I rely on the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 dashboard as the slowest and most conservative of pandemic tallies, though I realize that the true numbers of cases and deaths are likely far higher. But even conservative tallies may tell you more than you really want to hear.
The problem with dashboards is that they tend to jolt us with big numbers or graphs showing awful spikes, preferably today. Or the numbers are down and the current wave is dropping, so never mind—we'll look for jolts elsewhere.
But look at the graphs on tonight's Johns Hopkins dashboard. Like most such information sources, they're interactive: put your cursor on a specific bar and the precise numbers for that day will pop up. Consider what we have tonight, Thursday, November 11, at about 7:00 pm Pacific Standard Time:
(It might be a good idea to open the dashboard in another window, because the numbers may have changed by the time you see this.)
Weekly cases first: It looks as if the world is moving into a fourth wave, hopefully not as serious as the last one. Still, in the week ending November 7, we had 3,152,000 new cases around the world.
As for weekly deaths, the conservative count is 48,871—only half of what we had last May. But for the last four weeks the mortality count has stayed just under 50,000. Roughly 200,000 people have died of COVID-19 in the last month, about the population of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; or Little Rock, Arkansas; or Eindhoven in the Netherlands. In one month.
If everyone in such a city had died in a week, the whole planet would be in lockdown until 2025. Somehow we find the strength to survive 200,000 deaths as long as they're dispersed.
Weekly vaccinations did indeed spike, to 301,326,000 from 136,880,000 In the last week of October. That is some encouragement, if the spike continues. I hope it does.
I suspect those of us who aren't medical experts tend to surf the web impatiently, looking for the biggest current jolt, whether about COVID-19 or climate disaster or the follies of our local anti-vaxx politicians. We might get a better perspective on this mess if we slow down and poke around in our sources' numbers, before we draw conclusions. We might decide things aren't quite as bad as they look. Or that we're in far worse shape than we imagined.
Whatever. At least we'll have drawn our conclusions on more evidence than a glance at a dashboard.
