. Today, China has 83,817, while the U.S. has 783,290 confirmed cases.

It’s All About Testing

The United States has a severe problem with testing. Without an adequate testing program, it will be very risky for governors to open their state up for business, schooling, and recreation. As of April 20, there are about 150,000 new cases of COVIDE-19 per day in the U.S. This converts to about 45 new cases per 100,000 people per day. But this is an average for the whole population of Americans. When you look at specific locations, the numbers are much higher. New York: 1,272/day; New Jersey: 1,000/day; Massachusetts: 552/day; California: 85/day; Michigan: 2466/day. Ideally, we need to reduce the number of new cases to about 1/100,000 per day.

To know the current status of the virus, we need a rigorous testing program. And testing must be followed by tracing those people who came in contact with the infected, which means identifying close contacts, such as family, friends, and co-workers. Obviously, we won’t be able to track down fleeting contacts (such on the beach, at a mall, at a grocery store). When close contacts are identified, they need to be quarantined for 14 days. This will require thousands of people who work with health departments to identify, track and trace. In this way, we can cut off the virus within groups of closely connected people who come in contact with an infected person. This is what Massachusetts is doing now. It’s what South Korea did starting over a month ago.

Expert Sites

In this post you will find a few sites that I think provide important information about coronavirus. I hope these links will be useful to you in expanding your knowledge and the actions to take to work with your community to mitigate against the virus.

• BBC Site Global Outbreak Site
• Simulating an Epidemic
• Tracking Coronavirus in the U.S.

BBC Global Outbreak Site

This site provides us with a variety of graphical knowledge about the virus around the world. This series of maps and charts tracks the spread of the virus since it emerged in China in December last year. Link to the BBC site.

Simulating an epidemic

This simulation at 3blue1brown, by Grant Sanderson, is some combination of math and entertainment, depending on your disposition. The goal is for explanations to be driven by animations and for difficult problems to be made simple with changes in perspective. This simulation is brilliant. It was passed onto me by Dennis Adams, who has helped me expand my knowledge of the pandemic.

You will want to invest about 25 minutes to watch this simulation. It will teach you how an epidemic grows, and it will also show you how different methods of mitigation can affect the growth of the virus. What affect does social distancing have on the growth of the virus? In current stay at home plans, we are still allowed to go to grocery stores and pharmacies. What’s the effect of this situation? What about travel between communities? What if we get tired of this, and begin to socially interact with each other? The link to the video is

Tracking Coronavirus in the U.S.

This is Reuters tally of state and local government sources. The U.S. diagnosed its first COVID-19 case in Washington state on Jan. 20. The site includes a series of maps and charts on the virus in the United States. Over 700,500 cases of the highly contagious novel coronavirus have been reported in the United States and its territories, according to a Reuters tally of state and local government sources.

Coronavirus Online Course

For Harvard Medical School students, and thousands of other physicians-in-training around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic may prove to be the most meaningful lesson of their nascent careers:  a crash course in the pathophysiology of a formidable disease, involving diagnosis, treatment and prevention, and an evolving tutorial in epidemiology, public health response and ethics. Dozens of HMS students quickly gathered online to determine how they could respond to the crisis in the most constructive way.  

For one group, the answer was clear: they needed to educate themselves and quickly. What they had no way of knowing was that by doing so they would soon be helping medical students around the nation and the world learn about the disease. Within five days the students had divided the labor and drafted a curriculum that, at first, was stored on a shared Google doc that all HMS students could access and distribute to friends and colleagues. 

Now the curriculum is available to all. The curriculum, as it stands now, contains seven modules covering a range of topics, from bench to bedside content, to the epidemiological principles used to describe the spread of COVID-19. One module seeks to “develop technical know-how in preparation for roles that medical students may play in a clinical setting,” while two other modules cover medical ethics and global collaboration. 

Ed Johnson’s Daily Status Reports

Ed Johnson
Advocate for Quality in Public Education
Atlanta GA | (404) 505-8176 | edwjohnson@aol.com

Ed Johnson explains that the Georgia Department of Public Health offers a COVID-19 update on its website twice daily, one around noonday and another around early evening.  Ed’s presentation is meant to supplement the latest or a recent GaDPH COVID-19 noonday update.

If you live in Georgia, Ed’s reports are one of the most informative And important sources of information about the current status of coronavirus in the state. In his daily reports he provides several graphical summaries of COVID-19 in Georgia. His reports include pareto charts, control charts and prediction charts.

• Pareto charts of confirmed cases and confirmed deaths
• Control charts for confirmed cases per 10,000 persons
• Control charts for confirmed deaths per 10,000 persons
• Control charts for confirmed cases per 10 square miles
• Control charts for confirmed deaths per 10 square miles
• Prediction charts for No. cases in Fulton & Dougherty Counties
• Prediction charts for No. deaths in Fulton & Dougherty Counties

Pareto Chart

This pareto chart is helpful to identify areas that share nearly 80% of the cases while making up only 20% (32) of the 160 counties. Note the the 7 red lines representing as many counties nearly is 52% of the Covid-19 cases in the state? Which counties are in red? Any similarities Or differences among these counties? I’ve lived three of them: Dekalb, Fulton, & and presently Cobb.

Control Chart

The counties are plotted on the horizontal, number of cases on the vertical. The number of cases per county are plotted and connected with straight lines. Notice that some of the points fall outside the two horizontal dashed red lines. As Ed states within the notes of the chart, the more distant a counties number of cases or deaths (refer to a death chart) from the upper red limit of 14.87 cases, the mor unusual its rate. Which counties rate is most unusual? How about your county?

Prediction Control Chart

The reports published by Ed Johnson provide an important analysis of the spread of the coronavirus in Georgia. This link will bring you to an archive page from which you can access the latest daily reports published by Ed.

Final Note

We have a serious problem in the United States. The President of the U.S. is supporting and riling up Americans who want their governors and local officials to open up for business. God knows people are hurting. We’ve lost jobs. Lost health insurance. They have lost income. However, they could lose their lives, and put other people at risk if they don’t consider the implications of their actions. The coronavirus is a deadly virus. It’s already killed more than 2.5 million people around the world, and more than 3/4ths of million people in the United States.

We need to tread carefully. Breaking the 6 foot barrier, and discarding facial masks is sure to cause a resurgence of the virus. We know from the 1918 Flu epidemic that when we relax the mitigation procedures, the virus will come roaring back.

I know it’s a tough time for all of us. But for the health of kids, of your family and friends, you’re co-workers, and others that you come in contact with every day, play it safe. And listen and search for the facts about the coronavirus.