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COVID-19: key developments for Tuesday, May 12, 2020

2 Comments on COVID-19: key developments for Tuesday, May 12, 2020

There are over 4.3 million global cases.  There have been nearly 300,000 deaths around the globe. There are over 1.4 million cases in the US. Daily US case growth is plateauing at a peak of 20-30,000 cases per day—although there has recently been a consistent (yet slight) downtrend. There have been over 1,500 deaths in the US since yesterday.

Restaurant reopening isn’t going too great in the South. Folks aren’t quite ready to resume business as usual. The number of diners is down by over 80% according to Open Table data. The current behavior of consumers shows that folks betting on a rapid economic recovery are soon to be disappointed. The truth is, people are still afraid:

Here are some decent recommendations for staying safe as the economy reopens.

There’s a growing number of case reports of Kawasaki disease or Kawasaki-like syndrome in pediatric COVID-19-exposed patients. Some of these children had been asymptomatic but had antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. Kawasaki disease is an inflammatory disease that can cause damage to the heart and blood vessels. It is often fatal:

Has the pandemic virus been in Ohio since January? Antibody testing shows this may be a reality. Perhaps it was circulating longer than we knew.

This awesome dashboard shows that NY’s hospitals are moving in the right direction— hospitalizations are decreasing, ICUs are not completely overrun, testing and contact tracing rates are being monitored.

Bergamo is approaching herd immunity in the community, but not among its healthcare workers:

The kind of population saturation that Bergamo is experiencing is not entirely unanticipated. It may be coming to a region near you.

Putin’s Spokesperson is now positive. Russia is now third in the world in number of cases:

Fauci says we should not be cavalier with children’s lives by assuming they won’t be in danger from the virus. Fauci also says we can’t assume vaccines will be ready for fall school re-openings:

Los Angeles County may extend its stay-at-home order until August:

The CDC has a history of making lax personal protective equipment (PPE) recommendations for healthcare providers in the context of outbreaks. When Ebola broke out in 2015, I knew it would come to the US through air travel, and I knew that based on patently lax PPE recommendations that nurses and other clinicians were likely to contract Ebola. The recommendations were lax in 2015, and clinicians did get Ebola. I anticipated this happening again in the US with COVID-19, and it has—either I’m prescient, or the CDC isn’t doing the best job.

Stephanie Arnold | cosmicpixle

Stephanie Arnold is an advanced practice psychiatric nurse and a doctoral candidate in UA Tuscaloosa’s DNP program. Stephanie moonlights from time to time at UCLA teaching mental health nursing. She also likes making cold-process soap.

  • 2 Comments
    • Bob6590 May 13, 2020

      Thanks to you all for continuing to bring in new and different angles on the COVID issues, we appreciate it!

      Have been seeing more and more evidence presented that masking the population when out and about would be another way to speed progress to successfully unlocking the USA going forward.

      The last one I read thru was linked to here on Monday’s blog, stemming from a paper issued April 21,  some time before US went over to recommending  masking, article is still available at

      https://arxiv.org/pdf/2004.13553.pdf.

      (Tried to copy the charts, but cannot paste them here. They are toward the end of the report.)

      It included a couple charts showing clearly the advantage of what they call “Universal Masking” in several other countries.

      So my question is where is the Public Relations campaign that would let those outside academia, i.e. most of us, know how this could be so helpful?

      I see little if anything in the media about WHY it makes sense to mask: “I wear my mask to protect you from me, and you wear your mask to protect me from you”  Simple idea, I have yet to see it stated that way much in any of the media.

      Using that as a guideline would clear up 90% of the BS about how “you can’t make me wear a mask, this is America after all” and instead flip us over to the positive “I CAN really do something to help end this disaster sooner”

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      • Stephanie ArnoldContributor Bob6590 May 21, 2020

        I think we shot ourselves in the foot on the mass mask communications. We were constrained by a severe lack of masks during the time we should have been rolling out a campaign like that. We could still use it now, and it would be better late than never.

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