Coronavirus update – April 20th
Bottom Line: This daily update is designed to put everything in perspective with straight-forward facts. No hyperbole, no misinformation, no nonsense. We ended last week with a lot of generally optimistic trends. This included the potential peak having been crossed nationally and an extremely encouraging study result for a treatment. Especially encouraging is the news that President Trump’s three-phase plan for reopening the country already shows several states are in a position to act of the first phase. If you’re looking for better news – you can find it. We have data driven progress evidenced across the country as May has the appearance of being a much better month for us and likely people around the world.
Here’s where we stand as of now...
Worldwide:
- 2,414,095 – 165,153 deaths – 629,390 recovered
Nationally:
- 764,265 cases – 40,565 deaths – 71,012 recovered
Florida:
- 26,314 cases – 774 deaths (specific Florida recoveries aren’t disclosed)
We’ve experienced over 229,000 additional diagnosed cases and over 18,000 deaths worldwide since Friday – showing that while better news is out there – we're not out of the woods with the virus yet. In the United States, we had over 86,000 new cases and greater than 5,900 deaths. For the month of April, COVID-19 remains the top estimated cause of death in the United States.
The most disconcerting aspect of the virus remains the death/recovery rate based on closed cases. With nearly 800,000 closed cases, the death rate remained at 21% for an 15th-consecutive day. This after having reached a low of 6% in early March. More optimistically, new research suggests many COVID cases result in mild symptoms – likely showing we’ll have an overall outcome considerably better than those numbers currently suggest. Much is still unknown about why some are hit so hard by the virus while others aren’t. We’ve seen the death rate rise as the reach of the virus grows. The common pattern with the virus spreading is an increase in death rates with vulnerable early on, followed by improving rates overtime as people begin to recover.