COVID-19 Cases in U.S. Double to 2 Million in 44 Days

I hope people will put down their protest signs and weapons long enough to note that more than 2 million Americans have now been infected with COVID-19.

To be precise, as of this writing, the total is 2,016,027 cases. An increase of 21,744 cases over the past 24 hours. Oh, by the way, the COVID-19 death toll is now nearing 114,000 (113,914). 

Let's keep in mind the U.S. reached 1 million COVID-19 cases on April 28th. 

This means the number of COVID-19 cases in this country doubled in 44 days. So has the death toll. 

It's true that part of this doubling can be explained by greater testing capacity. It is also encouraging that New York and New Jersey, once the epicenter of COVID-19 in the U.S. has now seen a flattening of the curve. But other states which had been flattening like Michigan are on the rise again while other states like Texas and Arizona have yet to peak and are seeing increased hospitalization rates. Rapid re-opening schemes don't help matters.

And this doesn't take into account the nationwide protests which have been gripping the country for nearly 3 weeks since the murder of George Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis police officers. As noted by Alexis C. Madrigal and Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic earlier this week:

There’s no point in denying the obvious: Standing in a crowd for long periods raises the risk of increased transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. This particular form of mass, in-person protest—and the corresponding police response—is a “perfect set-up” for transmission of the virus, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in a radio interview on Friday.

Unfortunately, Jeffrey Kluger and Chris Wilson are spot on with their TIME headline, "America is Done with COVID-19. COVID-19 Isn't Done With America":

Yet the pandemic, if not remotely yesterday’s news, has begun to fade as a front-of-mind issue, pushed out both by the recent demonstrations against police brutality and systemic racism, triggered by the May 25 murder of George Floyd, and perhaps a sort of cultural numbing to all things COVID. The White House Coronavirus Task Force, whose press conferences were daily fixtures in the early months of the crisis, now convenes three times a week instead of daily—with Vice President Mike Pence, the group’s chair, attending only one of those three regular sessions—and there has not been a press conference in the last month. On June 12, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had its first media telebriefing since March 9; previously these were held at least weekly.

“I’m worried that people have kind of accepted where we are as a new normal, and it is not normal,” says Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of John Hopkins’ Center for Health Security at the Bloomberg School. “Some states have hundreds or even thousands of new COVID cases every day, and we can do better than this. Some countries have driven their [daily] cases down to zero.”

A week ago, I made the case that COVID-19 was being treated as "a distraction" to the George Floyd protests:

The brutal and senseless murder of George Floyd doesn't change the fact we are still fighting a pandemic which is still killing Americans. However awful police brutality in America is against the African-American and Latino communities, it doesn't change the fact there is no vaccine or viable therapeutic for COVID-19. So long as that is the case then COVID-19 will kill African-Americans and Latinos more swiftly in larger numbers than any police department, no matter how cruel, ever could.

COVID-19 can be described as many things. A distraction is surely not one of them.

I have a bad feeling that in a week from now COVID-19's second wave will begin in earnest and those who have out in the streets will have wished they stayed home.