April 2, 2020

Italy’s Coronavirus Epidemic Has Peaked—But How About Everyone Else?

This morning, as part of my daily report on the spread of coronavirus in western countries, I posted a chart showing that Italy’s daily death rate from COVID-19 seems to have hit its peak. That got me curious about all the other countries. Do any of them also show signs of being near their peak? Here’s the full set:

Note that all these charts begin on March 1 and the y-axis is just plain old daily deaths. I’ve used a 6-day rolling average to smooth out the noise.

There’s no good news here. Spain is showing a few glimmers of peaking, but none of the other countries looks anywhere close. We’re all still on the early exponential part of the curve and probably at least two weeks away from our respective peaks.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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