Another Ugly Number

as November or December in China. That's what the country's top bio safety scientist said this week. That timeline would make the country one of the first in the world to distribute a vaccine. In an interview with State television on Tuesday, Woo Greisen, chief bio safety expert at China's Disease Control and Prevention Center, said final stage clinical trials of several vaccine candidates had progressed smoothly. She said she had taken a vaccine shot in April herself and had

felt nothing abnormal. With the economic devastation of containment measures becoming too much to bear for many governments, political pressure has grown on drugmakers to deliver vaccines quickly. London Mayor Sadiq Khan said further measures may be announced in the next few days and weeks to contain infections in the UK capital. The potential restrictions come as virus cases surge

in the city. Estimates published on Friday suggest there were six thousand new infections per day in the city last week. That's up from thirty two hundred the week before. Boris Johnson's government extended coronavirus restrictions across northern England and the Midlands. For the UK, the so called r rate, or how many people each new COVID nineteen case infects, is now as high as one point four. The government said that

suggests the spread is accelerating. Thailand reported its first death from coronavirus since June second, two weeks after the nation ended a streak of one hundred days without local transmission. With the latest fatality, Thailand's total death told from the pandemic rose to fifty nine. Thailand, which was the first country outside China to detect the coronavirus, is among a handful of nations in the region which have managed to

contain the pandemic. And now for today's main story, the US will top two hundred thousand deaths from the novel coronavirus in the next few days. It's a devastating milestone that comes only weeks before a presidential election where the virus response is front and center. The US has only four percent of the world's population, but accounts for about

twenty one percent of global coronavirus deaths. The disparity underscores America's failure to contain a virus that hit New York City hardest in the spring, then blazed through populous states like Texas, Florida, and California this summer. After New York contained its infection, I spoke with reporter em A Court about what COVID nineteen in the US looks like now, eight months after it was first found on American soil,

and what we have learned about it since. So we're about to hit a pretty dark milestone in the US two deaths from COVID nineteen. I was wondering, could you maybe just give us a little color on this grim statistic. It's honestly a point I think a lot of people hoped we would never get to and I think the fear now is where are we going to be at the end of the year. You know, how many deaths are we going to be talking about in a couple of months time. I like to think of the pandemic

in terms of phases. So earlier this year, we saw New York City get hit really hard. We saw New Jersey have really high numbers. We saw Seattle get hit really hard early in the pandemic, and more recently over the summer, the burden of the virus really shifted towards these you know, southern and southwestern states that dominated the news. Right We had you know, Texas, Arizona, Florida, California. Really the virus sort of blaze through those areas, and you know,

fast forwarding to now to the fall. Uh. You know, we've been talking about the fall as a time of great concern for months now because schools are reopening, we're seeing colleges reopening, um, you know many in several parts of the country, the temperatures are getting a lot cooler, people are moving their socializing indoors, where obviously there's a

higher risk of the virus being transmitted. So when you think about these different phases of the virus right now, we're a little bit at a at an inflection point, and we don't really know what's going to happen. We're seeing those hotspots from the summer really dying down, and that's reflected in overall the case numbers declining. We've seen deaths decline as well. We have more understanding of the public health measures that are needed to try to stop

the virus from spreading. But you know, whether we see all this happen for a third time again is really kind of up in the air now. Is it's a very grim number, but is there any doubt as to its accuracy? There's a lot of doubt. I think we can all agree that two hundred thousand is a floor for death. So we know, you know, when we hit this two hundred thousand number, it will be two official deaths.

But we also know that our our system hasn't, through the course of the pandemic, been very good at recognizing all coronavirus deaths for a variety of different reasons um And so we know, for instance, looking at CDC data, that we have this marker called, you know, excess mortality, and basically you look at historically how many deaths you've had in a given year, and then you look at

how many deaths you've actually had this year. And we know we've already seen more than two hundred thousand deaths occur this year than we were expecting, and so that might not all be COVID nineteen. By the way, Um, you know, people were avoiding medical care for a long time because they afraid of going to these virus written hospitals. They didn't want to get sick. We know people died

of heart attacks things like that at home. Unfortunately, so this number isn't you know, it's not a hundred clear exactly how this pans out, but we do know that unfortunately, likely more than a hundred two hundred thousand people have already died from this virus. I was wondering, if you might go into how does perhaps this two hundred thousand number or where the US is right now with COVID, how does this relate to testing rates in the US.

