Take your pick

Times Square Subway

Both see the peak coming quickly, though Cuomo obviously foresees a far greater disaster than the professor. My inclination in deciding between competing theories like these is to ask cui bono? In this case, a liberal Democrat who seeks national fame, other people’s money and a reworking of the social order to his liking, or a medical expert who wouldn’t appear to seek any of those things? My money’s on the academic, but we need merely wait to see.

Cuomo: Coronavirus ‘spreading through NY like a bullet train”

“The rate of new infections is doubling about every three days,” said Cuomo in a press briefing at Manhattan’s Javits Center, currently being converted to a 2,000-bed hospital complex.

“We’re not slowing it, and it is accelerating on its own,” said Cuomo. “The [disease] forecaster said to me, ‘We were looking at a freight train coming across the country.

“We’re now looking at a bullet train.”

The increased rate led Cuomo to project that the worst could hit in as little as two to three weeks.

“It accelerates the apex, to a point where it could be as close as 14 to 21 days,” he said. “The apex is higher than we thought, and the apex is sooner than we thought.

Nobel laureate: Coronavirus turning point in U.S. will be earlier than predicted

The US will see a turning point in the battle to contain coronavirus sooner than expected, according to the Nobel laureate who correctly predicted when China would get through the worst of its crisis.

Stanford University biology professor Michael Levitt, who won the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry, said his models don’t support predictions that the virus will wreak months or even years of social disruption or cause millions of deaths, the Los Angeles Times reported.

“What we need is to control the panic … we’re going to be fine,” assured Levitt, who correctly predicted early on that China would get through the worst of the outbreak by mid-February.

His optimistic report on China said the country would peak with around 80,000 cases and 3,250 deaths. He was not far off: China has reported 81,588 cases with 3,281 deaths as of March 24.

Now Levitt is looking at 78 countries that have reported more than 50 new infections each day.

He said he focuses on new cases — as opposed to overall totals — and sees “signs of recovery” in each of the places.

“Numbers are still noisy, but there are clear signs of slowed growth,” Levitt said, without offering a concrete date for when the US may see its turning point.

The US has confirmed more than 46,000 cases, resulting in at least 593 deaths as of Tuesday afternoon, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.

Levitt acknowledged that not all cases have been detected in some countries, but their death tolls are on track with his findings, the outlet reported.

Though fatality rates are higher than the flu, Levitt said the pandemic is “not the end of the world,” according to the outlet.

“The real situation is not as nearly as terrible as they make it out to be,” Levitt told the newspaper.

And just to annoy readers who are offended by mention of these things, I ran across this just now, from January, 2014:

Historian says Spanish Flu originated in China

While some researchers have pointed to a military camp in Kansas or the front-line trenches in France as the breeding ground for the disease, a Canadian historian believes he has discovered evidence to support those who theorized that the “Spanish flu” actually started a world away in China.

According to a new article published in the January 2014 issue of the journal War in History, historian Mark Humphries of Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland points to newly unearthed records to make the case that the lethal influenza pandemic first appeared in China in 1917 and then exploded across the globe “as previously isolated populations came into contact with one another on the battlefields of Europe.”

UPDATE: Here’s a fun fact from CBS, January 2014:

In 2014, older Americans fell 29 million times, leading to seven million injuries, according to the report out today in the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

About 2.8 million cases were treated in emergency departments, and approximately 800,000 seniors went on to be hospitalized for fall-related issues. 

More than 27,000 falls led to death.