I heard over the weekend the United States topped 16 million CoViD-19 cases, 16.3 million when I read it on Sunday. It took 252 days to record the first 8 million cases and 87 days to tally up the second. Sixteen million cases, more than any other country in the world. Well, it’s a big country some might think. (Some might think we should have slowed the testing down. Similarly some might have thought we should stop counting votes. Both thoughts quite wrong but that’s a post for a different day.) (Maybe.) (Will see.) Anyway…
Back to those 16 million cases in such a “big” country. Canada is a big country too. There they have recorded just over 460,000 cases. Of course it is less populated. Canada has a population of 37.6 million people compared to the US population of 328 million. That means the US is getting CoViD four times faster. Well, clearly Canada is not as densely populated so they won’t have as high a rate as the packed in like sardines cities of the USofA. Hmm, well, let’s look at India where there are 9.8 million cases. That’s almost as many as America’s 16 million. But India has 1.32 BILLION people packed into a smaller area. India has 382 people per square kilometer, over 10 times the density of the. 36 people per sq km in the USA yet the US case rate per population is over 7 times that as crowded India’s.
So back to those 16 million. The borough of Manhattan in New York City boasts a population of 8.7 million people. There are probably not many people reading this who remember the TV drama “Naked City.” It ran from 1958 through 1963 and each episode ended with a phrase you may remember even if you don’t know the show, “There are 8 million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” Those 8 million stories ostensibly were the 8 million people of Manhattan posing as that naked city. In 1982 Lawrence Block wrote his hardboiled detective novel “Eight Million Ways to Die” again paying a sort of homage to the 8 million people of Manhattan. (In 1986 Oliver Stone with a few others adapted the book to a movie of the same name, with the lead character of the same name but everything else was different, even the city! It was horrible. But that’s a post for another day!) (Don’t see the movie, read the book.) Where was I? Oh yes, the 8 million people of Manhattan and those 16 million CoViD-19 cases.
I remember reading Eight Million Ways to Die shortly after its release. I remember remembering I never thought about how many people lived in Manhattan and thinking wow that is a lot of people. I grew up in little suburbia with about 20,000 people and our tallest building outside of church steeples was a 5 story department store. It was far from Hooterville but probably just as far from Manhattan. Eight million. That’s still a lot of people. But sixteen million. That’s 8 million times 2!
Sixteen million CoViD-19 cases, almost twice the current population of that island in New York. They say the recovery rate right now is around 48% so that works out to be 8.3 million active CoViD cases. They could easily swap into Manhattan for the 8.7 who live there now. Close the bridges and tunnels and we could have a quarantine community. Kind of like the Kalaupapa Peninsula. (Look it up.) I doubt anybody would be willing to make the big switch and we can’t be sure that there are only 8 million active cases because we don’t know how many people are running around with the disease who have never been tested. (Apparently some people actually thought I was a good idea to slow the testing down. Yeah, yeah, another post for another day. I’m keeping track.) So then, umm, right, 16 million people with CoViD-19.
Sixteen million people. Eight million times two. Not 8 million ways to die though. Only a couple ways. If they were among the unlucky 300,000 who had died, people who died from CoViD may have from acute respiratory failure, heart failure, blood clots, kidney failure, or a syndrome of a collection of symptoms called a cytokine storm including blood leaking out of its vessels. Ugh.
Yesterday, vaccines were loaded into trucks in Kalamazoo heading for the airport to be shipped across the US. That doesn’t mean the number stops at 16,300,000. It is probably going up as you read this. Actually it is definitely going up as you read this. Will it get to 8 million times 3? Likely yes. Maybe even 4 and 5 and perhaps 6 before the vaccine does what its supposed to fo which is circulate through the immune systems of every American regardless of where he, she, or it stood on testing and counting.
Sixteen million people. Eight million reasons to cry. Times 2.
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