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Pandemic diary: The escalating situation in the US

At 8pm yesterday, outside my balcony and across the UK we all joined in to a tumultuous and sincere clapping to give thanks to people that work in our national health service.

Their sacrifice and hard work is quite moving considering they will knowingly face difficult challenges and dangers ahead. The problem now lies in the type of response and protection that the government is able to provide to these health professionals. From the 20th of January the situation in China was problematic and clearly alarming, many hard questions will need to be answered since potentially we could follow similar trajectories to that of Italy, with serious consequences. Only yesterday evening a government spokesman provided reassurances that personal protective equipment, masks, gowns and other protective essentials are on their way. This is over two months after we found out about the seriousness and potential risk of the outbreak in China. Furthermore, we are yet to see if the equipment that will be provided is adequate, but many stories from doctors and nurses at the frontline suggest otherwise.

On a different note, the situation in the United States is quite worrying and dramatic, my expectation by looking at the epidemiological data from John Hopkins University was that the United States will overtake Italy today in the number of confirmed cases, instead it has already overtaken China and has now become the country with the highest number of confirmed cases. Today I can see that in the last 24 hours the United States had over 18,000 new confirmed cases, and this figure continues to increase rapidly everyday. If this figure was to stabilise now in the United States to around 20,000 new confirmed cases per day then over the next three weeks there will be a total of over half a million confirmed cases, this is a staggering. If you consider that the death rate from confirmed cases is around 1.5% currently in the US, and increasing, then that means at least 7,5 thousand deaths within a short period of time. Problematically, the number of confirmed cases will not stabilise at 20,000 under any model and will continue to increase.

I mentioned three weeks because that was the length of time that China took to control the number of new cases before sharply slowing the number of new cases for a further one week, before practically halting the spread of the virus, so the number of confirmed cases is quite conservative. The question is now whether the US is able to replicate what the Chinese did in the same period of time, however at the moment over half of the US states have not even imposed a lockdown or restrictions on the movement of people, so what comes next is uncertain. It is staggering and shocking to witness these events unfolding before our eyes amongst the multitude of expert advice and warnings from events in other countries.

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