Iowa

Coronavirus: Is Egypt suppressing the true outbreak figures?

In Egypt, the first person to die of the novel coronavirus was a 60-year-old German man who visited tourist hotspots during a Nile cruise trip. While traveling from the historic city of Luxor to the Red Sea resort town of Hurghada, he started running a fever.

He went to a nearby hospital on March 6, where he tested positive for COVID-19 and, within days, succumbed to respiratory failure caused by acute pneumonia. His case was one of many linked to Nile cruises in Upper Egypt.

Egyptian authorities eventually tested dozens of people aboard cruise ships operating in the area and discovered 45 positive cases of coronavirus, including 12 staff members. None of them had purportedly shown symptoms of the deadly pathogen.

Yet, weeks before Egyptian authorities started waking up to the magnitude of the epidemic in early March, public health officials as far as the US, Taiwan and Canada were piecing together a severe albeit unreported outbreak deep in the Egyptian heartland.
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https://www.dw.com/en/coronavirus-is-egypt-suppressing-the-true-outbreak-figures/a-52801568

Germany is now testing 300,000-500,000 samples per day. That's about one test for every 200 citizens, per week. By that measure, Iowa should be running about 16,000 per week. The number of total cases Iowa has had over the past few days is nearly the same each day as Italy had one month before.

I hope rural states can break out of this naive stupor, the idea that somehow distance between small towns is protective. It's not. Surface contact:the virus doesn't care how far you drove to fondle fruit in the grocery isle. The more surface you share, the higher the risk, and it doesn't matter if it's the checkout lane at Walmart in the county seat, or a pump handle at a gas station, or a church pew. The only advantage Iowa has is less total virus food and more room in the cemetery.

#staythefuckhome