Day four of me doing this, and COVID-19 has reached 175 separate countries. There are cases from Afghanistan (24 reported cases) to Zimbabwe (just reported its first case today).

The United States (blue dotted line) has vey nearly caught up with Iran and Spain in terms of total number of cases reported.

The bad news for the USA is that the number of new cases continues to grow at a faster rate than in Italy. While it is likely that part of that fast growth is due to better testing becoming more widely available, that is EVEN WORSE NEWS. That would only mean that the disease has spread even more widely than this graph suggests.

The other even worse news for the USA is shown here:

We are just beginning to see the exponential growth phase in the number of deaths, on a time delay from the exponential growth phase of the cases. Death toll in the USA so far: 260 people.

For those of you who say “lol the flu kills 30,000 people a year, this is not enough deaths for me to care” – I have a question for you. How many people need to die for you to take this pandemic seriously? How many? Just say a number.

And then when that many people have died, I’ll come back to you and you can start taking this seriously.

And then it will be even more too late to stop the dying than it is already.

FOLLOW THE CDC’S RECOMMENDATIONS!