Testing has remained a challenge in the US, and it does obscure our view of the virus when we aren't testing enough. We actually know testing has been declining each week since the summer, and we're doing about you know, a million tests, uh, less than we were doing in July of the summer. So it's unclear whether when we see cases decline we can be certain that it's entirely because cases are declining and not because, uh, we're doing

less testing. So as always, that remains kind of a fog through which we're viewing these numbers, and we can't be totally sure. We have some other metrics we can turn to to try to make sense of these numbers, like test positivity rates. If test positivity rates are pretty high, as we've seen, you know, just a couple of months ago in the US, we know for sure that we're probably not testing enough, but it's hard to know until you really see all this stuff pan out in terms

of hospitalization and death rates. And of course the issue with that is these numbers come a lot down the road, and by the time you know you're having a problem, you're you're kind of late to be doing anything to really stop it quickly. Now you've mentioned that the US is really at an inflection point, and I was wondering if maybe we could talk a little bit more about that in terms of the trajectory of the virus coming

off the summer. As you were mentioning into the fall, what are the major concerns going into the next several months or even say into one in terms of what might be happening with the trajectory of the virus in the US. I think it can be really hard to get a sense of where the U S is in this outbreak because it's all relative, right So things appear to be on the upswaying from where they were the summer,

but things were really quite bad this summer. I mean, if you look at you know, for instance, the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is an independent nonprofit, maintains this map of COVID nineteen hot spots in the U S. If you look at the map today, you know, as of the time we take this, thirty three states were considered hot spots. I mean, the country is you know, a massive red right now if you look at this map. So it's important to note, like we are still in

the trenches here. You know, things appear to be getting better, but it's all relative to where we were before. One of the big concerns about this fall again is more institutions are reopening. The weather in parts of the country is getting cooler. People meeting indoors. And then, of course there's the fact that you know, traditionally we can have really bad flu seasons, and the symptoms of flu are

extremely similar the symptoms of COVID nineteen. And in a country where the medical infrastructure has already been placed under strain by COVID nineteen, the chances of having a bad flu season are are concerning, to say the least. I mean, we've seen from other parts of the world that the flu seasons have actually been milder in many cases because people are doing these things like social distancing and wearing masks.

So we know these measures, if we undertake them, will not only prevent COVID nineteen from spreading, but also other concerns like flu. But again, it's it is a concerning time of year. There were beliefs that summer would be a better time for the coronavirus crisis, and that just didn't turn out to be true and and that's not what happened. So let's look big picture. What does this

number two hundred thousand say. Do you think about the US is overall response to COVID nineteen throughout this year? It says we have done a very poor job of containing this virus. You know, we have four percent of the world's population and about of global coronavirus deaths. I mean, this is something that has to be taken really seriously, you know, especially considering where these deaths have occurred, who these deaths have affected. We know people with other medical

conditions have disproportionately died from this virus. We know elderly people have died from this virus. We know people of color have disproportionately died from this virus. We also know geographically that the virus deaths have been, you know, especially concentrated in just about twelve states, and seventy percent more than seventy of virus deaths in the US happened in just twelve states, including some of the names that you

might assume you know in New York, California, Texas. It's really striking when you think about this two number in more death I mean, that is a really that's a large number, and and it's an amount of deaths that weren't we didn't expect to happen this year, right, I mean, this is a new pandemic um. I think it can be helpful to think about it in terms of even just cities in the U S. So, um, you know, Yonkers, New York has a population of two people. Huntsville, Alabama,

has a population of two people. I mean, we're talking about an entire city die basically, if if you think about it in just geographic terms. Is there any good news for folks looking for some regarding COVID nineteen in the US. I think you can see good news in a couple of places. I mean, from a public health perspective, I would say the good news is we do know what the right thing is to do, even though it's hard to do and it's hard to sustain for such

a long period of time. Where now eight months into a virus that was first confirmed on US soil back in late January, right, I think it's almost become a bit of a cliche at this point. We know you're supposed to wear a mask, we know you're supposed to social distance, wash your hands, all that good stuff. But we do know that we have that information and we

have the ability. You know, most of us hopefully have the ability to adhere to these things, and not everyone because of their circumstances and jobs and things like that, but intrinsically that's positive because that's information that we can use and we can put to good use. There's also encouraging news, I think on the vaccine front, although it's still very much remains to be seen whether these experimental drugs are going to be effective and safe for Americans

and for the global population. I think there's a real effort from the private sector to try to find a solution to this. But I think we've seen the public health response to this lag behind. And what does that say about America. I think it says a lot about you know, where we invest, where our priorities have been historically um and it gives us the opportunity to do better that was in the corps. And that's it for

our show today. For coverage of the outbreak from one bureaus around the world, visit Bloomberg dot com slash Coronavirus and if you like the show, please leave us a review and a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It's the best way to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily edition is produced by Top for fourheads Jordan Gospore, Magnus Hendrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported by Emma Court. Original music by Leo Sigrin.

Our editors are Rick Shine and Francesca Levi. Francesca Leavi is Bloomberg's head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.