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Your morning briefing of news, data, opinion pieces, videos, and other resources to help you through the Covid-19 pandemic
As of Tuesday, April 21st, in our editorial judgment, here are today’s three biggest issues going on vis-a-vis the pandemic:
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- To re-open our economy, we need an organized program of random sampling to determine the true extent of the Covid-19 virus in the general population. Today, New York begins the country’s first such test.
- States are crying out to the federal government for swabs and reagents, without which they testing kits they’ve been provided are worthless.
- Small businesses are getting desperate for Congress to approve the second tranche of PPP loans, which will cover about two months’ of payroll and rent for affected businesses.
Those are the big three, but in addition…
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- Trump is again using this crisis as an excuse to push through his usual priorities — tax breaks for the wealthy, shutting off immigration, and winning the next election. Today, more evil moves on the immigration front.
- As governors and public health experts push for citizens to respect shelter-at-home guidelines, certain right-of-center elements are calling for a resistance — and President Trump is actually encouraging people, via Twitter, to rebel against his own guidelines!
- Casting about for a scapegoat, Trump has pulled the U.S.’s committed funding from the W.H.O. at the exact time they’re desperately trying to prevent the coronavirus from making it into Third World countries (where it could cause mass slaughter!).
- The White House task force lacks experience in and competence for managing a major public health crisis, as it is composed largely (Drs. Fauci and Brix aside) of second-rate syncophants.
- Food banks are getting increasingly stressed out — there’s way too much excess food on the farm level, but not enough money or volunteers to get it to the people who need it
- [Add ninth point here]
And, finally, the ultimate cause of many of our country’s problems is…
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- We’ve elected a president who is unfit to lead us at this critical point in our history due to a condition — one far worse than, say, alcoholism or mere cognitive decline — called Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder. This disorder makes him incapable of empathy and compassion, unconcerned with truth, hostile to expertise, and entirely focused in every decision on how it will affect him personally and/or how it will get him increased adulation from others.Â
For new, searchable and sortable tables of data from all countries with at least 6,000 Covid-19 cases to date all 50 U.S. states and, using through Monday, April 20th, click the link in the table above (“Data by country and U.S. state”) or simply scroll to the bottom of this page. (Image below is a just a screenshot for illustration purposes; full table is lower on the page.) 
Top findings shown in the tables as the bottom of this page include: (1) In the U.S., cases and deaths grew 4% and 5% respectively yesterday, both up one percentage point from Sunday. (2) New York State’s cases and deaths grew 2% and 3% respectively yesterday, both down one percentage point from Sunday. (3) The percentage of the U.S. population that has been tested for Covid-19 is at 1.3%, which is at 18th place among major countries. (The leaders in Europe are Switzerland and Norway at 2.6%; Canada is at 1.4%.) (4) U.S. states with a double-digit % increase in cases yesterday were Iowa, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Connecticut; those with a double-digit % increase in deaths yesterday were North Dakota, Maryland, West Virginia, Connecticut, Nebraska, and Georgia. (Data source: Worldovision.info)
Various data-tracking websites:
EXCLUSIVE
Here are some ways you could be of service to others during this shared time of crisis:
- Sew cloth face masks to donate to your friends and neighbors.
- Track down N95 face masks and deliver them to local hospitals.
- Check in with neighbors who are living alone — even if you don’t know them well! — to see how they’re doing and if they need any help.
- Organize a Teddy Bear Hunt (click link for details) for local children.
- Call or write your elected representatives in Congress and urge them to speed up stimulus payments to the most-needy.
- Order a take-out or delivery meal from one of your favorite local restaurants to help them stay in business.
- Buy a gift card, for future use, from one of your favorite local shops.
- Teach a senior citizen or a person suffering from loneliness how to use video chat (e.g., FaceTime, Alexa, Zoom, or Skype video).
- If you have an RV (recreational vehicle), lend it to a medical professional who fears sleeping at home because he or she might expose their family to the virus.
- Donate blood. The need is high, and blood donation centers are open throughout the country, practicing safe distancing and sanitized donation practices.
Also, see some excellent suggestions (including non-profits that need donations) from The Washington Post here. Have other suggestions? Please share them here! (Reader suggestions so far have included teaching the non-tech-savvy how to order groceries online and how to pay bills online…)
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RESOURCES
Testing this block
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How countries rank
This table of world countries, with data through Monday (4/20), is sorted in descending order of Covid-19 cases identified to date. Note that while the U.S. ranks #1 in total cases, it only ranks #6 in terms of total cases per million population. (Conclusion: It isn’t fair to say, as some have been saying, that the U.S. has “the world’s worst outbreak” of Covid-19 — at least not on a population-adjusted basis. That said, it moved up from 7th place to 6th place yesterday)
Also note that in terms of the number of tests that have been conducted to date, as a percentage of the population the U.S. ranks behind several other countries, with only 1.2% of its population having been tested so far. Note that the data columns are sortable — just click once or twice in the header at the top of the column to sort the table by that column in ascending or descending order.
Data source: Worldometers.info. Countries included in this table are all countries with at least 6,000 reported Covid-19 cases.