June 30 COVID

I'm moving my data source to the NY Times. They have the best data dashboard I've found for the CoronaVirus, and it is improving, or I'm noticing more about it. Not as much a fan of their rate graph (I like the simple line more) and they don't calculate "French Guinea" (like Wikipedia and Google), or Mayotte. Both of which are really old French imperial colonies / regions in Africa. I would guess that the count for "French Guinea" is included in "Guinea" for the NY Times, which has only 0.043% case-rate at the moment. I am not sure where Mayotte is counted. If you include them, the US is still in 12th place in the world. Without them, we're in the top 10.

At NY Times, you can compare death rate too! Which is morbidly exciting. We're in 9th place, with 39/100,000. 

The NY Times estimates numbers differently. They have us at 0.796%, where Wiki has us in the 0.8% club, but it is a small difference. Most countries, except Latin America, seem to have a smaller percent at NY Times.

A test came back positive in Gunnison on Sunday, Monday, or today. And I have friends worried they have contracted it despite their very best efforts. Tourism continues to spike here, as people make the less ethical, more selfish decision to travel around during our most boring Armageddon.

It is a time of great stress without healing. 

Stay strong.

Louisiana and Arizona are our 2 states with growing caseloads that are now in the "top" 10 for case rate. From someone in your destination playground: if you live there, please stay home.

COVID June 25: It's getting a whole lot worse. Thanks for that.

Many upsets over the last 4 days, though none in the top 7. Little French Guiana has shot into 8th place with the small caseload of 2.5 thousand. Despite major surges in the US -- putting us back into the NYTimes list of countries where cases are rising, and posting our new record of about 38k new cases yesterday, and having about a quarter of all known deaths -- we have fallen to 13th place.

That isn't good news, globally, or even locally. It means that in addition to French Guiana and Oman have surged into the runnings, and Armenia has passed us again. Despite the reality that cases are only getting worse here in the US. The Pandemic is becoming more Pan as Latin America and even Africa are experiencing surges in cases.

And still we have a great deal of deniers in our country... which is a constant source of amazement to myself, as well as depression.

You can see on these standing for the 1st time Brazil, which is set to be our real competitor for most shit-headed country with many, many people relying on them to make wise decisions. Along with the US, they have 1-2 orders of magnitude more cases, and still have a high case rate. Which is pretty unique in the world. And along with the US, they have a pretty ridiculous government. Still, they are only in the 0.5% club, which we left about 2 weeks ago.

6 countries in the 1% club. The top 13 are all in the 0.7% club.

The states which should have restricted travel, since cases are rising and shouldn't go out infecting the rest of us (in a general order of importance, sorted by case rate, and steepness of the recent spike): California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, S. Carolia, Oklahoma, Utah, Arkansas, Oregon, Georgia... Louisiana, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Washington, Idaho, Alaska, Hawaii, and Montana. Colorado is doing alright at the moment, but expect that trend to begin changing in a week or two: We are open for tourism, which is a great way to keep this thing going and get back to shutting down the country. 

In Gunnison, we have gone from 118 positive tests to 122. 4 new cases in 4 days. Which is alarming because we prior to my weekend, we had about 4 cases in 4 weeks. That is a alarming trend. Tourism is set to hit us hard for a second time in this one little year.

Think we'll shut down again? Or continue to compete for this sad championship?

June 20 COVID

After a break for Juneteenth, Gunnison has somehow lost a case... Makes me question that data just a bit. The top 10 keep their standings for the last 2 days, the US making subtle gains on Singapore. Our caseload is more and more on the rise.

June 18 COVID

The US has battled it's way back into 10th place! Passing Luxembourg with 0.669%! What a major upset. With the 7 day average of new cases is higher than it has been since the 11th of May in the US, they are unlikely to pass us back. Our growth trend is becoming more clear. Even considering better testing, the US may be in for another shutdown due to the virus unless our treatment can improve mightily and we can get our death-rate to continue to drop. Four our sake, I hope our caseload doesn't get back up to 30k cases per day, but I'm not optimistic. There is a treatment which has been successful in Europe... But here in America, most of us can't go to the doctor to try. Yay for the "Land of the Free (to get sick and die)". That's your most protected right here. Enjoy it.

Sadly, Chile has its own upset: jumping two places to find itself in 4th place. There are now 6 countries in the 1% (or more) Club. Worse, Peru's death rate is double Chile's. 

June 17 COVID

The trend is finally looking clear. About 4 weeks after Memorial Day (which seems understandable: it takes up to 2 weeks for symptoms to show, and then it'll be a few weeks before those symptoms travel around a little) and as the US opens up, the caseload is starting to rise.

The global standings haven't changed among the top ten, but poor Qatar has breached the 3% club.

The plague continues. In the US, where there's little consistency, we are having a lot harder time dealing with this virus than Europe. Or cultural father and nations with democracy and capitalism. They are figuring it out, the US cannot. I wold love to see this graph again in 2 weeks to see if our death toll begins to trend back up as well.

