Here’s the COVID-19 Bad News In Four Easy Charts

It is not even close to winter yet, but already there’s nothing but bad news on the COVID-19 horizon. First off, here’s a chart you’ve probably seen a bunch of times:

In the past three weeks, the number of new cases per day has increased by about 2.3x using smoothed 7-day averages. But maybe this is simply because we’re testing more? Nope:

The testing rate has been dead flat at about 1 million tests per day. So why is the case rate growing so fast? It’s simple: more people are getting infected:

Over the past three weeks, the test positivity rate has gone up about 2.2x. This accounts for the entire increase in the case rate. So what does this mean for the death rate?

Between October 1 and October 23, the case rate went up by about half. Add three weeks to that, and between October 23 and November 14 the death rate went up by . . . about half. So, since the case rate has risen about 2.3x in the past three weeks up through today, we can probably expect the death rate to increase about 2.3x between now and the end of November. That gets us very close to 3,000 deaths per day.

It might be less than that, since the case fatality rate has been slowly declining. On the other hand, it might be more than that since the current unsmoothed case rate is about 180,000 per day. If that’s a more accurate measure, we could end up well over 3,000 deaths per day.

What’s more, this is hardly the worst it can get. At the moment, there’s no indication that the case rate is slowing down, which means the death rate won’t slow down either. It will slow down eventually, especially if more people get scared and start wearing masks and quarantining and just generally acting like this is a serious problem. Needless to say, this would be more likely if state governors helped things along by shutting down indoor dining at restaurants and Senate Republicans made this more palatable by agreeing to a bailout of restaurants and other highly affected businesses. That’s in addition to other assistance, mostly but not limited to aid to the unemployed.

Our first COVID-19 surge in April made me swear off crude projections, since they mostly turned out to be wrong. Partly this is because this isn’t just a pure mathematical exercise involving exponential growth. It also depends on how strongly the government puts in place countermeasures and how well the rest of us accept them, and that’s nearly impossible to predict. So don’t treat these numbers as gospel or anything close to it. They’re more like a warning: if we continue doing the minimum necessary to fight the coronavirus, we’ll almost certainly see a skyrocketing death rate. A lot of this is already baked into today’s numbers, but not all of it. We can still do better if we decide to put partisan idiocy behind us and simply agree to fight the pandemic with every tool at our disposal.

POSTSCRIPT: If you’d like to see this all in scary map form, just click here.

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“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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