I hope not. But I suspect so. It is beyond time to start asking if we can do better.

The good news, is that there is a treatment that seems to be working. Perhaps we won't rebound. Thanks to... Europe.

June 16 COVID

Over my weekend, my town of Gunnison added a case. The last time I caught an added case was on the 10th (Gunnison reported it on the 9th or earlier), so it's been about a week since our last positive test.

Since last weekend, Qatar has jumped 0.2%, and is now one to two days away from busting into the 3% club. A club of one. For now. However, their curve is flattening, which is more than can be said for the US, which has been dealing with this since March and seems to be getting worse at it every day.

Peru has passed Singapore, probably for good, into 8th place, but that has been the only upset in the last 3 days.

The US is still sitting comfortably in 11th place, at 0.65%. Belarus, behind us, gained about 0.03% over that time and we gained about 0.02%. We both seem to be holding fairly flat, though Belarus seems to be improving, somewhat, while the US appears to be on the verge of its next spike. Which makes sense in the overall picture. When you drill down, we still have a large number of states reporting spikes, and everyone's starting to travel around for fun.

Thanks for that.

Expect "great" things from this behemoth competitor: Even with 2.1 MILLION cases (a full ORDER OF MAGNITUDE more than its closes competitor and about 1/4 of all global cases) It may be on the verge of shooting up past the 0.7% club and into the 0.8% club and seems to have the goal of reporting a full 1% of it's people affected by the virus.

I'm feeling particularly cynical today. What with Texas, California, Alabama, Utah, Arkansas, the Carolinas, Florida, and our own Costilla and Montezuma counties growing... and especially Arizona, where the Governor insists: 'if I close my eyes, it doesn't exist! if I plug my ears it ceases to exist... how come only 3 month-olds seem to know about this? It's great!'

If you want to open up: be strict on masks. It's that damn simple.

Check in tomorrow, it will probably be much the same.

June 13 COVID

Bahrain skips ahead of Andorra, finally displacing them from their long-held 3rd place spot. Soon, Mayotte will make it to the 1% club. Cases are slowly coming back up in the US, though we are still hovering around 20k cases per day, never having dropped, our worse-case states are doing alright... and several of our warm-weather states seem to be getting complacent. The Carolinas, Utah, Arizona, and California are seeing rising trends, preventing the country from coming down. Wait for this time next week to see what the change is.

Gunnison remains fine... Still holding steady at 117 positive tests. Protect yourself against tourists who may carry this disease from less careful places to areas which have kicked the virus out.

COVID a dozen days into June

Peru is ascending in the Race to the Bottom, and Chile overtook Kuwait sometime in the last 2 days, but still the US holds steady. Still gaining somewhere around 20,000 cases per day, but unable to compete anymore, we hold on to 10th place. Our percentage increases every day, but not as fast as the small countries we compete with. We may be able to overtake Luxembourg in a few days, but I wouldn't place bets on it yet. By the time we catch them, Belarus or Maldives may catch up to US.

Gunnison and Colorado are still doing fine... though I had a visitor today who helped a friend move without a mask 2 weeks ago, and he feels justified in traveling around the country. This is why we can't seem to drop our caseload like all of Europe managed to do. In most metrics, the US instead competes with Belarus and Kuwait and Bahrain.

June 10 COVID situation

Stumbled upon Arizona today, their case load has bumped up noticeably since the beginning of June. Checked out a few other states: Florida is trending upward, slightly, as is California. New Jersey is not, New York is not, and my own state of Colorado is not... though my own Tourism-based place in Gunnison is. Over the last 4 days, we gained 3 cases. Which is huge for us: we held pretty damn steady for about 2 weeks.

Among the highest case load states (not the highest rate states), the trends are mixed, which might be why the nation as a whole is holding steady at about 20k cases per day, even now, a few weeks after the Memorial Day Revelries. We have broken past the 2 million mark (though not everyone agrees we're quite there yet) and have joined the 0.6% club, but still we have dropped out of the top 10 countries in the Great Race to the Bottom, being displaced by Peru. Though Brazil is hiding data in their bid, trying to grow cases as fast as they apparently can, they are still around a measly 0.3%

Among the top contenders, Luxemborg and Singapore traded places again. While Chile jumped up to just behind Kuwait. Bahrain jumped into the 1% club and Qatar is more than half way to being the first and only country in the 3% club and being virtually untouchable in the race to the Bottom. Though, thankfully, they have shown a recent trend to be heading back down on the curve. Good luck Qatar! I hope you're able to turn this around soon.

As morbid as this has been, it is my hope no one need top these charts.

As compared to last post, June 5, the data then:

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June 5 COVID dispatch

In this last update for the next few days, things hold steady. Qatar continues to pull away from the pack, now at 2.4%. Bahrain and Mayotte trade places. The US nears the 2 million cases mark, as the number of cases per day flattens so much it's almost growing a little. To those nay-sayers who think this is mostly a cold weather disease, recognize that Qatar is not that much of a "cold weather of a country", and neither is Bahrain or Kuwait in the middle east. Neither is Singapore, close to the equator. 

However, according to the NY Times, the US may be improving more than I predicted. We are seeing a steady level of cases, but we are also testing far better than we used to, and we are getting more negative tests as a proportion. Perhaps even the arrogant US of A is improving the outlook against all the odds of the leadership we choose. Most people are behaving well and compassionately, wearing masks and maintaining distance, and washing hands.

June 4 COVID situation

Chile beats the US to the 0.6% mark, even as we climb one more hundredth of a percent. The US does seem to be slowly rallying, but it is as slow to ramp back up as it is to ramp down. Remember again that other countries hit hard and early have dropped in new incidence, even the UK, but the US has held remarkably steady at about 20,000 new cases a day since early May. As we continue into June, keep an eye on this competitor. They may be planning to make their move in October....

Thanks to Diane Mitch Bush

In March this year, along with all my co-workers, I was rapidly laid off due to a global pandemic that was affecting Ski Areas early and heavily. Since that time, 6 people in my small local community have died from that same disease. I think the decision to close was appropriate and even necessary, and I don't argue with that. But all of a sudden, I had no income. When applying for unemployment, in this emergency, I was asked by the State of Colorado to please wait to apply. There was some federal aid coming, and they were getting thousands of new applications and they could not keep up. So, kindly, I acquiesced to their request. I checked in regularly, and once I was allowed to apply, I tried.

And I didn't succeed for a month.

By then, I had nearly begun to work again. By the time I was able to request my unemployment, I was working more than 32 hours a week, and not allowed to request my payments.

Frustrated, I tried to contact the department of Labor and Unemployment, but no phone numbers could contact anyone. Even in good times, they are hard to contact, and now they were more over-worked and low on resources than ever.

So I harassed my elected officials, and they tried to help. But when Diane Mitch Bush reached back out, who is not yet my representative, she got me in contact with someone who helped me out almost immediately. Within three days of Ms. Mitch-Bush offering a hand up, I had solved my troubles with the Unemployment system.

This is just one reason I will be voting for her in the primary, and the general, elections. Thank you, Diane, you are one of a kind!

Black Lives Matter - Gunnison

I am extremely proud of the people who organized the demonstration in Gunnison in honor of George Floyd and the thousands of other black men and women who are unjustly killed by police in our country. I was overwhelmed by the show of solidarity, the energy, and the sheer number of people who came out. I have helped put on some demonstrations in Gunnison, I have attended many more, but this event was the most powerful and emotional thing I've ever witnessed in this town. I'm not ashamed to say I cried. Photographers for our newspapers cried. The organizers and speakers cried a little bit too. It was unspeakably moving. It affected me even more deeply than standing on stage with the diversity of supporters behind Joe Salazar's bid for Attorney General in 2018. I want to extend my thanks to our Gunnison police, who were, from what I could see, very respectful, did not interfere, and helped direct traffic for our safety when we were all standing in the middle on an intersection of two highways. So thank you.

The demonstration was a great success, and now we all need to harness that energy and use it. Become more engaged politically so we can make these changes our society so desperately needs. We elect representatives who are supposed to speak for us. That's hard when they do not reflect our diversity, or don't care about our issues. Become involved in the dominant parties at a small and local level and the primaries. Primaries are vital. For better or worse (mostly worse) these two parties are the ones who are going to field a candidate in a general election. If we don't speak up and demand that those candidates care about us, and if we aren't involved in choosing leaders of a diverse cast, we'll end up with more sociopathic narcissists like the Darth Drumpf and his horde of allies.

Keep the energy up!

In solidarity,

Edward

June 3 COVID data

The same day the US drops to 10th place in the great Race to the Bottom, Gunnison registered its first case of Coronavirus 9 days after Memorial day. Our last positive test was on the 24th. Now is the beginning of the time we will see a surge in cases, if we are to see one, from the Memorial Day revelries. I have been predicting we should see a surge. However, if we remain at 20,000 cases added per day, we will probably continue to remain stable. We wont get worse through the summer.... that would be my humble prediction.

Unlike other countries with resources that got hit hard early: they are dropping in cases per day.

And don't forget Andorra, they made the big move to the 1% club today.

June 2 COVID race

In 9 days, at our current rate of 20,000 cases a day, the US will be the first country in the world to 2 million cases. But we are losing the race to the bottom. Even Singapore pulls away from us a little, leaving us lonely in the 0.5% club. Kuwait, however, passes Singapore, pulling into 7th.

It shows you what elite company we are in when we add nearly the same number of cases as many cases as our competitors have in total. Carrying nearly 1/3 of all cases in the globe, we are still able to race for the most cases per person.

However, South America is closing many gaps, so it may be that tomorrow we drop out of the bottom 9, displaced by Chile and Peru. We still have 5-10 days to see how the USA rallies from Memorial Day revelries. Hopefully protesters of genocide and discrimination were careful enough we don't get a spike from that. We really don't need help hurting our marginalized communities in the US of A.